Following the Russian revolution of 1917, the communist Soviet Union was the site of a remarkable experiment in state-directed feminism during the 1920s. (See Communist Feminism in Chapter 21.) Among the most prominent leaders of that movement was Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), who was born to a privileged, gentry family and became involved in socialist politics and revolution with a focus on women’s issues. For several years, Kollontai was the head of Zhenotdel, the communist organization dedicated to female emancipation. Her outspokenness on women’s issues and her opposition to an emerging Soviet dictatorship soon diminished her influence within Soviet leadership circles. By the 1960s, however, her ideas resonated among some participants in a reviving feminist movement in the West. Her essay on “Communism and the Family,” written in 1920, gives expression to a distinctly communist feminism.

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI

“Communism and the Family”

1920

Will the family continue to exist under communism? . . . [One] fact that invites attention is that divorce has been made easier in Soviet Russia. . . . A working woman will not have to petition for months or even for years to secure the right to live separately from a husband who beats her and makes her life a misery with his drunkenness and uncouth behaviour. Divorce by mutual agreement now takes no more than a week or two to obtain. . . .

[T]he old family in which the man was everything and the woman nothing . . . is changing before our very eyes. . . . It is the universal spread of female labour that has contributed most of all to the radical change in family life. . . . Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother. Woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load. . . .

The circumstances that held the family together no longer exist. The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole. . . .

All that was formerly produced in the bosom of the family is now being manufactured on a mass scale in workshops and factories. . . . The family no longer produces; it only consumes. . . . The individual household is dying. It is giving way in our society to collective housekeeping. Instead of the working woman cleaning her flat, the communist society can arrange for men and women whose job it is to go round in the morning cleaning rooms. . . . Instead of the working woman having to struggle with the cooking and spend her last free hours in the kitchen preparing dinner and supper, communist society will organise public restaurants and communal kitchens. . . . The working woman will not have to slave over the washtub any longer, . . . she will simply take these things to the central laundries each week and collect the washed and ironed garments later. . . .

Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility. . . . Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia . . . we already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children, restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective. . . .

In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them independent, and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up. The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work. . . . She need have no anxiety about her children. The workers’ state will assume responsibility for them. Marriage will lose all the elements of material calculation which cripple family life. Marriage will be a union of two persons who love and trust each other. . . . [T]here is no more room for the old proprietary attitude which says: “These are my children. . . .” [T]here are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers. . . .

In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades. This is what relations between men and women in the communist society will be like. These new relations will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in the commercial society, of a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners.