Kollontai’s Intervention
Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian communist, took up the position of working-class women in
Russia and concerned herself their status before and after the communist
revolution. She recognized in her powerful writings that women in
pre-revolutionary society were dependent upon capital and their husbands and
that “free love” could not take place so long as such dependence existed. By
itself the radical-sounding slogan of “free love” meant little more than bourgeois
censure and misery to working-class women. Kollontai argued that what mattered
more to working-class women was “the attendant social and economic conditions
which define the complicated obligations of the working-class woman…it matters
to her too whether her husband has the right to dispose of her earnings,
whether he has the right by law to force her to live with him when she does not
want to, whether the husband can forcibly take her children away, etc…The
question of relationships would cease to be such a painful one for the majority
of women only if society relieved women of all those petty household cares
which are at present unavoidable (given the existence of individual, scattered
domestic economies), took over responsibility for the younger generation,
protected maternity and gave the mother to the child for at least the first
months after birth.”
In opposing the legal and sacred church
marriage contract, the feminists are fighting a fetish. The proletarian women,
on the other hand, are waging war against the factors that are behind the
modern form of marriage and family. In striving to change fundamentally the
conditions of life, they know that they are also helping to reform
relationships between the sexes. Here we have the main difference between the
bourgeois and proletarian approach to the difficult problem of the family….
Before these formulas of “free
relationships” and “free love” can become practice, it is above all necessary
that a fundamental reform of all social relationships between people take
place; furthermore, the moral and sexual norms and the whole psychology of
mankind would have to undergo a thorough evolution…What about the jealousy that
eats into even the best human souls? And that deeply-rooted sense of property
that demands the possession not only of the body but also of the soul of
another? And the inability to have the proper respect for the individuality of
another? The habit of either subordinating oneself to the loved one, or of
subordinating the loved one to oneself? And the bitter and desperate feeling of
desertion, of limitless loneliness, which is experienced when the loved ceases
to love and leaves? Where can the lonely person, who is an individualist to the
very core of his being, find solace? The collective, with its joys and
disappointments and aspirations, is the best outlet for the emotional and
intellectual energies of the individual….Without the “unique,” “one-and-only”
twin soul, even the socialist, the collectivist, is quite alone in the present
antagonistic world; only in the working class do we catch the pale glimpse of
the future, of more harmonious and more social relations between people.
Writing in 1921, Kollontai framed sex work as
prostitution and wrote “Prostitution is above all a social phenomenon; it is
closely connected to the needy position of woman and her economic dependence on
man in marriage and the family. The roots of prostitution are in economics.
Woman is on the one hand placed in an economically vulnerable position, and on
the other hand has been conditioned by centuries of education to expect
material favors from a man in return for sexual favors–whether these are given
within or outside the marriage tie. This is the root of the problem…” She
analyzed prostitution by arguing that “It is also significant that in the
capitalist countries prostitution recruits its servants from the propertyless
sections of the population. Low-paid work, homelessness, acute poverty and the
need to support younger brothers and sisters: these are the factors that
produce the largest percentage of prostitutes. If the bourgeois theories about
the corrupt and criminal disposition were true, then all classes of the
population ought to contribute equally to prostitution. There ought to be the
same proportion of corrupt women among the rich as among the poor. But
professional prostitutes, women who live by their bodies, are with rare
exceptions recruited from the poorer classes. Poverty, hunger, deprivation and
the glaring social inequalities that are the basis of the bourgeois system
drive these women to prostitution.
Kollontai’s analysis was not one-sided or oblivious to
morality. She wrote that “…prostitutes in the capitalist countries are drawn,
according to the statistics, from the thirteen to twenty-three age-group.
Children and young women, in other words. And the majority of these girls are
alone and without a home. Girls from wealthy backgrounds who have the excellent
bourgeois family to protect them turn to prostitution only very occasionally...More
often than not they are victims of the hypocritical 'double morality.'”
Kollontai’s experiences as a revolutionary leader gave her
the advantage of understanding new relations in a communist society. She accurately
contrasted capitalist and socialist societies when she wrote “The workers’
revolution in Russia has shattered the basis of capitalism and has struck a
blow at the former dependence of women upon men. All citizens are equal before
the work collective. They are equally obliged to work for the common good and
are equally eligible to the support of the collective when they need it. A
woman provides for herself not by marriage but by the part she plays in
production and the contribution she makes to the people’s wealth. Relations
between the sexes are being transformed. But we are still bound by the old
ideas. Furthermore, the economic structure is far from being completely
re-arranged in the new way, and communism is still a long way off. In this
transitional period prostitution…keeps a strong hold. After all, even though
the main sources of prostitution–private property and the policy of
strengthening the family–have been eliminated, other factors are still in
force. Homelessness, neglect, bad housing conditions, loneliness and low wages
for women are still with us. Our productive apparatus is still in a state of
collapse, and the dislocation of the national economy continues. To struggle
against prostitution chiefly means to struggle against these conditions---in
other words, it means to support the general policy of the Soviet government…The
correct slogan was formulated at the first All-Russian Congress of Peasant and
Working Woman: ‘A woman of the Soviet labor republic is a free citizen with
equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling.’… (P)rostitution
harms the national economy and hinders the further development of the
productive forces. We know that we can only overcome chaos and improve industry
if we harness the efforts and energies of the workers and if we organize the
available labor power of both men and women in the most rational way. Down with
the unproductive labor of housework and child-minding!...Prostitution is not
compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic …it does not contribute to the
development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the
proletariat and its new morality.”
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