termtwowomenandtheworkingclassinrussia.docVIP

Term Two: Women and the Working Class in Russia Last term Annie focused on issues of race, class and gender in contemporary capitalist society Persistent inequalities in capitalist society are not simply the result of differences in individual abilities but are embedded in the social institutions of capitalist society Many people through the 20th century believed that socialism or communism promised a different kind of society in which institutionalised inequality and oppression would be eliminated. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the communist heartlands apparently gave strong support to Margaret Thatcher’s famous cry ‘There is no alternative’. This term we will look at what happened in Russia, focusing particularly on class and gender inequality in Soviet society and its legacy today. This week I will talk about the ideas which lay behind the proclamation of the liberation of women by the Russian revolutionaries, focusing on Engels, Bebel and Kollontai. Lecture One: Feminism, Women and the Revolution Engels’s Origins of the Family In the earliest times there was a gender division of labour, but if anything women, who were based in the home, were superior to men. Private property in the means of production arose first in the men’s sphere. Men wanted to leave their property to their sons. This meant that they had to impose monogamy and patrilineal descent on women, to be assured of the identity of their own sons. Engels describes this as `the world historic defeat of the female sex’, the victory of men over women and private property over common ownership. But he also believed that it responded to women’s longing for chastity and for marriage with one man as they found free sexual relations `the more degrading and oppressive’ as society developed. This preoccupation with property and inheritance remains the basis of the bourgeois family. In the bourgeois family patriarchy remains firmly established, whatever the legal position, be