Question

How was the badcondition of women responsible for Russian Revolution

Answer 1

 

The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power.

She looks at the measures taken by the party to involve women, the progressive measures introduced by the Bolsheviks once in power, but also the negative consequences for women of the later Stalinist degeneration.

The situation of women before the revolution

Before the 1917 revolution in tsarist Russia the majority of the population was made up of peasants living in rural backwardness, as they had done for centuries. In such conditions the women were treated as the property of men. Russia was still extremely patriarchal. According to Tsarist law, women were not much more than men’s slaves, and men had, by law, the right to beat their wives. Oppression of women was widespread in the culturally backward countryside where the Church and tradition had a firm hold. According to an 1897 report, only 13.1% of Russian women were literate.

In his analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia written between 1896 and 1899, Lenin studied in detail the situation of the Russian working class and the double burden of women. Children and especially girls were expected to help out at home and in the field or the factory. Many girls were taken out of school after a year of schooling, that is, if they even made it to school in the first place. Women workers started working in the factory at an average age of 12-14 years, many of them even earlier. The working day was up to 18 hours long for meagre wages.

But Lenin also described how  industrial development  was a progressive step because it pulled women out of the home and the patriarchal relationships and instead made them an independent part of society:

”Large-scale machine industry, which concentrates masses of workers who often come from various parts of the country, absolutely refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked by a truly ’contemptuous attitude to the past’.

“It is this break with obsolete tradition that is one of the substantial conditions which have created the possibility and evoked the necessity of regulating production and of public control over it. In particular, speaking of the transformation brought about by the factory in the conditions of life of the population, it must be stated that the drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive. It is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of the working population in particularly hard conditions, and that for them it is particularly necessary to regulate and shorten the working day, to guarantee hygienic conditions of labour, etc.; but endeavours completely to ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchal manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utopian.

“By destroying the patriarchal isolation of these categories of the population who formerly never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic, family relationships, by drawing them into direct participation in social production, large-scale machine industry stimulates their development and increases their independence, in other words, creates conditions of life that are incomparably superior to the patriarchal immobility of pre-capitalist relations