International Women’s Day Speech, UCLA, Los Angeles, California
Written: 1981
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Spring 1981
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Suppressed Facts Behind the Khrushchev Revelations." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp 340-350). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
It was the energy of women, the upheaval amongst women, the uninterrupted revolutionary audacity and intensity of women that caused, that impelled, that motored the new Russian and Eastern European revolution.
It was women who were the sparkplugs that created Glasnost—the movement for political openness—and Perestroika— the loosening of bureaucratic economic controls. It is women who are the active agents of all these changes. The revolution is the effect and the form of a womanly essence.
Let’s put that in our samovar tonight and brew it! What is the story of Soviet women? It’s a horror tale—a scary saga of successive defeat and prolonged subjugation under Stalin in a degenerated workers’ state. And the horror exists to this day.
But it didn’t start out that way.
After the 1917 revolution in Russia, the new status of women was a beautiful and a noble and a vastly progressive phenomena. The early Soviet Union granted women more rights, more respect, more appreciation, more access to all forms of economic and political and cultural work than any other government in history. The Soviet constitution is a marvel to this day.
This is what Trotsky had to say about the status of women in the USSR in his 1937 book, The Revolution Betrayed:
The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the socalled “family hearth”—that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death.
The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, crèches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. Up to now this problem of problems has not been solved. The forty million Soviet families remain in their overwhelming majority nests of medievalism, female slavery. . .daily humiliation of children, feminine and childish superstition.
(He must be talking about adherence to the church.)
We must permit ourselves no illusions on this account. For that very reason, the consecutive changes in the approach to the problem of the family in the Soviet Union best of all characterize the actual nature of Soviet society and the evolution of its ruling strata.
At the beginning, in 1917, abortion was legalized, divorce was legalized, contraception was legalized, homosexuality was legalized. I’m talking 1917, in backward Mother Russia! The concept of illegitimacy was liquidated—the first country in the world to do that.
Prostitution was decriminalized, but only for the women. The pimps and brothel-owners were rounded up. How do you like that! The principle was to punish prostitution, but not the prostitute. The prostitute was the victim, the product of reactionary, bourgeois society and she was offered rehabilitation and training.
Women’s organizations were fostered by the Communist Party and subsidized by the government. Their function was to promote and educate about women’s rights throughout the enormous length and breadth of the USSR—especially reaching out to women in the Far Eastern, Asiatic cultures where women still wore the chador—the black veil.
Lenin, Trotsky, and all the women leaders spoke and wrote on questions of women frequently. The Bolsheviks had great women leaders including Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was Lenin’s companion; Alexandra Kollontai, who was on the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and Inessa Armand, a journalist, war correspondent and feminist leader. They also had the wonderful example and role model of Rosa Luxemburg whose revolutionary work in Germany and Poland was famed in the Soviet Union. In the course of all this activity, chadors were trampled in the dust.
But 20 years after the 1917 revolution, abortion became a crime again. Homosexuality became a crime again. If you got a divorce, you had to pay a special tax. If you had a baby, you got a prize, a reward. Illegitimacy was restored and to advocate feminism was a kind of crime. It was “bourgeois” to do so, and uppity females were treated very harshly: fired, exiled, sometimes jailed. There wasn’t one woman in the upper strata of Soviet public life, in politics, in the party, in the government. The only place a woman could shine was in the theater or the opera, as an athlete or a dancer.
Today, the plight of women is still deplorable. And the reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev are making it even worse. In his book, Perestroika, he writes:
. . .Over the years of our difficult and heroic history, we failed to pay attention to women’s specific rights and needs arising from their role as mother and home-maker, and their indispensable educational function as regards children. Engaged in scientific research, working on construction sites, in production and in the services, and involved in creative activities, women no longer have enough time to perform their everyday duties at home— housework, the upbringing of children and the creation of a good family atmosphere. We have discovered that many of our problems—in children’s and young people’s behavior, in our morals, culture and in production—are partially caused by the weakening of family ties and slack attitude to family responsibilities.
(Guess who has that slack attitude. He’s talking about us, ladies! Everybody’s troubles are the fault of women: youth, bad morals, bad culture, bad production.)
This is a paradoxical result of our sincere and politically justified desire to make women equal with men in everything. Now, in the course of perestroika, we have begun to overcome this shortcoming. That is why we are now holding heated debates in the press, in public organizations, at work and at home, about the question of what we should do to make it possible for women to return to their purely womanly mission.
Gorbachev is continuing Stalin’s fiction that women already have equality, or as much as they need, as much as they want. And that their real calling is to raise babies and to be good productive little workers. He’s reinforcing women’s role in the home because he needs their unpaid domestic labor. This takes the onus off the state, don’t you see, to provide for the upbringing of children.
The government is pushing for higher birth rates among Russians (there is a different demographic plan for the non- Russian national minorities). In Russia, you’re taxed if you’re childless. But you’re paid 50 rubles per birth and parents get extra paid leave from work. Women with 10 or more children are honored as “Mother Heroines.” If you’re really good, you get a medal!
The regime’s perspective on women is also revealed in an editorial in the March 1989 issue of Socialism: Theory and Practice, a journal printed in Moscow. The writer is talking about fulfilling the desires of women:
There is no small number of these desires, or so feel the males who constitute the rest of the human race. Perhaps, in addition to the universal desire of women to look at least two times younger than their age, they are united to one extent or another by the idea of emancipation.
(Huh! He noticed.)
Whereas at the start of this movement, pioneering women had to wage a selfless struggle for their rights and tear down the psychological barriers, both at home and in society, it is now different: males not only support women’s emancipation to the hilt but at times they let [let!] women work in areas which are plainly contraindicated to them.
(Which means physically demanding work like road building, farming, logging, etc.)
. . .Even though Soviet women do not experience social discrimination, they nevertheless are striving at this point to stay feminine. The vast majority of them are prepared to combine motherhood and married life, something nature itself wills them to do, with a career and social activity.
. . Devoting herself to her home and raising children is what she sees as her primary and joyous duty.
You can hardly say “All rise and sing the ‘International’” after that!
Women in the Soviet Union suffer the most from all the economic and social problems of the country. Childcare, what little there is of it, is terrible. Women put in long days at work. They spend long hours in lines trying to shop. And when they finally get home, they have to do all the cooking and the housework. And I mean all the housework. The men do not do housework. They do not raise the children. They do not cook. They do not shop.
Medicine in the USSR is dreadful. The hospitals are dirty. Childbirth is a very unhygienic process, with ill-staffed hospitals and a dearth of drugs. There is no information or education on AIDS prevention.
Contraceptives are very hard to get but abortions are frightful and cruel. Women are put through a barbaric assembly line resulting in a very high rate of staph infections. For every live birth, there are two to three legal abortions per live birth and three to five illegal abortions.
Why, you may ask, are there illegal abortions when abortion is legal? Because no anesthesia is provided for legal abortions! Women get illegal abortions for the sake of some pain killers, even though one in five dies. One in five women dies of illegal abortion, and there are three to five illegal abortions for every two to three legal abortions. Great country for women.
These conditions prevail and are often much worse in the rest of the Eastern Bloc.
What about the plight of older women? They’re a vast army of domestic slaves. They’re generally unpaid baby tenders or else they continue to work at very hard labor until very old ages because pensions are so low.
Younger women must take care of elders as well as work and raise their own family. And they all live together in a little crooked room, or maybe if they’re lucky, two rooms.
The government has finally admitted that prostitution was never wiped out. And now it’s rampant. The prostitutes are mostly single mothers with young children who say this is the only way they can survive.
What about family relations? We hear that the men, when not at work, are drunk or absent from the home. Alcoholism is out of control. The men are completely unsupportive and unsympathetic to the triple labors of the women. Women are the real heads of the families because the men aren’t there. All observers of Soviet life remark on how independent and casual the women are with their husbands or male companions. They don’t think too much of men. But at work and in politics and in unions, they have to bow down to the men because they are the bosses and have all the high-paid, top jobs.
So far as the general consciousness of Soviet women, it’s undoubtedly true that while most women want to work and like their economic independence, they don’t like the low wages of “female” occupations. Everybody’s searching for a rich husband to support them. Western feminists are derided as man haters and the word feminism is seen as equivalent to bourgeois feminism. They know nothing of Marxist feminism. You’d think that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky opposed women’s liberation.
Women have come practically full circle to where they started out in 1917. Which gives a very bad name to socialism.
What happened to cause this situation?
In a nutshell, counter-revolution happened. We call it Stalinism, after the person raised up by the counter-revolution to express it and reflect it.
On the heel of the 1917 revolution, Russia was invaded by 21 capitalist countries determined to smash the new Soviet state. A civil war raged for years. By the time the Bolsheviks defeated the foreign armies and the czarist White Russians, the country was in a state of exhaustion and total ruin. It was not only economically destroyed, not only did famine and disease rage, but the cream of the revolutionary leadership had been killed defending the Soviet Union.
And the country was politically isolated. No other nation had revolutions in those years. So you have this country, still benighted with feudalism, with a heritage of terrible economic and cultural backwardness, which is isolated, its people exhausted by poverty and war, its leadership wiped out. What happened?
What happened is what will happen, as Lenin and Trotsky explained. When there is scarcity, lines form as people try to get what few goods are available. And as lines form, you need policemen to keep order. The police become a special caste above the masses. A whole social layer emerges—the order keepers, the administrators, the controllers, the cops. And this caste becomes parasitic. It becomes a force for brutality. It becomes solely concerned with its own administrative activities and special privileges, and in maintaining those privileges, even if it means enforcing poverty and deprivation for everybody else.
And then Lenin dies, probably murdered by Stalin. Trotsky, who is fighting the bureaucracy and leading a huge Left Opposition against it, is exiled. The Left Opposition is slaughtered or imprisoned or driven underground. Stalin unleashes the 1936 Moscow Trials in which he frames the entire leadership of the Russian Revolution and gets rid of them—anybody that’s left by that time.
In the midst of these horrors, Stalin declares that socialism has not only been achieved, but the country’s gone beyond that into pure communism! He says, “The Soviet experience has proved that it was possible and desirable to build socialism in one country.”
It’s neither possible or desirable. It’s totally impractical and it can’t happen. But he says it has. And he says it’s the duty of revolutionaries everywhere to subordinate their own struggles to a defense of whatever the Soviet bureaucracy declares is in the best interest of the fatherland. Revolutions are forbidden—they’re too dangerous. Just get into the Democratic Party (if you’re in the U.S.), and stick with your own bourgeoisie. Fight if you must for narrow reforms, but do it quietly. Don’t rock the boat and undermine the Kremlin’s deals with your rulers.
On the home front, the unpaid labor of women is once again needed. So Stalin comes up with a new theory to supplant the teaching of Marx and Engels—that travesty called the “Revolutionary Nuclear Family.”
The patriarchal family is triumphantly rehabilitated. Instead of Stalin admitting that the Soviets are still too poor to provide the services women need and promising to keep women’s emancipation a top priority, he announces that everything is perfect for women in their happy revolutionary families. Trotsky says, “It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of this retreat.”
So all the gains made by women were reversed by Stalin. The women’s organizations were eliminated. Gays were forced back underground and the backlash on all the other questions took place. Counter-revolution, the regime of betrayal and treachery, solidified into a full-blown police state and a monstrous regime.
With this background of backwardness and defeat, the current explosion is quite an uproar. But it didn’t take Trotskyists by surprise. It’s what Trotsky wrote about, gave his life to, kept saying: The bureaucratic caste has got to be thrown out so that the revolution can continue, so that socialism can really be built.
You can’t have socialism without democracy. And you can’t have socialism unless you’ve reached a higher economic level than capitalism. On a low economic level, it’s impossible to provide more and better social services—especially when you’re still having to put a hell of a lot of money into armaments. It’s silly to boast about having achieved socialism under these conditions. You can describe yourself as a workers’ state or a revolutionary state, but you simply aren’t socialist.
Trotsky said this revolution has to have a rebirth. The people will rise up one day and say, “I’m fed up with all this. I’m sick and tired. I’m not gonna take it anymore. And out you go, bureaucrats!”
We Trotskyists kept saying this even though everybody laughed at us. And here it is! Okay, we were a little surprised. Even though we predicted it, it’s a shocker to see it happen right before your eyes. Needless to say, we’re glad to see it. “Good morning, revolution!”
Russian women are armed with a long history of revolutionary struggle and a wealth of Marxist theory on women’s emancipation. They’re going to need these weapons for the struggles ahead, because Perestroika is bringing the threat of capitalist restoration.
A recent Marxist feminist manifesto talks about the dangers of Perestroika. With more and more independent entrepreneurs and small businessmen on the scene, a lot of factories are going to close down. Who’s going to lose their jobs? Women. Young people, pensioners, handicapped people, and women will be the first to lose in connection with modernization, staff cuts, and all the other Perestroika measures.
Soviet women are angry, discontented, miserable and defiant. It is they who are screaming that Perestroika isn’t working. They are increasingly involved in strikes. They are integral to new cross-national labor unions springing up in the ethnic republics. All over Russia, women are demanding better services and better living standards. Women are going to ferociously resist the reimposition of capitalism and church control. They’ve had enough of the horrors of Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Muslim dogma, as well as the horrors of Soviet bureaucracy.
I believe that women will become the major force in the new Soviet Union. They’ve been the power behind it all along and tomorrow they will be visible in the forefront as well. I believe that women’s emancipation depends on the forward march of Soviet democracy, and conversely that the new Russian and Eastern Bloc revolutions will grind to a halt without women’s leadership.
I believe, in short and in conclusion, in Permanent Revolution—in an unstoppable, uninterruptible, worldwide revolution to solve all the burning needs and injustices and inequalities and abuses of class exploitation, political tyranny, and race, sex and sexual oppression.
Permanent Revolution is linked closely to women’s liberation and women’s liberation is central, pivotal, to modern politics. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s the oldest, the deepest, the most passionate unresolved problem of the majority of the human race. It is the unfinished struggle against the prehistoric crime of male supremacy. Women will have to free the world. And they will have to free themselves. The two things go hand in hand.
I say, with the French, cherchez la femme. Look for the woman. As women move, so will move the Soviet Union, the far-flung nations, the regions, the continents, the world. History will trace our path (to put it in New Age terms) from the revolution crucified to the revolution reincarnated.