Communism Means Equality for women and men

This celebratory column is in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world communist movement of the 20th century. We mainly examine its triumphs. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.

One hundred years ago The Messenger, a Black U.S. socialist monthly, editorialized:
Soviet government proceeds apace. It bids fair to sweep over the whole world! The sooner the better. On with the dance!
U.S. Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs declared:

The common people of Russia came into power, the peasants, the toilers, the soldiers, and they proceeded as best they could to establish a government of the people. It may be that the much-despised Bolsheviks may fail at last, but let me say to you that they have written a chapter of glorious history. It will stand to their eternal credit.

These words are more important today than ever. We hear everywhere that “communism is dead,” and it is true that the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe abandoned the goal of communism and are openly capitalist market economies.
Soviet revolutionaries and the communist movement more broadly made mistakes that led to the restoration of capitalism. Workers everywhere must learn from these mistakes—as well as from the many victories of the Bolshevik revolution and the world communist movement—in order to move forward. In the future, we must build a fully egalitarian society. It is necessary to reorganize society along the communist principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” The PLP has come to realize that nationalism, racism, sexism, and acceptance of inequality of any sort are fatal to the working class movement. “On with the dance!”
Communist revolutionaries fight sexism
You can learn a lot about a society by looking at the position of its women. V. I. Lenin, Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Elena Stasova, and many, many other Soviet leaders had long recognized that the active participation of women, especially working-class women, was absolutely necessary to the success of their movement.
Lenin wrote:

Unless women are brought to take an independent part not only in political life generally, but also in daily and universal public service, it is no use talking about full and stable democracy, let alone socialism.

Kollontai wrote:

Without the participation of women the October Revolution could not have brought the Red Flag to victory.

The Bolsheviks recognized that to win over large numbers of women they would have to do two things: (a) educate them politically in the principles and practical work of communist revolution; and (2) fight for reform demands that would attack the profoundly and viciously sexist social system that ground down women workers (especially among the Asian minorities) even more harshly than their brothers.
They did both. The Bolshevik Party program of 1902 already demanded “full equality for all citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, or race.” And when the government of workers, peasants, and soldiers took power in November, 1917, it quickly moved to make this a reality.
Antisexist accomplishments
Among the accomplishments of the first few years of the Russian Revolution were:

• A large-scale system of crèches (nurseries) and “children’s palaces” was begun to provide for a “social upbringing” for the children and to free women to participate fully in political and factory work;
• Guaranteed maternity leave and special safeguards of working conditions;
• Divorce easily available on demand of either spouse, freeing women from the tyranny of abusive husbands and fathers;
• In January, 1918, in response to demands of women workers and peasants, lying-in hospitals (special hospitals for childbirth) were reorganized to guarantee the best available care for all women, regardless of ability to pay, “thereby ending,” as Kollontai put it, “the inequality between poor and prosperous expectant and nursing mothers”;
• Improved midwifery training and new regulations were implemented to protect women “against a view which saw them as ‘sacrifices to science’ on whom unskilled midwives and young medical students gained practice”;
• Abortion was legalized;
• A mass campaign was organized in 1918 to draw women workers into politics. Three hundred delegates were expected at the first congress of women workers, held in November 1918—but 1,147 came! They formulated a plan to turn “women workers and peasants into conscious and active communists” on a large scale;
• Women were active with the Red Army, often serving at the front. The women workers of Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad) served by the thousands in machine-gun companies, in medical and communications units, and in constructing fortifications.

Soviet women continued to advance throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Increasing numbers of women became scientists, engineers, skilled workers and political leaders. One of the most spectacular accomplishments of workers’ power was the freeing of Central Asian women from the suffocating veils that had for centuries symbolized their virtual enslavement.
Need working women in leadership
But serious mistakes were made too. For one, the communist movement consistently underestimated the importance of a sharp ideological struggle for equality, in this case the fight against sexism within the ranks of the working class. This was a mistake. As late as 1921, only 10 percent of the Party members were women, and women occupied only a tiny minority of leadership positions throughout the socialist period.
And while the Soviet woman was increasingly visible in public life, her “natural obligation” was still said in 1946 to be “that of bringing up her children and mistress of her home.”
Still, the Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, was, as Debs put it, “a chapter of glorious history” for women as well as for male workers. “To have failed to see the hope in the Russian Revolution,” wrote The San Francisco Bulletin war correspondent Bessie Beatty a century ago, “is to be as a blind man looking at a sun rise.”
Her words are still true today. The sky may be cloudy, but the struggle for communism continues. And the working class will win!