Imagine a world where women were property, traded like livestock, silenced by veils and worked to death by the age of 30.
That was the context in which the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 launched history’s most radical experiment for women’s emancipation. The Bolsheviks devoted resources to ensure women were no longer slaves. They made childcare free, awarded equal pay and allowed women reproductive freedoms, reforms that were revolutionary for the time.
While the Bolsheviks’ reforms were short lived (because of policy reversals under Joseph Stalin from the 1930s), they nevertheless showed how inextricably linked capitalism is to women’s oppression.
Today, even though such policies are about achieving gender equality, many nations, including Australia, lag behind.
Women’s oppression in Tsarist Russia
At the time of the revolution, the vast majority of Russians were peasants struggling to survive. More than 60% were illiterate and there was extreme scarcity. World War I, 1914–18, had caused even greater privations and disease.
Women had no voting or property rights in Tsarist Russia.
Whatever her class, a woman was expected to marry a man of her parents’ choice and live as his dutiful wife. There was no escape from abusive marriages.
In the 1890s, one quarter of factory workers were women. Women worked 18-hour shifts, gave birth on factory floors and were told to “make up wages on the streets” during economic downturns. Sexual exploitation of women workers by their bosses was rampant.
Textile workers would work eight hours a day and take work home to do for another eight hours. Women who worked at home winding cotton often worked 18 hours a day, but earned very little. Girls started work at five or six years old.
In the countryside it was common for the father-in-law in multi-generation households to sexually exploit younger female family members. Renowned Russian author Maxim Gorky wrote about witnessing a mob drag a naked “adulteress” behind a horse for daring to choose her own lover.
Activists attempting to organise women to fight for their rights were frequently imprisoned by the police.
At the time of the revolution, there were 15 major nations in the new Soviet Union. They included the Uzbeks from Central Asia, who followed Islam; the Tajiks, who lived in the mountains; the Turkmen, Bedouin-like nomads who wandered the deserts; the Altai, who are shamanistic; and the Jews, who suffered persecution from discriminatory laws and endured pogroms, many of which were either organised by or tacitly approved by the Tsarist authorities, and during which rape was routine.
Each nation had their own traditions and beliefs about women, which were nearly always backward and oppressive.They included marrying off children and polygamy. In Central Asia, girls as young as seven were regarded as slaves and sold to men who were often decades older.
The backward attitudes were a huge barrier to activists. It was mainly female factory workers and urban soldiers’ wives who became politically active.
Bolshevik women quickly discovered that peasant women, the overwhelming majority of the female population, were enslaved by centuries of patriarchal tradition, illiteracy and geographic isolation, and living behind a fortress of suspicion.
These women, conditioned to view outsiders as threats to their fragile survival, often met revolutionary ideas with fear or hostility, their lives governed by codes of obedience that made even whispers of equality feel like betrayal.
To reach them, activists had to defy not just Tsarist loyalists and village elders, but the crushing weight of a culture where resistance could mean exile, violence or death.
Men murdered wives for attending meetings. Mullahs called the Bolsheviks “devils” for educating girls. Priests and the Russian Orthodox Church agitated against the revolution and collaborated with the anti-revolutionary forces.
Even years after the revolution, women were still being killed, sometimes by male family members, for wanting equality.
Frequently, older women could not understand or accept changes to their traditional way of life. Housewives lacked confidence, as many were illiterate. When the Bolshevik government set up sex-segregated schools in some of these nations in an effort to eradicate illiteracy and change the prejudices, many families refused to send their daughters.
At this time, the young revolutionary government was also fighting two wars simultaneously: a civil war against the old White powers they had just overthrown and a battle against a dozen countries that sent their troops to help the Whites defeat the revolutionaries.
Under these assaults, millions of people became homeless, and by 1918 food rations were about four ounces of bread a day. The cities became isolated as the rich peasants, the kulaks, began to hoard food. War weariness set in, limiting what the new government could do without international support.
Fighting for gender equality
Despite these enormous obstacles, the Bolsheviks did their best to advance women’s rights.
In 1918, Bolshevik women established a women’s section of the Communist Party, the Zhenotdel. Under the leadership of Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya, the Zhenotdel worked to advance women’s full participation in society by spreading news of the revolution, enforcing its progressive new laws, establishing political education and literacy classes for working-class and peasant women and fighting for women’s self-activity.
It organised the first Russia-wide Congress of Women Workers and Peasants in November 1918. While 300–500 delegates were expected, more than 1100 attended.
The conference focussed on explaining women’s rights and urging delegates to spread information to millions of women across the vast country. They knew that even the best laws were meaningless unless women knew of them and insisted that they be observed.
Under the Bolsheviks, all women in the Soviet Union were given the right to vote and stand for elections, a right enjoyed by the women of very few countries at that time.
Under new family laws, women could file for divorce with no consent needed. Marriage no longer conferred ownership of one spouse’s property on the other, and women retained full control of their earnings and inheritances.
Homosexuality was decriminalised. Abortion was legalised and made freely available.
The principle of equal pay for equal work was legislated. Sex discrimination in employment was outlawed and the eight-hour working day was enforced.
The government legislated for women’s right to serve as attorneys and for equal rights in the civil service.
Sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave was introduced and the work week for breastfeeding women was reduced to four days. As state-run nurseries and childcare were free, more women entered the industrial workforce and became more economically independent.
Health services were made freely available with special attention to women, children and pregnant mothers. Children born outside of wedlock were granted the same rights as those born within.
Community kitchens and public laundries were set up to relieve women from housework so they could participate more fully in society, as well as starting an effort to pay women for housework.
These new laws swept away centuries of patriarchal and religious power based on gender inequality and were the most progressive laws for women in the world at that time.
The Bolsheviks showed that free childcare, equal pay and reproductive rights are the bedrock of progress towards full liberation.
Next time someone says socialism “doesn’t work”, remind them that it was revolutionary socialists who gave women rights more than a century ago that we are still fighting for in Australia today.