Immediately, women claimed citizenship rights in the new order. Feminist leaders campaigned, successfully, for long-standing goals. In June 1917 women lawyers gained the right to serve as attorneys and represent clients in court. Women obtained equal rights with men in the civil service. On 20 July, all adults over the age of twenty gained the right to vote for the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. For lower-class women, economic rights appeared the higher priority. Soldatki fought to raise their monetary allotment. In May, over 3,000 laundresses struck, demanding an eight-hour day and a minimum daily wage of four roubles. They persisted in the face of employers' resistance and won a modest victory. Another strike of mainly female dye workers, lasting four months, ended in failure.
Nevertheless, as a group, women workers were far less visible than men during 1917. Many proved reluctant to strike, fearful that plants would close, depriving them of the ability to support themselves and their children. Women's fears were surely heightened by the demands of male workers, when threatened with lay-offs, that women be let go first. Lower-class women were poorly represented in the trade unions, factory committees and soviets that upheld workers' interests. Women were also marginalised by revolutionary rhetoric, which reflected an intensely masculinised working-class culture. For decades, swearing, telling dirty jokes and boasting about sexual adventures with women had demonstrated the masculinity of ordinary male workers, while politically and socially 'conscious' men forged a community of brothers. Women family members served both as figures against which to define themselves.[181]In 1917, this masculine brotherhood assumed symbolic significance. Images of male workers were ubiquitous, 'either as the brother of the male peasant and/or the soldier ... or else as the liberator of the world, breaking chains and crowns'.[182] Working-class women might themselves adopt the language of brotherhood and identify themselves with the family. 'Let us, Russian women and mothers, be proud knowing that we were the first to extend our brotherly [sic!] hand to all the mothers the world over', reads one socialist proclamation.[183]
The Bolsheviks seize power
During 1917, the Bolshevik Party made only half-hearted efforts to attract women. As membership burgeoned, the proportion of women dropped to 2 per cent; few were workers.[184] After October, the Bolsheviks suppressed the autonomous women's movement, condemning it as 'bourgeois'. For the next seventy years, the party's view of women's emancipation would determine its parameters. As Marxists, they regarded working-class men and women's interests as identical and women's full and equal participation in waged labour as the key to their liberation. Thus, they proposed to equalise the relations between the sexes by socialising housework - that is, entrusting child-rearing and other household tasks to paid workers, enabling women to work full time for wages. Once free of the need to exchange domestic and sexual services for men's financial support, women would encounter men as equals. The family itself would eventually wither away as society assumed its functions; thereafter, women and men would unite their lives solely for love.
Initially, the Bolsheviks attempted to legislate social change. In 1918, the government produced a family code that equalised women's status with men's, allowed a marrying couple to choose either the husband's or the wife's surname and granted illegitimate children the same legal rights as legitimate ones. Marriage was secularised. Divorce became easily obtainable at the request of either spouse. Labouring women gained eight weeks of paid maternity leave before and after childbirth; women engaged in mental labour gained six. In 1920, abortion became legal if performed by a physician. The law promised equal pay to women whose work equalled men's 'in quantity and in quality'. Whenever possible, new decrees used language that was deliberately gender- neutral. 'Spouses' could retain their nationality upon marriage. A 'spouse' unable to work could request support from the other.[185] Co-education became the rule.
Yet gender distinctions persisted, enhanced by the militarised atmosphere of the civil war. When the authorities decided against obligatory military service for women, the Red Army, the crucible of citizenship in the new order, became identified as a masculine domain: 'I, a son of the labouring people, citizen of the Soviet Republic, take on the calling of warrior in the Worker and Peasants Army,' pledged all new recruits (my emphasis).[186] Women experienced difficulty acquiring the toughness demanded of party members in brutalising circumstances. In any case, women's toughness evoked an ambivalence that men's did not. Moreover, even as it tried to efface distinctions of gender, the leadership emphasised the uniquely feminine contribution that women could make to the war effort. Women's independent citizenship was undermined by propaganda and entitlements based on a woman's relationship to a man.[187]Slogans that addressed working women as mothers reinforced the notion that women's responsibility was to care for fighting men and men's, to protect women and children: 'Proletarka! The Red Army soldier is defending you and your children. Ease his life. Organize care for him.'[188] Post-revolutionary iconography consistently portrayed the heroic worker as male, at the centre of action, battling the opponents of revolution or refashioning the world.
Thus, proletarian domination, connected rhetorically and visually to male domination, confirmed a gendered hierarchy.[189]
Women occupied the margins of the new civic order. They were identified with private life and family, spheres denigrated by a post-revolutionary culture that privileged public life, the collective and the point of production. The leadership viewed lower-class women as inherently more 'backward' than men, more attached to the family, religion and traditional values and, consequently, as a potential threat to the revolution. (Formerly privileged women the leadership dismissed altogether, apart from party loyalists.) Women's historians argue that it was women's alleged backwardness, more than concern for women's emancipation as such, which convinced the leadership to authorise efforts to mobilise them. Thus, concern over women's lack of support during the civil war led the party to approve the first All-Russian Conference of Working Women, which took place in November 1918, and in September 1919 to authorise a Women's Bureau (Zhenotdel) to co-ordinate the party's work among women. Inessa Armand was designated its first director; after her death in 1920, Aleksandra Kollontai, the party's leading advocate of women's emancipation, replaced her. The party conceived of the Zhenotdel as a transmission belt from the top downwards to mobilise women to support party objectives and inform women of their new rights.
Instead, some Zhenotdel activists became advocates on women's behalf. Empowered as well as constrained by the Marxist vision, they regarded the emancipation of women as an end in itself and the Zhenotdel as a means to achieve it. Kollontai, the most radical, tested the limits of the organisation's mandate. Viewing women's freedom to act on their sexual feelings as essential to their emancipation, as head of the Zhenotdel she rhapsodised about the future when everyone would live in communes and 'women would be free to choose whatever sorts of romantic relationships met their needs'.[190] Kol- lontai's efforts to link personal with political change won no converts among the party's leadership. And her aggressive advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation alienated other party members. Kollontai was removed as head of the Zhenotdel early in 1922, following her association with the Workers' Opposition. Subsequent Zhenotdel leaders proved more politically astute, but also more tractable and willing to remain within the limits of their charge.
181
S. A. Smith, 'Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St. Petersburg', in Barbara Clements et al. (eds.),
182
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii,
183
Mark D. Steinberg (ed.),
184
R. C. Elwood,
185
Elizabeth Wood,
187
Joshua Sanborn, 'Family, Fraternity and Nation-Building in Russia, 1905-1925', in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.),
189
Victoria Bonnell,