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
55 - A.K. 47 - Red Love: Introduction
Kristen R. Ghodsee introduces Alexandra Kollontai's 1923 novella, Red Love (full text available at marxists.org) and reads the Foreword to the 1927 English language edition. Also mentioned in the episode is Sally Rooney's novel, Normal People.
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"This novel is neither a study in “morals,” nor a picture of the standard of life in Soviet Russia. It is a purely psychological study of sex-relations in the post-war period.
"I have chosen the environment of my own country and made my own people protagonists, for I know them better and could give a more vivid picture of their inner life and characters. Many of the problems presented are not exclusively Soviet-Russian; they are world-wide facts, which can be noted in all countries. These silent psychological dramas, born of the change in the sexual relations; this evolution, especially, in the feelings of women, are well known to the younger generation of Europe.
"Do we ever judge a man for his conduct in love-affairs? Generally, if he does not overstep certain, very flexible limits, we say that his sexual life is his own “private affair.” The character of a man is evaluated not by his conduct in family morals, but by his efficiency in work, by his intellect, his will, his usefulness to the State and Society. As long as the majority of women had no direct duties to the State or to Society, as long as their whole activity was concentrated within the family limits, civilized nations demanded no other qualities in woman than that she display “good morals” in sexual and family life.
"Now, when more than half of the grown-up women-citizens in most countries toil and struggle, just as the men do, Society puts new demands on the women. Their ability to respond to the social duties of a citizen begins to have more value than their “goodness” and “stainlessness” in family-morals. Family life is not the unique field of activity for women nowadays; often enough her family duties come into bitter conflict with her out-of-home work and her public duties. It is only natural, therefore, that the method of evaluating a woman today is different from that of our grandfathers and grandmothers.
"Though a woman may, at the present time, attain “perfection” in the current bourgeois standard of family morals, and be “esteemed” by her own people, she may neither receive the real appreciation of society nor the “respect” of the State. She will merely be “overlooked.” On the contrary: a woman may not be “spotless” from the point of view of current bourgeois sex morals, but if she is an outstanding figure in politics, art, science, etc., one will not even “whisper” about her behind her back. Were one to put into the balance two women: one with “good morals,” but who never did any useful work for the country or humanity, and the other, whose “family morals” are not free from criticism, but who is an efficient public worker – there would be no doubt about the choice.
"Our criteria in sex morals are always changing. There is never a standstill. There are merely periods in human history when the evolution of morals goes on more rapidly; other periods (with a general stagnation
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