Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Peace profile: Alexandra Kollontai

1998; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10402659808426158

1469-9982

Tina Braun,

Political Economy and Marxism

Feminists around the world, whether they adhere to the socialist ideology or not, have tried to understand what socialism can offer to the women's liberation movement. To understand how socialism tries to answer the “woman question,” we must examine prominent socialist women and their theories about socialism's effects on their gender. The belief that a socialist state will automatically emancipate women seems all too simple. With the Marxist principle that all people will find freedom under socialism, one wonders whether the theory can actually be put into practice. Alexandra Kollontai—a Bolshevik leader and the only woman member of Lenin's government—recognized flaws in the neat Marxist argument that women's goals would, and could only, be met by joining hands with the men of their class. If the standard Marxist response to the woman question considered any special attempt to organize working women to be a dangerous, separatist act, deviating from the larger picture, then how were women workers to be brought to the cause to begin with? Kollontai had a straightforward response: if women's needs and concerns were not addressed, then women would not join the class struggle. Just as she recognized the need to pay special attention to women during the struggle for socialism, Alexandra Kollontai was vocal in demanding that the victorious Bolsheviks begin to deliver the long‐heralded advancements for women after socialism was achieved. As a woman, her extraordinary strength and determination on women's issues caused her to be inaccurately portrayed as an ultraradical threat to the newly developing Russian society. Instead, Kollontai was merely pioneering a new line of inquiry. In exploring the relationship between men and women, Kollontai was making connections between the personal and the political. Her theories on social and sexual relationships between men and women in the new communist state, to which she dedicated most of her energy, have been distorted in a way that has also earned her the reputation of being a militant prophetess of free love. But Kollontai never recommended “free love” in the promiscuous sense that we may think of it. Rather, as we see in her writings and other work, she was merely addressing the old morality by which a woman's value had been judged by moral purity. She felt these repressive, outdated standards should no longer apply in the new socialist society. What were Kollontai's suggestions for dealing with women's situation in society, even in the new society in which women were, according to traditional Marxism, supposed to be granted total emancipation? How did she see this position directly connected to the position women held in personal relationships, and why did her attempt to make the personal the political bring upon her so much criticism?