Women, Resistance and Revolution (23 page)

Women were admitted with full rights into the working class. Thus an essential principle of women’s equality at work was established and a completely different criterion introduced for redundancy. Women benefited particularly from this assertion of the value of workers as persons rather than things, because single women with young children were regarded as among the most needy.

It was obviously necessary too to provide protection for pregnant women. Alexandra Kollontai had spent a considerable time before the revolution studying maternity provision. Partly as a result of her pressure the first working women’s conference was held in Petrograd within a week of the formation of the Soviet government and more than fifty thousand women were represented. Although her proposals for the new maternity laws were the basis of discussion, the working women formulated its actual outlines on the basis of what they themselves had experienced. The Decree on Insurance in Case
of Sickness, 22 December 1917, was the first of a series of protective measures. An insurance fund was set up without deductions from wages and workers’ wives were covered as well as women actually in industry. In January 1918 the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy was officially organized and functioned in close connection with the department of social welfare. It secured sixteen weeks’ free care for women before and after pregnancy. Expectant mothers did light work and could not be transferred or dismissed without the consent of a factory inspector. Night work was prohibited for both pregnant and nursing women. Maternity homes, clinics and advisory centres were set up. These seem like unspectacular and extremely fundamental reforms now, but in the Russian context they were an extraordinary achievement. Although women benefited from the general legislation for all workers, Jessica Smith says it was the maternity insurance law which they always mentioned as the most important change in conditions.

Most extraordinary was the legislative transformation of the family. Six weeks after the revolution the former ecclesiastical control of marriage was replaced by civil registration; within a year the new Matrimonial Code established before the law complete equality of rights between husband and wife, as well as dissolving the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. The husband’s legal domination in the family was ended and women could decide on their own names and citizenship. They were no longer obliged to go wherever their husbands went if they didn’t want to. Divorce was made easy and a relationship could become a marriage simply by mutual agreement between the two partners; equally, mutual agreement could end it. If both partners did not want the relationship to end it was left to the decision of the courts, until 1926, when both partners were able to get a divorce by applying to the Registrars’ Office instead. At first both partners were obliged to pay alimony for six months after they separated if one of them was unemployed or not able to earn a living. Property was at first divided equally. The 1926 Family Code changed this. It attempted to secure the rights of peasant women and housewives by regarding all property as jointly held. Women were thus entitled to remuneration for work during marriage. This code also made explicit provisions for women living in unregistered marriages. Although the marriage laws were not uniformly applied – the recognition of
de facto
marriages for instance
never penetrated the eastern areas – combined with the industrial legislation they brought an extraordinary transformation in the lives of Russian women.

Nor were the women merely passive spectators to all this. The organizational results of the Petrograd conference was the setting up of special committees to instruct women in the use of their rights. These were found to be inadequate and in 1919 the Working and Peasant Women’s Department of the Communist Party was formed. It was known as the ‘Genotdel’. There was opposition to this at first; some Bolsheviks were against it because they thought it was too feministic.

The Genotdel did not simply act as a means of educating women; it actually brought them into political activity. At first it mobilized women for the civil war and the famine. Thousands of emergency ‘red nurses’ went to the front, did military service, dug trenches, put up barbed wire or carried on political and educational work along the firing line. There were women in the Red Army who fought as guerrillas; in some cases they were in charge of men. Vera Alexeyeva, a social revolutionary cigarette worker turned Bolshevik, was made captain of a guerrilla group and spent weeks in the saddle, day and night, hunting whites in the Ukraine. Later she became leader of a local Genotdel, and found herself organizing peasant women who had just started work in a textile factory. She told Jessica Smith how difficult she had found it to adjust at first:

When peace came they requisitioned me to work among women. Everyone laughed. They didn’t think of me as a ‘baba’ at all. I didn’t think much of the idea much myself at first – I was so used to chasing around like a man and wearing men’s clothes.… I remember the first women’s meeting I called, how I tried to draw the women out to discuss the problems before us. One after another got up and talked of her own troubles. Each one had to tell how she had suffered during the revolution and the famine. How could she get bread and clothing, how could she get work, why should so much misfortune have been visited on
her
? Now they are talking about
our
problems – how we can organize day nurseries to take care of
our
children and how we can improve
our
condition. That is a great advance, to have got the women to think and act collectively.
⁶

The Genotdel drew women in often on a practical basis at first. ‘When we can’t get ’em one way, we try another!’ said Vera Alexeyeva.
‘There are plenty of women we couldn’t get to come near a meeting – but when we give them something practical – look how they come.’
⁷
Sometimes they came to sew and heard lectures on politics or babies or sex. Discussion circles grew from these. Kollontai helped to organize a network of women’s clubs which penetrated even into the eastern regions. The women’s congresses brought members of the local groups together. The experience women gained from their separate organization helped them to assert themselves in trade unions, public debates and in the party. Kollontai told the American journalist Louise Bryant that the women’s congresses were important not simply for the direct political work they did, but also for increasing the confidence of the women themselves and preventing their needs from being ignored by the men.
⁸
A peasant woman who had been to one of these congresses returned home to her village with pamphlets, posters and a new important understanding of a world beyond the old boundaries. In 1925 Kayer Nissa, a girl of twelve from the Muslim East who had attended one of the women’s clubs, been cast out of home and supported by the other women, spoke as a delegate at a conference: ‘We have had enough of having our faces covered … of being imprisoned, in stuffy ichkaris, sold at the tenderest age to old men, maimed in body and soul, and degraded to slaves.’
⁹

Sometimes this new confidence meant that the women criticized the men. They felt insulted by attitudes they had not even noticed before. In the discussions which preceded the 1926 Family Law a peasant woman said:

We are still in the dark, we were enslaved for centuries. All we know is priests’ gossip – which we are only now beginning to forget about. ‘The wife must fear her husband.’ … Our men comrades, they know a bit more than we do. You must teach us, you must not just laugh and giggle; that is no use, particularly on the part of the enlightened comrades, the party men. I do not consider this the way of comradeship,… To us that is very insulting.
¹⁰

Commitment among party leaders to women’s emancipation was real enough. But there was considerable confusion about how it was to be achieved. Theoretically specific reforms at work were fairly straightforward. The relationship between the sexes presented more problems. It was generally accepted that ‘The proletariat cannot
achieve complete liberty until it has won complete liberty for women.’
¹¹
It was also apparent that liberty for women implied not merely change at work but in the family. The revolution had to reorganize at the point of reproduction as well as production. The need to free women from the drudgery of housework was a common theme. It was hoped that they would be able completely to collectivize these private tasks with public restaurants, communal kitchens, laundries, cloth-mending centres, collective housekeeping arrangements and facilities for children, crèches, nurseries, kindergartens, children’s colonies. By releasing women from this private work in the family, they could become involved in production. Lenin emphasized the effects of work on women’s consciousness. He believed they could discover a new active and public world in place of the isolation and fatalism of the little world of the family.

The involvement of women in production had another aspect though which tended to predominate after his death. Soviet economists did elaborate calculations to show the amount of labour hours spent in inefficient private housekeeping. It could be argued that the emancipation of women from the family was economically necessary if the material preconditions for socialism were to be created. The slogan ‘Abolish the Family’ could thus be justified in terms of economic efficiency as much as of women’s liberation.

Kollontai tended to see the family more as a cultural institution which maintained the old values of authoritarianism and domination. While the family in its traditional form continued it was impossible for the workers to achieve full social emancipation. ‘The capitalists themselves are not unaware of the fact that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well-being of the family … is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort towards liberty.’
¹²

Trotsky takes up the same argument in
Problems of Life
, lectures he gave to workers, and carries it farther with the sensible observation:

Unless there is actual equality of husband and wife in the family, in a normal sense as well as in the conditions of life, we cannot speak seriously of their equality in social work or even in politics. As long as woman is chained to her housework, the care of the family, the cooking and sewing, all her chances of participation in social and political life are cut down to the extreme.
¹³

For all these reasons, in the early years of the revolution it was generally assumed that the family would wither along with other institutions which had persisted from capitalist society. The real argument was how long it was going to take, and how much effort you needed to put in to help yourself out of the transitional period. In the early twenties Trotsky was arguing that though new kinds of family could only develop after a more highly developed material base had been created, because economic backwardness continually held back the provision of public facilities, voluntary initiative in making cultural precedents was still important. He recommended that people should ‘group themselves even now into collective housekeeping units’. These should be very carefully thought out and coordinated with the local Soviets and trade unions. He envisaged a new architecture – housing built round the needs of these communal associations. ‘We can escape the deadlock at present only by the creation of model communities.
¹⁴
He saw these as one means of releasing the ‘creative imagination and artistic initiative’
¹⁵
of the masses, through changing the ‘complicated net of inner relations in personal and family life’.
¹⁶

Very quickly, when people began to emphasize the liberation of women, they became involved in the cart before the horse, chicken before the egg dilemma of new culture versus material base.

Naystat in
Youth Communes
makes it all seem a simple problem, the delineations in theory of the transition to the transition seem clearcut:

The new
byt
, like the new family, will be able to grow up only when all the necessary economic conditions are fulfilled. For that reason it is not yet time to consider a complete reconstruction of life on a socialist basis.… We begin by building up the fundamental conditions of a socialized life, the commune is the model of the future socialist
byt.
But even now marriage in a commune is different from marriage elsewhere. For it anticipates the marriage of a socialist society in that the economic tie has ceased to play a part in the mutual relation of husband and wife. The same applies to the question of the children, although the communes have little experience in this matter at present. During their early years the communes did not desire children for material reasons. But now there are a considerable number of commune children.
¹⁷

He glosses over the actual manner in which a new society is to be communicated through transitional institutions. As Reich points out,
it was quite possible for the new families to revert to old values because of material scarcity and lack of any theory about the actual mechanism by which economic and social change connected with sexual liberation. In a youth commune which was formed originally in 1924 to solve the problem of the housing shortage, he describes how overcrowding led to the attempt to enforce sexual asceticism. Couples wanted a room of their own. The other communards resisted marriage which they thought would constitute a faction in the collective. Eventually they gave way but banned offspring because there wasn’t enough space for them in the commune. They struggled with practical circumstances but finally gave way on the issue of human, sexual liberation. It was regarded as wrong to want privacy to make love. They did not try to guarantee the prerequisites of sexual happiness; instead they made unhappiness into a virtue. Because it was not made an explicit and integral part of the revolution, sexuality was subordinated to immediate economic necessities. Reich asserts in
The Sexual Revolution
that it was no good saying ‘economic base!’
then
‘new way of life!’, as the forms of sexual and personal life could not simply be correlated with economic changes. He believed the original attempt of the revolution to create the external means for the liberation of women was on the right lines.
¹⁸
But the revolutionaries faltered at the very moment when those external changes started to penetrate the inner consciousness.