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Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and key figure in the early Soviet state—the first woman to hold a position as a People's Commissar and a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. A fierce critic of bourgeois feminism, she argued that women's liberation could only be achieved through the broader socialist revolution and class struggle, not by uniting across class lines. As head of the Zhenotdel (the Women's Department), she championed radical reforms to family life, the socialization of domestic work, and new norms of sexual morality, exploring themes of love and the "new woman" in her writings. Later in life, she served as a Soviet diplomat in Norway, Sweden, and Mexico, becoming a prominent figure in the international communist movement while remaining a pioneering voice for women's emancipation within a Marxist framework.

For issue #195 of The Internationalist, we feature an essay from Alexandra Kollontai's remarkable work. Here she explains how bourgeois feminism followed, rather than led, women's entry into the workforce, relying on the prior exploitation and struggles of proletarian women.

From the first steps they took on the path of labour, the women of the bourgeoisie found their efforts met with the harshest opposition by men. There followed a hard and silent struggle between male professionals defending their ‘warm spot’ and female newcomers to the winning of bread. It is this struggle that gave rise to ‘feminism’, bourgeois women’s involuntary urge to come together, lean on one another, and join forces to resist a common enemy: men. But the feminists who entered the workforce, proudly proclaiming themselves the ‘vanguard of the women’s movement ’, forget in vain that, in the conquest of economic independence, as in all other areas, they merely follow in the footsteps of their little sisters and benefit from the labour of their callused hands.

In point of fact, it is impossible to claim seriously that the feminists ‘made way’ for women to enter the workforce, when, in every country, the bourgeois women’s movement has come into being at a time when proletarian women were already flooding the factories and workshops in their hundreds of thousands, taking over one branch of industry after another. It is only the recognition of the value of working-class women’s labour on the world market that made it possible for bourgeois women to occupy that independent position in society that is the pride of the feminists.

We need only look to England, a country at the forefront of the bourgeois women’s movement. What do we see there? At the end of the eighteenth century, there were 142 paper spinneries, employing 35,000 children and 31,000 women alongside 26,000 men; at the same time, not a peep could yet be heard of a struggle of bourgeois women for the ‘freedom to work’. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, only the solitary voice of Mary Wollstonecraft demanded that the standards of women’s and girls’ education be raised and women be allowed to share in the benefits of culture in order to prepare them to be ‘better mothers’. In 1841, English industry already employed approximately half a million female workers (of 464,000 female workers, 258,000 were employed in textile production and 177,000 in garment production); they participated most actively in the class struggle, and fought in the ranks of the Chartist movement. Already in 1842, the trade unions counted many female weavers in Lancashire amongst their members, and a fair number of women participated in Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

The proletarian women of England are experiencing all the adversi- ty of the class struggle, and occupying a prominent place amongst the wage-earning population at a time when their bourgeois sisters are only taking their first timid steps on the path to economic emancipation.

Above all, access to the worst-paid professions—teachers and civil servants in the postal and telegraph services—was opened to the women of the bourgeoisie; the demand for cheap intellectual labour on the part of the state, municipal institutions, and industrial and commercial enterprises, which had expanded due to the increased tempo of life, played a significant role in attracting bourgeois women to independent labour. In 1858, the international telegraph agency hired women for the first time; in 1846, the first institution of higher education – the women’s teaching seminary—opened its doors to women. ‘The English census of 1881 does not mention a single occupation belonging to women outside the category of domestic service; the 1881 census, on the other hand, already lists 331 different women’s occupations.’ Slowly, positions as teachers, bookkeepers, civil servants, stenographers, etc. gradually opened up to women. Women’s economic independence gave rise to a natural dissatis- faction with their political disenfranchisement and social subordination. Only in the 1860s did the bourgeois women’s movement take any serious measures, that is, at a time when the proletarian women’s movement, closely linked to the class struggle of the proletariat, could already look back on an entire history.

In France, the famous nouvelle femme of the Third Estate, who had begun to walk the path of liberation in the ’80s, merely repeated the slogans of the ‘daughters of the people’, who had defended their right to work and bread in the face of the most terrible convent. Opening the doors of the intellectual professions and the universities – those were the basic demands of French bourgeois women. In other words, they stood in defence of the slogan of ‘freedom to work’ at a time when the women of the working class had already come to curse this freedom and reminded society in the bloody events in Lyon that ‘the free exploitation of male and female labour does have its limits’.

In Germany, the bourgeois women’s movement, pursuing the same goals as in other countries – access to the intellectual professions – came into being in the ’60s. Meanwhile, the rise of large-scale industry in Germany had long since created vast cadres of wage-earning proletarian women, and these women, particularly the weavers, had already managed to taste the full sweetness of the ‘right to work’ in the contemporary exploitative structure.

In the United States, the bourgeois women’s movement has achieved particularly fast victories. However, we must not lose sight of the sui generis conditions of economic life in the US. There is no other coun- try where women have participated in production to the same extent as in the US. The colonist farmers, the early legislators of social and legal standards in the US, required the labour power of their wives and daugh- ters; their welfare depended on the labour of their families. Women were workers not only in the home, but in the fields, the pastures, and the forest. They suffered all of the vagaries of the struggle with strange and wild nature; they defended their families’ property from plunder by the natives with rifles in their hands. The fact that American women were not only consumers and distributors of goods acquired by men, but in- dependent producers of them, granted them an entirely special position. In societal consciousness, they were seen as social units equal in value to men. As such, they felt their political disenfranchisement all the more acutely; they felt the injustice of being ignored as citizens by state institutions that much more. In the US, the influence of the proletariat on women’s access to the various fields of labour was observed less than anywhere else. Nonetheless, the women’s movement never would have reached such intensity if, at the time it arose, it did not rely on the enormous and rapidly growing contingent of working-class women. In 1816, in just a few Massachusetts spinneries, sixty-six thousand wom- en were employed alongside ten thousand men, and at the dawn of the American feminist movement in the ’60s, when the first women’s colleges were founded and the doors of the intellectual professions were opened to women, working-class women already looked back on a long and grim history of the development of professional proletarian labour.

The emancipatory aspirations of Russian bourgeois women coincided with the enlivening of economic and state life in Russia in the ’60s. Worker shortages in the professions – physicians, teachers, civil servants, etc. – granted women access to these professions and temporarily allowed them through the tightly guarded doors of the institutions of higher education. But the female professionals surely were not the first women to enter the path of labour and conquer one occupation after another. Even in the days of serfdom in Russia, proletarian labour was already widespread amongst women; in many factories, particularly in textile production, the number of women already exceeded that of men at the beginning of the century. Cursing the dreary fate that had opened such space for the exploitation of women’s labour, female manufacturing workers worked eighteen hours a day; in their huts, female artisans went blind over their spinning, weaving, embroidery, not suspecting that they – proletarian women cursed by fate – were opening up the path for the free, equal women of the future. And yet this downtrodden, apparently resigned and obedient female ‘slave of labour’ was always able to fight amicably and fearlessly for the needs of the proletariat as a whole, to raise her voice every time the cup of working-class tolerance overflowed with terrible force on the horrified exploiters. Women’s participation in the ‘factory riots’ of the ’40s and ’50s was as unavoidable as their participation in factory work. However, in defending their economic interests in this way, and fighting for more bearable working conditions, female workers also laid a solid foundation for the economic independence of bourgeois women. Proletarian women’s labour convinced the world of women’s ability to produce commodities; since then, the doors of independent incomes also began to open to women of other social classes.

Excerpt from The Social Basis of the Female Question by Alexandra Kollontai and translated by Élise Hendrick, published by Haymarket Books.

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