UNLIKE THE WARS waged by one ruling class against another, class struggle has never been an exclusively male affair. Women have been part of revolts, riots and revolutions in past class societies, and in workers' struggles against capitalism in modern times. Marxism comes out of this tradition of class struggle, and the link between women and revolution is not new.
In the French Revolution of 1789, women played a crucial role in riots and demonstrations, forcing the revolution forward despite the reluctance of moderate leaders. They led the march from Paris to Versailles which forced King Louis XVI and his family to move to Paris and recognise a new constitution. They took part in the republican movement that led to the abolition of monarchy and the rule of the radical Jacobin party, even though the Jacobins were unsympathetic to women's demands. But women in radical groups and clubs such as the Club of Revolutionary Republican Women were well aware of class and political divisions among women as well as men, and were prepared to attack aristocratic women and supporters of the moderate party physically as well as in words.
Despite the bitter defeat women suffered in this revolution--the downfall of the Jacobins did not improve women's position, it made it a great deal worse--the tradition of revolutionary action by women did not die, but reappeared in Paris in the 1848 revolution, when the working class first appeared as a separate political force in a revolutionary situation, and during the Paris Commune of 1871, when thousands of women died on the barricades to defend a workers' government.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution had transformed workingclass life in many parts of Europe, but first and foremost in England. Women were becoming involved in the new movements of the industrial working class: they joined and formed unions, went on strike, and took part in industrial protests. The poet Southey wrote about a women glovemakers' protest in 1807: 'Women are more disposed to be mutinous: they stand in less fear of the law . . . and therefore in all public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity.' The ferocity of women was also noted in the Derby silk riots of 1833 and the 'Plug Plot' strikes in Lancashire in 1842. Women readily joined the trade unions that sprang up in the 1820s and 1830s, and were involved in Britain's first socialist movement, which was led by the manufacturer Robert Owen but involved many working people (see Barbara Taylor's book, Eve and the New Jerusalem, published in 1982).
But the rise of modern industry often set men and women against each other, as employers tried to use women as cheap labour to undermine men's traditional skills and organisations, while men tried to exclude women from many skilled trades. Within the working-class movement there were many reactionary ideas about women, the worst perhaps being among the followers of Proudhon in France, who said, 'Woman must be housewife or whore,' and wanted to exclude women from the workforce altogether.
By 1850, the still young socialist movement was beginning to divide on the question of women, and on the question of class struggle too. The followers of Proudhon believed in small property and gradual economic reforms; the Owenites turned to philanthropy and experimental communities; and as trade unions became more stable and permanent many of their leaders wanted to co-operate with capitalism instead of opposing it.
Marx and Engels, in their first important piece of political writing, the Communist Manifesto of 1848, came down clearly on the side of both class struggle and women's liberation. They rejected all utopian communities and ideas of benevolent manufacturers or gradual reforms, insisting that only the working class could free itself from the tyranny of capital. They ridiculed the reaction of the ruling class to the shocking ideas of women's liberation:
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare
up at this infamous proposal of the Communists . . .
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of
production. He hears that the instruments of production
are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come
to no other conclusion than that the lot of being
common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has
not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away
with the status of women as mere instruments of
production. (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848)
In the First International (known as the International Working Men's Association in English), Marx and Engels argued against the anti-women ideas of other political groups. They welcomed the affiliation of striking women silkworkers at Lyons in 1869, and tried to have one of the strikers attend the Congress of the International at Basle in support of a resolution on women's right to work and to membership of the International; but this was prevented by the local section at Lyons, under the influence of the anarchist Bakunin.
Both Marx and Engels were intensely interested in the history and origins of women's oppression, though it was Engels who wrote the book they had both planned, after Marx's death. By that time, the movement for equal rights for women was well under way in England, and one of the most interesting things in the book is Engels' comment on the question of legal equality:
With regard to the juridical equality of man
and woman in marriage: the inequality of the
two before the law, which is a legacy of
previous social conditions, is not the cause
but the effect of the economic oppression of
women . . . The necessity, as well as the
manner, of establishing real social equality
between the two will be brought out into
full relief only when both are completely
equal before the law. (Origins of the Family,
Private Property and the State, 1884)
A hundred years on, when we have come much closer to complete legal equality but are still a long way from women's liberation, Engels' words still ring true.
Since the days of Marx and Engels revolutionary socialists in the Marxist tradition have tried to keep the link between socialist revolution and women's liberation, despite the hostility of other tendencies in the labour movement and the reluctance of many men in the revolutionary movement itself. It has been at the highest points of class struggle, when the most working-class people have been involved, that the link has been strongest. Many of these are dealt with in Tony Cliff's book, Class StFuggle and Women's Liberation (published by Bookmarks in 1984), but the most important is the Russian Revolution of 1917, because this did succeed, though only for a few years, in creating a genuine workers' state.
In Russia, working women's struggles were sometimes ahead of socialist theory from the start. Even before the first mass strike wave of 1905-7, women were a substantial part of the new industrial labour force and had begun to take strike action for specifically women's demands such as maternity rights, time off for breast-feeding and laundry days, and the end of sexual abuse by management, as well as for improved pay and other conditions. During the early years of the First World War, women organised to fight falling wages and factory layoffs; they formed unions of domestic servants, soldiers' wives, laundry workers and bakery workers, as well as the older textile and manufacturing unions.
Leading members of the Bolshevik Party such as Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Klavdia Nikolaieva (a typesetter who had joined the Bolsheviks as a girl of fourteen during the 1905 revolution) took part in women's struggles and urged women to join the party. For a time in 1914 (until it was raided by the police) and again in 1917, they published a paper for women, Rabotnitsa or Woman Worker. They argued that working women could not and should not join aristocratic and middle-class feminists in the women's movement (who, like most of the Suffragettes in England, came out in full support of the 1914 war). They argued that working women should fight for and with their own class. Women workers played an important part in the two revolutions of 1917, while aristocratic and middle-class feminists were bitterly opposed to revolution, especially the workers' revolution of October.
The newly-born soviet government of October 1917 soon took steps to carry out the legal emancipation of women. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality were legalised, the hold of the Orthodox Church over marriage was broken, and the state took responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children.
But the Bolsheviks recognised that legal emancipation was only the first step to women's liberation. Without far-reaching changes in social and economic conditions, women could not obtain the freedom that the law promised them. Russia was a huge and backward country with a mainly peasant population and the hold of reactionary religious ideas was still strong. 'Women's Departments' were set up in all areas to bring women together actively to change things.
For the oppression of women in the old Russian patriarchal family to end, state provision for women and children had to become a reality, with maternity homes, nurseries and schools for all. Experiments in collective living, too, were encouraged, though the state had even less money to spare to support them than it had for the essential facilities. The determination to tackle these vast problems was there.
But by 1929, power in Russia had passed into the hands of a new ruling class headed by Stalin, hostile to women's liberation and determined to do away with all traces of workers' power--though they retained the rhetoric of socialism and women's liberation to hide what they were doing. The Women's Departments were closed down, and the progressive legislation of the 1917 revolution bit by bit reversed. Many people continued to believe that Russia was still socialist, despite an increasingly authoritarian regime; they had to pretend that women were liberated in Russia because they drove tractors or mined coal. But to the few critics of the retreat from socialism in Russia, the reversal of policies on women and the family was one of the most obvious signs of the betrayal of the revolution. Leon Trotsky, who was thrown out of Russia in 1929 for opposing the rise of the new . authoritarian state, regarded the question of the family as crucial, and in his book, The Revolution Betrayed (published in 1937), denounced the new family policies of Stalin's regime.
It is the revolutionary socialist tradition that women's liberation goes hand-in-hand with workers' power which we want to rebuild now. We reject all the other, anti- women traditions that have existed in the labour movement, and the idea that women's liberation can come about by other means. We want, some day, to be able to carry on from where the Russian Revolution was forced to stop.