Women and the Vote by Jad Adams

Author:Jad Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198706847
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Soon it was officially considered that the position of women in Soviet Russia was ‘resolved’ and the Zhenotdel was abolished in 1930. In fact, despite having equal voting power with men, women had long disappeared from any positions of power in the party and government, so in the new Communist system women were learning the same lesson as in capitalist countries where the vote was won: it conferred the right to a small share in conferring power on someone chosen by a political party.

Russian feminism began as a demand for education, much as had feminism in Britain and other countries; the level of repression by the Tsarist authorities prevented the growth of liberalism in Russia and also the peaceful transition from philanthropic to political ends. Women who might have become constitutional feminists in other circumstances in Russia became the most violent of political militants. The revolution of 1905 radicalized women along with the rest of the politically aware population, so women played a significant part in the first revolution of 1917 of which universal suffrage was an obvious corollary.

Vera Figner died in 1942, Alexandra Kollontai in 1952, shortly before her 80th birthday, ‘only partially assimilated into the mainstream of Soviet political life’ as historian Cathy Porter has it.30 She had been Soviet Ambassador to Norway from 1924 (the world’s first woman ambassador) and continued a career in diplomatic work, conveniently far from the power and intrigue of Moscow.

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