Women, Resistance and Revolution (21 page)

She intended to combine the duties of a mother with those of a revolutionary. All winter she had been giving lessons supporting her mother and as many workless people as she could, until two months before her confinement.

The great emphasis on education which was such a feature of the nineteenth-century movements continues. Just before the Russian Revolution, Alexandra Kollontai, who was to conflict with the Bolshevik leadership after the revolution for her insistence on the need to combine feminism with Marxism, as well as her support for the Workers’ Opposition movement which stressed change coming from below, organized a club of about two hundred women in St Petersburg. An interview with her appeared in
The Woman Worker
in 1909:

Two years ago we made the first effort to interest groups of women in questions specially affecting them and in means to raise their condition. Such for instance as protection from hard work, before and after the birth of children. So step by step we hoped to lead them to socialism.… Men visitors are admitted but it is managed by the women themselves.
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There was a congress in December 1908 which the authorities expected to be a tame gathering of moderate middle-class women. In fact, out of 700 women forty-five were socialists and thirty of these were factory workers. They had also prepared carefully enough to
have an important impact. The working women with Kollontai’s help had decided what to say in support of various reforms they urgently needed. Sometimes two or three had studied the same question so that the one who emerged able to speak best for it could get up at the Congress. They were all very frightened, but startled the Congress by holding forth for at least fifteen to twenty minutes and getting their points across. All this was even more remarkable because they were meeting underground, in great secrecy, smuggling speakers out of the back door with handkerchiefs over their faces if the police raided.

Really, because these women had so little experience and confidence, they could only start to achieve anything by producing an atmosphere in which everybody felt it to be absolutely necessary to contribute everything that they had. Women’s movements have often been characterized by a stress on self-activity, equal participation and a suspicion of leaders. In the New York shirtwaist strike in 1909, girls of seventeen and eighteen were standing up and addressing meetings; some of the immigrant girls didn’t even know how to telephone, they had no idea about the laws relating to pickets, or how to defend themselves in court. A reporter in
The Call
commented:

The most remarkable feature of the strike is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship, secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested and go to prison.
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The same has frequently been true of the way women participated in revolutions. Men have sometimes felt that there was some inbuilt anarchic tendency in women. However, the absolute necessity of complete participation is generally characteristic of all people who have long been oppressed and have little experience in continuing organization. Their problem is in sustaining this, but the presence of tried leaders means that they simply drop into their old roles of dependence and any popular movement disintegrates. The contradiction appears not so much in leadership in particular situations based on specific concrete knowledge, but in the leader as figure with all the trappings of authority. Women who have had such an intense personal struggle to escape from male authority have shown a complex attitude to leaders within a women’s movement. There is an
intense suspicion but also a kind of passive dependence once any authority is asserted. Conversely, women who have fought alone and reached any measure of independence are often passionately jealous about it and unwilling to work with other women. When the women round
La Voix des Femmes
suggested George Sand as a candidate for women, because she had the respect of men, Sand turned on them with contempt and was careful to dissociate herself from any socialist feminist movement.

But a problem could arise when individually prominent women were completely committed to a movement. The existence of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes along with the network of welfare services, the crèche in Bow, the cooperative toy factory, the continued agitation for working women’s conditions in the Dreadnought, were all a product of Sylvia Pankhurst’s energy and determination. But her presence inevitably eclipsed the other women and meant they played a secondary role within the federation. She was in the ridiculous position of instructing them not to depend on her. When they were going on a demonstration to Trafalgar Square she said, ‘I am going with you. I want you not to cling round me, but to do your own business. You must all go around. I am certain that the more there are of us, the more difficult it will be for our opponents.’
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The federation showed great ingenuity in organizing. They thought of everything, from women in a boat on Victoria Park to advertise the Dreadnought with the letters written on the top of coloured umbrellas, to the occupation of empty houses by people in workhouses. The minutes are full of the micro world of all groups. An organizer was inefficient, funds were stolen. They negotiated complicated agreements with the Socialist Sunday School Union; they patiently drafted letters to the papers. They led innumerable militant deputations to ministers, organized an exhibition of women’s sweated trades, sent resolutions in support of the Russian Revolution, campaigned for equal pay, and for non-interference in the allowances for soldiers’ and sailors’ wives. But despite all this they did not as a group work out together any theory of the way in which their feminism related to their socialism.

One point became perfectly clear however, and that was their fundamental difference from the Women’s Social and Political Union. They were very much frozen out:

Their [the W.S.P.U.] view of the difference between the E.L.F. and headquarters was that we had more faith in what could be done by stirring up working women than was felt at headquarters, where they had most faith in what could be done for the vote by people of means and influence. In other words they said that they were working from the top downwards and we from the bottom up, that is with regard to wealth and influence.
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Mrs Parsons struck a more personal note; she ‘thought it a good thing to have a separate party in the East End from the West End, as they did not say anything about our work in the East End at the meeting at the Empress Theatre and that Sylvia Pankhurst was the leader down here; they had their two leaders’.
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Sylvia Pankhurst, who was clearly embarrassed, ‘said we would not talk about that as we did not bother about those things’. Mrs Parsons apparently took the hint and subsided.

Historically though the split was of tremendous significance. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution forced feminists to define clearly which side they were on, while the extension of the franchise removed the single unifying issue which had bound them together. After 1917 no political movement could be quite the same. This was as true for the woman as for anyone else. Ironically it was the action of women which was crucial. On 23 February there was a peaceful women’s demonstration on International Women’s Day. The women decided, against the advice of all organized political groups including the Bolsheviks, who expected the police and troops to be called out and futile bloodshed, to go on strike. But when the women sent delegations to the factories thousands came out and were joined by working-class and middle-class housewives who were affected by the shortage of food and high prices. The army was called out but did not fire on the women. Encouraged by their success workers came out on to the streets in great numbers the following day.

There are obvious similarities in the action and organization of women. At one side there is action which comes from a particular need in a specific situation; at the other there are new needs which the extraordinary events of revolution make possible to conceive but not to realize. While these are common to movements which are not specifically revolutionary, the ideas of democracy, equality, liberty and comradeship provide a theoretical justification for the women’s claims. The weakness of revolutionary feminism was a failure of
coherence, both in practice and theory. True, they organized internationally in the early twentieth century on a scale far beyond that of any equivalent groups now in terms of formal organization and congresses. But they did not find a means of overcoming the traditional fatalism, the passivity, the timidity and lack of confidence which were characteristic of women in normal times. The spasmodic heroism of exceptional moments of revolutionary and industrial militancy could sweep this aside momentarily but as a long-term problem it was not solved.

Similarly they did not achieve a form of organization and a theory which could relate and clarify the specific aspects of women’s oppression, and the more general oppression which they shared with men, which could serve as a basis for action. They did create in innumerable different ways though an historical memory of the collective action of women, organizing from the point of their femaleness, their class, and their commitment to the idea of a society in which there would be no indignity, and in which no one would be despised or ignored. Subsequently this tradition of revolutionary feminism has been obscured. All that remains is the memory of the other feminism that came from the top down, and which was concerned to accommodate privileged women within capitalism. But persistently, against incredible odds and often with opposition from men, the same kind of demands, which immediately raised many questions often ignored by male revolutionaries about ways of living together, about authority in the family, about the toys children first learn about the world from, recur.

At the same time all the women involved, whatever their class, found themselves fighting the enemy within as well as the enemy without. They had to overcome their own silence, their own paralysis, their way of shrugging off the responsibility for the world to the men. There was no denying this for them. They couldn’t fight just for bread, because their own hearts had been starved for so long they hardly knew how to begin:

Sisters, don’t say you can’t do anything …

No more lack of confidence

No more hesitation.

Let us ask ourselves clearly this question,

What do we want?

We want total and complete liberation.

Let them mock us, a day will come when they will no longer laugh. Is this day far away?

What does it matter.

We will have difficulty, suffering, struggles.

Happiness will be for our sisters, for the women born after us.

Women reply to men who ask ‘What do you want? What are you trying to do?

‘We want to reconstruct a new world with you, where peace and truth will reign, we want justice in every spirit, and love in every heart.’
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CHAPTER 6

If You Like Tobogganing

23 February 1917:

In spite of all directives the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support …

It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution …

The February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives. The overgrown bread-lines had provided the last stimulus. About 90,000 workers, men and women, were on strike that day. The fighting mood expressed itself in demonstrations, meetings, and encounters with the police. A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal Duma demanding bread. It was like demanding milk from a he-goat. Red banners appeared in different parts of the city, and inscriptions on them showed that the workers wanted bread, but neither autocracy or war. Women’s Day passed successfully with enthusiasm and without victims. But what it concealed in itself, no one had even guessed by nightfall.

L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution

The woman’s road – threshold to stove.

I thought I saw two people, but it was only a man and his wife.

Russian proverbs