Two Material Feminist Texts: Gilman and Kollontai on Public Kitchens and Sex

• In Event: Non-liberal Dissent in Illiberal Times: Envisioning Practices Outside the Modern Nation-state Framework

Abstract

In the early nineteen-eighties Dolores Hayden wrote in The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT 1981) that material feminists are “the first feminists in the US to identify the economic exploitation of women’s domestic labor by men as the most basic cause of women’s inequality. […] They [thus] dared to define a ‘grand domestic revolution’ in women’s material conditions” (Hayden, 1). Hayden understands material feminism as a lost tradition for feminism in the US and narrates how, in the Red Scare of 1919-1920, US corporate forces allied with the state in exaggerating the influence of a “Madame Kollontai” and Soviet Russian intervention in the US, thus marginalizing and silencing US material feminist thought and practices, including the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Hayden, 282-283). This then is the prehistory to the “deep-freeze” that undergirds Betty Friedan’s late seventies naming a post-war women’s household malaise “the feminine mystique”; against which Adrienne Rich among others formulated a politics of location toward decentering Cold War selves and country. Gilman and Alexandra Kollontai are contemporaries whose writings, fictional and non-fictional, are more often listed than read together. They were feminist public intellectuals in the late 19th century and the first two decades of the twentieth century, one a socialist feminist in the US and the other a communist feminist in revolutionary Russia. Both were activist-writers who wrote speeches, articles, pamphlets, and fiction to propagate their thought in movement. Finally, both imagined and advocated public kitchens and alternative sex arrangements toward the liberation of women from material and immaterial labor. This paper proposes to reread Gilman’s and Kollontai’s fiction and non-fiction at this historical juncture to better understand the early cross-national resonance amidst the deepening Red Scare/Cold War divisions that have skewed their reception in English feminisms into the present.

Author

• Naifei Ding, National Central University, Taiwan