The Story of Women's emancipation in Russia

Women’s emancipation in Russia

As a historian of Russian and Soviet history, I find the story of women’s emancipation in Russia particularly interesting. It begins with women proving themselves to be incredibly powerful when they work together, since their march on International Women’s Day 1917 triggered the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. By October of that year a new Soviet government was in place which was deeply committed to the full emancipation of women and which put its money where its mouth was. It introduced a raft of legislation which was light years ahead of any other nations in the world in terms of its progressive stance-maternity leave, nursing breaks for mothers with infant, equal pay, equal access to divorce, the legislation of abortion, state provision of nurseries, communal kitchens and laundries, equal political rights and an attempt at the genuine sexual emancipation of women. What’s fascinating to explore is the way in which the emancipation was not just resisted by men, but exploited by them for their own gain. So the new easily accessible divorce laws which were supposed to allow women to escape abusive marriages were used by men to abandon their pregnant wives. Or, my particular favorite, they would marry women in spring time to help with the sowing and the bringing in the harvest in the autumn and then divorce her. The new sexual freedoms which women to supposed to receive were also turned round on them, so that men regularly bullied woman into having sex by arguing that refusing them was a rejection of socialism.

It’s rare that you’d ever turn to Stalin for insight or advice, but I find his view on the notion of class struggled oddly applicable to women’s drive for emancipation. He argued that the class struggled becomes the most fierce when communism is closest to being achieved. It seems to me that a s women (in certain parts of the world) reach full emancipation and equality, the resistence to it is expressed most intensely, though in subtle and insidious ways. We can see it clearly in the Russian examples above, but it is also apparent today, when many countries in the developed world and some in the lessdeveloped world have caught up with the reforms the Soviet Union put in place in the 20s. Arguably women have achieved the most rights they have ever had and are nearing emancipation in numerous ways.

Posted by: Dewi Sartika