Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women by Fauré Christine; Faure Christine; Faura(c) Christine

Author:Fauré, Christine; Faure, Christine; Faura(c), Christine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 183243
Publisher: Routledge

Regarding alimony or dependence upon a man as demeaning for women, Kollontai developed a plan to ensure them other means of support. She proposed to create a general fund, levying a tax of two rubles that would be used to support single mothers and to set up nurseries and children's homes. The plan, which would have weighed most heavily on the conservative peasantry, attracted few adherents. A more straightforward solution was to put the responsibility for their sexual behavior squarely on individual men. As one woman put it succinctly: “If you like tobogganing, you have to drag your sled uphill”

These exchanges occurred a year or two after Lenin's death in January 1924; a few years later, Joseph Stalin triumphed over his rivals for political power. The women's views resemble the ideas of party conservatives, who viewed the sexual question as marginal and emphasized disciplined and responsible family sex. In the words of the physician Aron Zalkind, a leading proponent of the view that sexual energy was limited and should be harnessed to serve society, “I am very much afraid that with the cult of ‘winged Eros’ we will build aeroplanes very badly.” It is likely that lower-class women's views strengthened the tendency to marginalize Kollontai and to limit wide-ranging theoretical explorations of sexuality and sexual morality. At the same time, the fact that lower-class women articulated conservative views in public forums designed to elicit their opinion on the most pressing questions of everyday life in itself represented a triumph of the revolution; such forums would cease after Stalin's victory. Disagreements over such key issues as sex and marriage between the leading Bolshevik advocate for women and the lower-class women she had done so much to empower reminds us of the experience of earlier generations of radical women, who similarly articulated a vision of liberation that had far more in common with their own experience and needs than with the experience and needs of their lower-class sisters. These disparate visions are an important aspect of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement; they remain one of the many tragedies of the Bolshevik Revolution.

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