Clara Zetkin
[This document was translated from the German version published in the Journal of the Executive Committee of the Communist International #16, 1921]
For the Russian comrades, some paragraphs of the following guidelines of the international communist women’s movement may appear superfluous, outdated, inapplicable. For example, the debate about our position on bourgeois feminism and its goals, the demands for full political equality of women before the law and in practice, the extensive legal protection of female workers, the right of women to vocational training and employment, the social valuation of motherhood, etc. Our comrades must remember that the guidelines should not only apply to Soviet Russia, but to the international communist women’s movement. The guidelines must therefore also include social phenomena that are not present in Soviet Russia or are of no importance there, but with which the communists of other countries have to grapple with in places in which the proletariat has not yet conquered state power and its dictatorship of the Soviet order has not arisen.
In Russia, for example, the bourgeois women’s movement has never played a significant role. Here the struggle for full social and human equality of women was part of the revolutionary movement from the beginning and was carried out by revolutionary minded men and women as a common social cause. First as a struggle of the “sons” against the “fathers,” as a struggle of the young, liberal against the old, conservative generation, the bearer and guardian of the inherited prejudices and traditions, then as a struggle of the various social-revolutionary and socialist tendencies against tsarism and the expressions of its subjugating nature and institutions in the fields of politics, science, etc. Finally as a proletarian class struggle against the old enemy, tsarism, and the new enemy, capitalism, which created changed forms for the exploitation, social disenfranchisement and enslavement of women and revolutionized the broadest masses of the proletariat. It was only after the 1905 revolution that the bourgeois feminist movement was transplanted to Russia as a frail graft of the bourgeois women’s movement of Western Europe and the United States, and here it has always remained a weak and sapless plant.
This was not the case in Western Europe. There the socialist women’s movement had to develop from the ground up in theory and practice, ideologically and organizationally amid struggles with the bourgeois feminist movement. There the communist women’s movement still has to struggle against it to win over the souls of the working women and housewives of the working people. This applies to countries like Belgium, France, Switzerland, etc., where the female sex has still not achieved full political equality even on the patient legal paper. This is no less true of the countries where the war and the revolution have finally broken down the many strong opposition to the introduction of universal women’s suffrage.
Indeed, precisely where this is the case, the communists have to deal more than ever with feminist theory and practice. In these revolutionary times, feminist ideologies are favored by all bourgeois parties and powers in order to prevent the women of the working people from rallying around the banner of communism to attack capitalism and its state. The feminist views, that made the bourgeoisie scream blue murder before, are valued today as the building blocks of the wall against which the “red tide of Bolshevism” is to break. To give just one example: the supposedly liberating magic power of the ballot as the be-all and end-all is now touted to the female proletarians, small farmers, etc., in Germany in all tones by the same people for whom the introduction of women’s suffrage before the proletarian revolution of November 1918 was synonymous with the arrival of the apocalypse. Feminism is intended to plant and root the superstitions of bourgeois democracy among the broadest masses of women. The suddenly flared love for women’s rights is revealed by daylight to be hatred of the rights of the revolutionary proletariat, as a result of the fear of its struggle for freedom. Therefore it is perfectly compatible with the practice of maintaining the privileged position of men in political and state life. As a voter, the woman is allowed to cast a vote into the ballot box and, as an elected person, to participate in the parliament and to have a say in its decisions. But government and administration, everything that makes the resolutions come alive politically and socially, and turns them into flesh and blood, that mainly remains a matter for the man. In all countries with women’s suffrage, there is a very small, even extremely minute, number of women who are executives in government and administrative bodies. The higher up in task and responsibility—which in the capitalist states usually means high rank and salary—, the less likely the executive or staff member is to be a woman. If it is a question of filling an important position, the man is usually preferred, given the same suitability and ability to perform, simply because he is a man, unless the competing woman enjoys particularly effective social relationships and special patronage. In general, a woman has to do more than a man if she wants to achieve the same political and social sphere of influence as him. Only in the municipal councils and their various organs are things more favorable for the cooperation of women, and here they have shown their full potential for public life. Only the sphere of activity of the corporate bodies of the municipalities is narrowly defined in most states and largely dependent on superior state authorities.
How strange, as from another world, must these conditions and the demands that arise from them appear to the Russian comrades! In Soviet Russia, equality for women is not limited to voting and being elected, to speaking and making decisions. In all areas of public life, in all Soviet organs, from the public up to the collective ones: everywhere the woman is an employee, a coimplementer, creator. Everywhere she can use the strength of her spirit, the ardor and devotion of her heart to allow a new social life to blossom, to embody words in deeds, ideas and demands in institutions and measures. And more than that. In Soviet Russia women are sought, appointed, honored and encouraged as equals, persons with equal obligations and employees for all social organs. In communist Soviet Russia, the demand to lift the economic and social antagonism between man and woman prevailed, to eliminate the competition between them. Here one is clearly aware that the masses of women, filled with understanding and enthusiasm for the new order of things, are indispensable both for the defense of Soviet Russia at the front and at home against all hostile forces, as well as for the construction of the communist economy and all social institutions that arise on its soil.
What then is the need for the corresponding demand for the comprehensive public activity of women in states with a Soviet system? One could ask that. There are many answers. First and foremost, that these demands are essentially of a different nature in revolutionary Soviet Russia than in countries under capitalist rule. These are not calls to fight for women’s right to work in all areas of public and social life, nor declarations of war against all the powers that contest this right for women. They are primarily reminders to the woman herself to exercise her right, which is undisputed in Soviet Russia, to train and educate herself for the political usage of this right. These demands are at the same time a moral support for the assertion of women’s rights and the fulfillment of women’s duties where remnants of the old prejudice against the female sex should oppose women’s activities, contrary to the nature of communism and its goals. In addition, these demands apply to future Soviet states, which will hopefully join the Russian workers’ and peasants’ state in the near future. Hardly in any of them could the ancestral prejudice against the female sex be so slight, or be pushed aside so quickly and easily, as in Soviet Russia.
The demands regarding the protection of female workers, social welfare for mothers and children, social institutions to relieve housewives, the transfer of domestic work to the social economy, etc., are of a different character for Soviet states than for countries under the thumb of capitalist class rule. They are more than safeguards for women and the younger generation. They are more than reforms of bourgeois society to alleviate the burdens and sufferings of proletarian women, peasant women and all working, productive women, and to increase their struggle against capitalism. Detached from the poison-laden, withered topsoil of the capitalist economy, they are important building blocks of a new social order, which alone is able to liberate the woman in truth and deed, to secure her full humanity, which acts freely, adjusted to solidarity with society as a whole and only bound by solidarity with society as a whole. The explanations of the directives that deal with the strong tendency to displace working women from all areas of activity and the resulting fight for women’s right to work in society, of course not in the narrow bourgeois feminist sense, will seem frankly astonishing to our Russian comrades. In contrast to the capitalist states, Soviet Russia no longer has people living from the labor of others. Labor conscription for all healthy, normal adults is one of the supreme laws of the proletarian republic. Here one cannot do without women as workers in factories, workshops, offices, schools, hospitals, in transport services, in farming, etc., even if one wanted to, because the combined counter-revolutionaries of all countries tear millions of men from plough and anvil and force them to the front. Here, however, women that are employees in business, administration, in the field of education and health care, etc., are in no way shown the door. Here the proletarian revolution has set titanic tasks that can only be solved if the female half of society participates with insight and dedication. How different is the picture in the countries where crumbling capitalism reigns. The inexorable dissolution of the capitalist economy is overturning the traits and tendencies of said economy. The blooming capitalism, sure of his strength and power, capitalism in his youth and prime, tore the woman from home and family and whipped her into the social economy as an object of exploitation, pushed her as an employee into all areas of work that used to be open for men alone. He atomized the families of the exploited and turned all their members into workers, tributaries to him, whose competition he unleashed for the purpose of increasing his profits. In industry, in commerce and transport, capitalism everywhere needed women as cheap, willing labor that he could play off against men in dishonest competition. Now, in his days of senility, of collapse, he was the first to push the unemployed and breadless women and girls out of the economy and back into the home, the four walls of which he smashed down, the hearth of which he extinguished. But this development of things must by no means make the old competition between men and women for employment and subsistence grow stronger. Rather, it must unite women and men in a common struggle against the common enemy, capitalism, in a common struggle for the common savior, communism, for which the conquest of political power by the proletariat opens the door and smoothes out the path.
The backward tendency to drive women out of the economy and cultural work in the capitalist states is a hypocritical feature of the bourgeois order. It announces that this order cannot solve the problems that arise from the conditions it has created. It calls out to the masses of women in the capitalist countries:
Wake up! The time is near when your chains will break! Realize, want, act, fight! It must also be your work when the proletariat pushes capitalism into the pit with its dictatorship, your work also when communism rises triumphantly.
Fuentes: