Year: 1976
Type: article
Abstract: For example, when the Menshevik Aleksandra Kollontai sought to reach working class women in 1905 she found neither sympathy nor support; when she fled Russia in 1909, efforts on behalf of women languished.The opportunity to work for women came as a result of factional struggles between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.In the hope of capitalizing on the new social unrest of 1912 in which women figured prominently, each group took up the women's question.The Russian case study, too, was designed to offer proof of the general hypothesis: Bolsheviks were the most successful in making the revolution yet most mistrustful of separatism generally; their party was most committed to unity and subordination and the least willing to recognize the need for female activism.These sentiments would later block the efforts of Kollontai and others to liberate Russian women and form a truly new society after 1917.The polarization of Social Democracy into basically radicals and reformists prior to World War 1, as Bridenthal noted, carried with it different positions on the women's question.Recognizing great individual variations, radicals tended to stress unity while reformists, less emancipated from tradition, were often blatantly sexist.But the net result was similar: hostility within the European socialist camp toward a degree of self-determination for the female sex.On balance, ideological assumptions and organizational needs and choices combined to undercut the employment of feminist tactics within Social Democracy and thus produced further imbalance in the uneasy alliance of socialism and feminism.
Author: Thomas A. Knapp
Institution: Loyola University Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2002952329