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
8 - A.K. 47 - Kollontai Speaks "To the Workers"
Happy International Women's Day! This episode features an actual audio clip of Alexandra Kollontai speaking "to the workers." This undated audio clip was downloaded from the www.marxists.org website, and Alina Yakubova provided the translation from Russian to English. In the first part of the episode, Ghodsee reads the English translation between segments of Kollontai's speech. A bit of commentary is then followed by the entirety of Kollontai's speech without interruptions.
The rough translation of the speech by Alina Yakubova is here:
Comrade [female] workers!
For long centuries, a woman had been oppressed and without rights. For long centuries, she had been a man’s appendix and his shadow. The husband fed the wife, and for that, the wife submitted to his will and humbly bore her lack of rights, and her domestic and family slavery. The October Revolution has liberated the woman. Now, a female peasant has the same rights as the male peasant, a female worker has the same rights as the male worker. A woman can make choices everywhere: she can be a member of a council and a Komissar, even a people’s Komissar. But if, according to the law, a woman is equal in rights, life has yet to free the woman. A female worker, a female peasant are still in the vice grip of household labor, she is still a slave in her own family. The task of a female worker is to make life such that the burden of childcare is taken off the woman’s shoulders, to lighten the domestic work’s grip on the female worker and a female peasant.
The working class is interested in freeing a woman in those areas, a worker has to understand that a woman is the same kind of member of the proletarian family as he is, because the woman works equally with the man. One third of all riches on Earth have been created by women’s hands. In Europe and America, female workers are 70 million, and in the communist society, a woman and a man must be equal in rights. Without women’s equality, there is no communism.
So to work, comrade [female] workers, start freeing yourselves, build daycares, mother’s homes, help with your advice to streamline public cafeterias, help the Communist Party to build a new, bright life. Your place is among those who fight to liberate the workers, to bring equality, freedom, and happiness to your children. Your place, female workers and peasants, is under the red revolutionary flag of the global victorious communism.
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