Women’s Liberation versus Democracy?: The Communist Women’s Movement’s Take on the Emancipation of Women and 'Bourgeois Democracies' in the Early 1920s

• In Event: Legitimizing and Contesting Soviet/Post-Soviet Authority across Time and Space

Abstract

The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) emerged in 1920 in Moscow following the foundation of the Communist International (or the Comintern). The movement’s goal was to bring women into Communist parties, train them as managers and leaders so that they could work together with men to bring about socialist transformation. Women workers’ emancipation was an integral component of this transformation.

The CWM carried out international campaigns. Some of them concerned only women, such as the struggle for women’s participation in politics. The “Guidelines” that Communist Women elaborated at its first conferences pointed out the deficiency of “bourgeois democracy” which, according to CWM’s program, “serve[d] as a basis and a veil for a perfected form of class rule by owners and exploiters.” Communist women contrasted this latter to “real, economic, proletarian democracy” that can bring about “full liberation of the female sex.”

Using the movement’s internal documents and press of the early 1920s this paper will explore the debates within the movement around the questions of universal suffrage, citizenship, democracy and parliamentarism. What were the different viewpoints regarding these questions? How did they evolve? How did these concepts correlate with the idea of women’s emancipation? To answer these questions the paper will, first, tackle the question of “proletarian” and “bourgeois” democracy in CWM’s discourse. It will then focus on how this differentiation affected the understanding of suffrage and citizenship. Lastly, the paper will dwell on the CWM’s ideas of participation in parliamentary election in capitalist states.

Author

• Daria Dyakonova, Sapienza University Rome