A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Ukrainian-Finnish Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world).In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.
A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
3 - A.K. 47 - First International Socialist Women's Conference 1907
In this second episode, Kristen Ghodsee takes a moment to introduce herself and to give some background on Alexandra Kollontai. Ghodsee then reads the first section of Kollontai's report from the First International Socialist Women's Conference held in Stuttgart, Germany in 1907. This was an historic meeting of socialist women from across Europe. It was attended by 58 delegates from 14 countries, and Kollontai represented Russia. The congress of socialist women convened to discuss the issue of universal suffrage for the working class, including women, and the need for a special international movement to agitate among women. Kollontai argued that as long as the working class was divided by sex, the bourgeois owners of the means of production would rest easy because any strike by male workers could easily be broken by calling up the "army" of "submissive" female workers to replace them. But once women workers joined with their male comrades, the bourgeois would have no choice but to listen to proletarian demands.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com
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