Women & gender politics in the Russian Revolution

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T sidering the meaning of the Russian Revolution his is a particularly important moment to be con­ for women, LGBTQI activists, and gender politics. We have seen the protests against the Misogynist in Chief by more than 3 million U.S. women being channeled into clubs to rebuild the Democratic Party in the 2018 elections.

Women eager to fight show up at many follow-up events, only to hear vapid lectures about how to run for office or how to network. In the meantime, Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders lecture the fighters for a $15 minimum wage, telling them last month that even after the Democrats regain control, they must not expect a $15 minimum wage for at least another seven years.

At the same time, state legislatures dream up ever more creative ways to tighten restrictions on birth control, dismantle education for children, roll back wages and benefits, and cut health care. Rape culture continues, and lesbian bashing is again in the news.

The global crisis of capitalism is throwing up right­ ist parties and regimes with the most reactionary gender politics at the center of their political pro­ 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 2017 grams. It is clear as day that this system is incapable of providing women’s full liberation or a real end to gender discrimination.

But a look at the experience of the Russian Revolu­ tion should help us think of an alternative way for­ ward. It reminds us that there once was a state of­ ficially committed to women’s liberation. Their pro­ gram was based on the idea that a socialist society could release women from the control of institutions like the Orthodox Church and the patriarchal family. They not only created conditions of full economic independence for women but provided alternative means of supplying food preparation, laundry, child care, and education.

In the effort to create these material conditions, they were working towards the goal of the withering away of the restrictive family—with the striving for romantic love and sexual expression freed from the repression and authoritarianism that came with the development of the compulsory family as an econom­ ic and social unit under capitalism.

In the end, the pressures of imperialist intervention and civil war and then of counter-revolution under the bureaucracy led by Joseph Stalin reversed and then buried their dreams. But they still left us with the most extraordinary record of a de­ cade when working women deliberately set off on a new road with the support of a revolutionary state.

That decade was a time when hun­ dreds of thousands of women workers, teenagers and mothers, from cities and nearly feudal rural villages gathered in conferences and meetings to debate the way forward and participate in some of the most audacious mass social experi­ ments yet seen. Whatever the limitations of a century ago, they demonstrated that when the profit motive is suppressed and material conditions changed, extremely rapid changes can occur in social organi­ zation, attitudes, and goals.

As soon as the revolution occurred, the Tsarist criminal code was thrown out the door. While lesbians were never specifically mentioned in the code, gay men were criminalized through the an­ ti-sodomy laws. When the anti-sodomy laws were repealed, Russia was only the second country to do so—the other being France, which at the time also was in the aftermath of its great revolution.

One of the first actions of the Russian Revolution was a new Family Code; the first version came out in 1918. In re­ sponse to the lived experience of women over time, the code was revised and be­ came more and more radical.

The first issue to be dealt with was an attempt to free women and children from the archaic morals and repressive family structure launched by Russian Orthodox marriage. The revolution also sought to end the misery of divorce. So, marriage and divorce became voluntary civil ar­ rangements, marked legally only by registration. There is even a record of a same-sex marriage court case that ruled in favor of the couple. We do not know how common this was, but it shows just how dramatic was the change in thinking. The Bolsheviks began their work in a situation in which the compulsory fam­ ily structure had been weakened by the same kind of pressures women experi­ ence today when they are responsible for both waged work and domestic work. They recognized the vise in which wom­ en were squeezed, and implemented measure after measure to remedy the situation. For example, they ended the concept of the family wage and replaced it with equal wages for women.

This meant women could escape abus­ ers without economic fear. They elimi­ nated the shame and economic depri­ vation of illegitimacy, decriminalized sex work, and provided child-care centers for working mothers, communal dining for workers and children, and com­ munal laundries. By 1920 free abortion was more or less available in hospitals.

These measures were in reality always partial, and the facilities were not always of the highest quality or enough to meet the demand. But think what they meant for those who experienced the sudden and amazing shift in their social organization and being involved in the continuing debate!

All of these legal changes resulted in an immediate upset to the sexual order. But sometimes, changes in behavior were far in advance of the economic ad­ vances that made women more secure. Under the circumstances of the war-torn economy, all women did not have genuine economic independence, and men abused the system, so the Family Code was al­ tered again and again to provide more alimony to “divorced” women. There was little hesitation about taking remedial actions until the economy, wrecked by intervention and war, could be repaired.

These changes did not only impact urban women.

(continued on page 11, in “DA’s office refuses to release Mumia files”)

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Lee Friedlander