What was the role of women in the russian revolution
Answers
Millions of Russian men fought actively in World War I, causing some disruption in the patriarchal gender roles traditional to Russian society.The number of women workers in industrial centers rose to over one million as 250,000 women joined the workforce between 1914 and 1917. Peasant women also took on new roles, taking over some of their husbands' farm work. Women fought directly in the war in small numbers on the front lines, often disguised as men, and thousands more served as nurses. The social conditions of women during World War I affected the role they played in coming revolutions.
The Women Question, the idea that women were seen as inferior and given strict social rules and roles, was a popular topic in Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russians generally viewed women as backward or superstitious, and not to be trusted politically, and even some Marxists referred to women workers as the “most backward stratum of the proletariat” and accused them of being unable to develop a revolutionary consciousness without party guidance. Many wrote and theorized on the issue, but many Russians associated the issue mainly with feminists. Before the revolution, feminism was condemned as "bourgeois" because it tended to come from the upper classes, and was considered counterrevolutionary because of the perception that it would have divided the working class. Engels’ 1890 work on The Women Question influenced Lenin heavily. He believed that the oppression of women was a function of their exclusion from the public production sphere and the relegation to the domestic sphere. For women to have been considered true comrades, the bourgeois family had to be dismantled and women needed full autonomy and access to employment.In light of the participation of women in the February Revolution, the Bolshevik Party began to rethink and restructure its approach to "the women question."
The Bolsheviks had opposed any division of the working class, including separating men and women to put some focus specifically on women's issues. They thought men and women needed to work together with no division, and because of this, in the party's early days, there was no literature printed specifically targeting women, and the Bolsheviks refused to create a bureau for women workers. In 1917, they acquiesced to the demands of the Russian feminist movement and created the Women's Bureau.