Bebel and later socialists
August Bebel of the German Social Democratic Party wrote a much more influential
book than that of Engels – Woman Under Socialism(1878) – which followed the
argument that women could only be emancipated through a proletarian revolution
which resulted in their economic independence and the collectivisation of housework
and childcare. However, unlike Engels, he was also conscious of the problems that
were peculiar to women. Capitalist employment resulted in women being paid less
than men, and women suffered from the problem of having to do all or most of
the housework. Bebel also noted that economic subordination was linked to non-
economic forms of oppression like a double standard of sexual morality, and
inconvenient forms of dress (Bryson, 1992: 121).
Clara Zetkin, a German socialist who was to be a founder member of the German
Communist Party, argued that class must take primacy over gender interests. She
refused to cooperate with other women in campaigns for improved education,
employment prospects and legal status, on the grounds that proletarian and
‘bourgeois’ women had nothing in common. Lenin was to declare at the time of
the Russian Revolution that ‘the proletariat cannot have complete liberty until it
has won complete liberty for women’ (Rowbotham, 1972: 163), but this did not
prevent him from extracting a pledge from Zetkin that personal matters would not
be raised in political discussions (Bryson, 1992: 125). It is true that the new Soviet
government was the first in history to write women’s emancipation into the law (in
1918), but the right to abortion was removed in 1936 and the family which radical
Bolsheviks had sought to abolish was idealised under Stalin as a crucial part of the
disciplinary mechanism of the state.
Alexandra Kollontai was commissar, or minister, of social welfare in the first
Bolshevik government and she sought to encourage women to set up, with state
help, nurseries, laundries and educational campaigns. She fell from power in 1921
and the Women’s Department that she had headed was abolished in 1929. She is
also interesting because she argued for a new kind of relationship between men and
women – one that would be less exclusive and not monogamous (Bryson, 1992:
137–40).
Women in the Communist Party states
In terms of more recent developments in Communist Party states, the regime in
Romania was particularly oppressive with Ceausescu stating in 1986, some 20 years
after an anti-abortion law had been passed, that those ‘who refuse to have children
are deserters, escaping the law of natural continuity’ (Funk and Mueller, 1993: 46).
In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) abortion was legal and used
as the main means of birth control, while 90 per cent of women of working age
were in paid employment, and 87 per cent had completed vocational training (Funk
and Mueller, 1993: 139). Despite the authoritarian character of these Communist
Party states, the position of women in post-communist societies has worsened as
reproductive rights have been scaled down (although in Poland the attempt to pass
an anti-abortion law was blocked in 1991). Women have left the workforce, are
much less represented in legislatures and have suffered as state nurseries have been
Chapter 14 Feminism 319