SOCIALIST SOLUTIONS

The feminist movement was both encouraged and disappointed by the development in the late nineteenth century of the European socialist move­ment. Socialism offered a new ideological umbrella for some streams of feminist thought, putting the subjugation of women on a par with the subju­gation of the proletariat.

The claims made by middle-class feminists for legal equality, access to higher education and the professions were sometimes criticised as irrelevant to the vast majority of working women for whom the daily struggle to put a meal on the table was a more pressing need. The so-called bourgeois feminists were castigated by Russian feminist and Bolshevik Aleksandra Kollontai (1872—1952) in 1923, for ‘imagining themselves to be the advoc­ates and spokesmen of the demands and aspirations of all women, believing themselves placed above all class differences, when in fact they were the very mouthpieces for the needs and interests of the women of the bourgeois class.'⁵⁰ Kollontai's words were harsh, but as a leading socialist writer and member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, she was hardly likely to pay even lip service to the achievements of middle-class feminists whose solu­tion to the woman question stood in such stark contrast to her own position. For Kollontai and socialist women before her, the root of women's oppres­sion was capitalism. The feminist demand for equal rights was a bourgeois solution to women's plight; only the overthrow of the capitalist social order would offer women a means of casting off their economic and political oppression. In the meantime, however, it was left to socialist women to work out a means of pursuing emancipation in the here and now.

The intellectual stimulus behind the development of a socialist women's movement was the work of Karl Marx (1818—83), Friedrich Engels (1820— 95) and August Bebel (1840—1913). Strictly speaking, socialist feminism is something of a misnomer, since socialist women (and men) portrayed the feminist campaign for women's rights as bourgeois. For socialists, demands on behalf of a special group — women — were a distraction from the class struggle. The fundamental cause of women's subordination was capitalism, and only with the overthrow of the capitalist system would working-class women, along with working-class men, be emancipated. However, Engels and Bebel offered a gendered analysis of capitalism. Women's subordination was the consequence of the introduction of private property and monogam­ous marriage, resulting in the exclusion of women from public production. Only the full participation of women in waged labour and the destruction of private property and the family with the socialist revolution would lead to women's emancipation. However, links had to be made between theory and practice. Engels, in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State pub­lished in 1884, advocated political rights for women as a means to achieving equality in the home and the workplace. But it was the German socialist August Bebel, in his tremendously popular book Woman and Socialism (1879), who provided the most tangible arguments for working-class women. Like the liberal John Stuart Mill, Bebel rejected notions about woman's destiny being rooted in her special nature, and like Mill he was supportive of liberal demands such as entry to universities, civil rights within marriage and so forth. And, like Mill, Bebel believed that women's emancipation — albeit as part of the emancipation of the working class as a whole — would be of benefit to society as a whole. ‘A society in which all the means of production are the property of the community, a society which recognises the full equal­ity of all without distinction of sex...

Bebel's book was read by thousands of German women and inspired many — but it tookfemale activists who understood the oppression of working women, to put theory into practice. It was women like Clara Zetkin (1857— 1933) in Germany, Hubertine Auclert in France, Adelheid Popp (1869—1939) in Austria and Anna Kuliscioff (c.1854—1925) in Italy, who tried to bring about a synthesis of two potentially conflicting ideologies: feminism and socialism. For the German socialist Clara Zetkin, the double oppression of working women by capitalist employers and by men required immediate attention because the leaders of the socialist parties were not about to take action despite their theoretical and much-trumpeted commitment to equal­ity for women. European socialists accepted the reality of working-class women's oppression but were reluctant either to embrace an agenda deter­mined by sex (seeing the woman question as a social or private as opposed to a political issue) or to endorse separate women’s organisations. In a speech to a workers’ congress in 1889, Zetkin spelled out her socialist-feminist vision which combined an advocacy of women’s rights with a commitment to the proletarian revolution:

As the worker is subjected to the capitalist, so is woman subjected to man; and she will remain subjected as long as she is economically dependent. Work is the essential condition upon which this economic independence of woman is based. If we wish women to be free human beings, to have the same rights as men in our society, women’s work must neither be abolished nor limited.⁵²

Thus Zetkin showed that she accepted the key tenet of the socialist position on the woman question articulated by Bebel.

Zetkin and her counterparts elsewhere in Europe battled to convince their respective parties that the woman question was not subordinate to the class question but intrinsic to it. ‘I am truly afraid that human equality, as preached by every socialist school, will still mean the equality of men, and that women will be duped by the proletarian men just as the latter have been duped by the bourgeoisie’, commented the French socialist Hubertine Auclert.⁵³ Socialist women did succeed in gaining commitments to female equality by socialist political parties, but such commitments were worth little in practice. In France, when the lifelong socialist Paule Mink (1839—1901) argued that working women should be educated in order that they might become more conscious of the revolutionary cause, stating that the working woman ‘cannot go into the streets dressed only in her innocence’, she was ridiculed by male activists who aspired to keep their womenfolk at home.⁵⁴ And her efforts to stand as a candidate in municipal elections were treated with contempt by her male socialist colleagues. In Italy, Anna Kuliscioff's com­mitment to universal suffrage was not shared by her party.⁵⁵ In Sweden the Social Democrats evidently thought little of their formal support for female suffrage since they refused to support either a female suffrage campaign or to allow women members to debate the decision.⁵⁶ In Britain, the Independent Labour Party expressed little more than lukewarm support for female suf­frage until it introduced a bill to extend the suffrage to women on the same property basis as men in 1904. Across Europe it was left to female socialist activists in trade unions and local party organisations to convert Zetkin's theoretical position into practical improvements on the ground for ordinary working women.

The central plank of the socialist women's policy was the guarantee of women's right to work. Most working-class women most of their adult lives undertook paid labour of some kind and a woman's right to work was self- evident. It was a position that was to bring socialist women into conflict with male trade unionists and workers, many of whom regarded female workers as a threat to male jobs and to pay rates. French and German socialists were by the 1890s seeking the votes of male workers, and won support by promis­ing protection for male jobs against feminist demands for equal pay for equal work and equal access to jobs.

There was no such thing as a socialist women's movement in Europe before the First World War, at least not in the sense of an organisation with agreed aims and a unity of purpose. The two manifestations of such a movement — the Socialist Women's International (the counterpart of the Second Socialist International) and International Women's Day on 8 March — were, by no stretch of the imagination expressions of a mass movement of proletarian women. At a national level, the German Social Democratic Women's Movement was the most successful in Europe with around 175,000 members by 1914, a party newspaper for women — Die Gleichheit (Equality) — and more than 400 party spokeswomen. Elsewhere the level of socialist representation for working women was lamentable. There was no socialist women's organisation in France until Elisabeth Renaud (1846—1932) and Louise Saumoneau (1875—1950) formed the Groupe Feministe Soci- aliste (Feminist Socialist Group) in 1899. In Britain, although the Women's Labour League was founded in 1906, it never achieved critical mass, partly perhaps because of the existence of a lively suffrage campaign at a time when the Independent Labour Party had not formally committed itself to the vote for women. Few working women belonged to either European socialist parties or trade unions. Yet at the grassroots, in the workplace, the socialist feminist agenda offered working women representation and a hope of material improvements in the immediate future.

The problem for socialist women had always been how to combine socialist and feminist platforms without alienating male workers and socialist colleagues. Clara Zetkin had achieved this marriage in a theoretical sense, but she had never really understood the double burden of working women — the difficulties of combining paid and domestic work. Zetkin's successor, Luise Zietz, was more acceptable to her male colleagues in arguing that protec­tive legislation and maternity benefits would improve the condition of the woman worker, enabling her to carry out her domestic role more effectively. Perhaps the most integrated vision was formulated by the Frenchwoman and member of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Frangais (French Workers' Party), Aline Valette (1850—99). For Valette, the key to the advancement of all workers, men and women, was social and sexual harmony, a view which accepted women's maternal role whilst insisting on women's equal right to work. The inscription on her headstone when she died in 1899 read, ‘The emancipation of woman lies in emancipated labour (L'harmonie sociale)'.⁵⁹ Valette's acknowledgement of the need for equality in the labour market as well as recognition of the reality of most women's lives as wives and mothers brought her closer to the bourgeois feminists than most socialists would have countered.

In most European countries, socialist women never experienced the culmination of revolutionary ideology. In Russia and in Germany, though, the revolutions of 1917 and 1918 offered the prospect that sexual equality might be realised as part of the emancipation of the proletariat. Though the German Revolution of 1918—19 culminated in the murder of those on the radical left, including Rosa Luxemburg (1871—1919), it established the democratic Weimar Republic which recognised women as equals under the constitution and gave the vote to all women over the age of 18. In Russia, though, the revolutionaries seized control of the government and proceeded to carry out fundamental changes to state and society. In these circumstances, the potential for women's emancipation was far greater. There was probably a much stronger tradition of female radicalism in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, and Russian left intellectuals, including Lenin, had assumed the mobilisation of women would be crucial to the success of the revolution. In 1903, at Lenin's instigation, although probably influ­enced by his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869—1939) who had recently published a pamphlet The Woman Worker (1900), the party programme of the Russian Social Democrats included a commitment to civil and political equality of the sexes.⁶⁰ During the revolutionary years 1905—17, a group of revolutionary women including Krupskaya, Inessa Armand (1874/5—1920) and Aleksandra Kollontai, set about organising proletarian women, weaning them away from bourgeois feminism and raising consciousness of exploita­tion through meetings and a newspaper, Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker). The February Revolution in 1917 was initiated by groups of war-weary Pet­rograd women who came out on to the streets on International Women's Day demanding bread and an end to the war. In the wake of the Czar's abdication Bolshevik women swung into action, mobilising women workers, and in July of that year the government granted women the right to vote and the right to equal pay. The October Revolution, which saw the Bolsheviks take control of the government, offered the opportunity for Bolshevik women to implement more far-reaching change. It was recogn­ised by all Bolshevik activists, though, that this change could not happen overnight.

In 1918, Lenin, in a speech to the First All-Russian Congress of Women, reaffirmed the commitment of the Soviet government to women's emancipation:

The aim of the Soviet Republic is to abolish, in the first place, all restrictions of the rights of women... Up to the present the position of women has been such that it is called a position of slavery. Women are crushed by their domestic drudgery, and only socialism can relieve them from this drudgery, when we shall pass on from small household economy to social economy and to social tilling of the soil. Only then will women be fully free and emancipated.⁶¹

The first few months of the Soviet government had seen far-reaching re­forms affecting women's lives. By December 1917, marriage had been made a civil contract, divorce was permitted on demand, and the laws on separate property and the rights of women to work and to equal pay were reformed in women's favour. By 1920, abortion was legalised and Kollontai, in her job as People's Commissar for Social Welfare, set in train policies to protect women workers and provide maternity care. The Zhenotdel or women's bureau, worked during the civil war to raise consciousness amongst women workers in the towns and the countryside, including those in the east where activists encountered serious opposition to their attempts to liberate women, particularly in Muslim communities. But family reforms aside, there was little commitment to change within the Bolshevik Party and the organisation of the state. Aside from a few prominent activist women such as Kollontai, Krupskaya, Armand, Elena Stasova (1873—1966), a professional revolution­ary and secretary of the Bolshevik Party during the revolution, and Angelica Balabanova who had helped to organise the International Women's Socialist Conference in Berne in 1914, very few women found a place within the party hierarchy and even Kollontai lost influence. In 1922 she was sent to Norway to assist with trade negotiations following criticism of her writings on sex in a collection entitled New Morality. The absence of women, not only in positions of power in the Party hierarchy but also in the soviets and trade unions, almost certainly permitted the government to lose sight of the woman question by the 1920s when economic problems and political in-fighting took precedence over social reform and the woman question. Nevertheless, the short-lived Bolshevik experiment before the reaction of the 1920s and 1930s was the most visionary and theoretically radical anywhere in Europe, inspiring feminists elsewhere who visited Russia and who believed they were seeing a revolution in gender relations under way. Perhaps a more realistic assessment was made by Leon Trotsky in 1936, who wrote honestly that although the Soviet government granted women equal legal and political rights, it failed in its attempt to destroy the family and therefore women were still chained to household drudgery. The reason, according to Trotsky was that, ‘The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party.' ‘It is doubtful', he continued, ‘if the resolution of the Communist International on the “complete and irrevocable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union” sounds very convincing to the women of the factory districts!'⁶²