Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 8
Capitalism shakes the branches
By Leslie Feinberg
As city life and capitalist industrialization
were shaking up family and sexual relations for Russian male
workers, women also felt their impact.
Historian Dan Healy wrote, "Same-sex relations between women
in tsarist and early Soviet Russia reflected the general
transformation of women's roles and opportunities. For
increasing numbers of women, the ties of the patriarchal
village were loosening and breaking, and as with migrant men in
the city, links to family ... were not always sufficient to
maintain traditional forms of surveillance, including the
monitoring of sexual behavior." ("Homosexual Desire")
While capitalism shook the branches of this rooted
patriarchal system, it left the trunk intact.
Russian women were still weighed down with the burden of
patriarchal family relations that served the class interests of
the semi-feudal, semi-imperialist state.
Laura Engelstein writes, "Imperial Russian law established a
system of power within the family at least as autocratic as the
one governing the operation of the state: the husband wielded
absolute authority over the wife, and the father entirely
dominated the children. Women could not leave their households
or undertake paid employment without the formal permission of
father or husband, who controlled their access to the necessary
official papers. No law protected women against physical abuse
short of severe bodily injury.
"No formal grounds existed for legal separation; divorce,
for which adultery constituted one of the few legitimate
reasons, could be obtained only after elaborate and humiliating
(or duplicitous) procedures; annulment was a rare and arduous
attainment. No one of any age, male or female, could marry
without the permission of parents or other appropriate
authorities. By ancient custom, women had the legal right to
maintain their own property after marriage, but they suffered
severe disadvantages when it came to inheriting family wealth."
("Fin-de-Siècle Russia")
Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Bolshevik leader and author of the
pre-revolutionary pamphlet "The Woman Worker," described
company housing at the Thornton Broadcloth Mill, which, like
much of Russian industry, was foreign-owned. Workers lived in
"a huge building with an endless number of rooms, the
partitions not up to the ceiling. ... The din was
ear-splitting. The walls were green with damp. There were two
families in each of the rooms, which were not large. ... They
dried their laundry in the room, and it was so stifling the
oil-lamps sputtered. ... Dormitory rooms were terribly crowded.
... The working day was incredibly long (12-14 hours at the
textile mills). We saw some of the women workers lying on the
cots in exhaustion, their faces in their pillows." ("Soviet
Women")
Urban living also left its mark on the lives of male
workers. "The rapid expansion of Russia's industrial base was
accomplished by large numbers of male workers living in cities
where there was neither space nor money for the replication of
peasant marriage and family patterns," Healey wrote. "In
tsarist Moscow, working men in the sexually active younger age
groups outnumbered women, and they were crowded together in
accommodations precluding any possibility of starting families
or of bringing a wife and children from the village to join
them." ("Homosexual Desire")
As peasants were pulled towards the vortex of urbanization
in search of jobs, "A significant proportion of these newcomers
stayed only temporarily or seasonally; many left wives and
families behind in the village," Healey notes. "Others settled
and became the basis of an urban proletariat in St. Peters
burg, Moscow, and a handful of other centers. Urban workers'
hous ing was crow ded. A huge proportion lived in barracks,
flophouses, or shared rooms and even shared beds; a significant
percentage lived in employers' households and workshops.
"Men found opportunities for sexual expression with each
other in Russia's industrializing centers. As they exploited
these new possibilities, they transformed Russian masculinity's
traditional patterns of mutual male eros." ("Homosexual
Desire")
That same-sex Eros--including, in some instances, lesbian
love--was expres sed eloquently in the literature and arts
produced in the late 19th century by the radicalized
intelligentsia that was funded and flourished in the battle of
the rising bourgeoisie and their imperialist backers against
feudalism.
This articulation of the love that was finally speaking out
in its own name flowered after the easing of censorship of
books and periodicals following the 1905 Revolution against
Tsar Nicholas II.
Two currents in women's struggle
The emancipation of women and the overall struggle for
sexual liberation are closely tied, in particular because
sexual subjugation in general is historically a key weapon of
patriarchal domination.
That connection was visible in the late 19th century as
revolutionary activists established collective living spaces.
These political revolutionaries, writes Mandel, "established
communes in the largest cities that were, particularly for
women, places of refuge for runaways from the patriarchalism of
smaller towns or family estates."
Mandel describes this collective living and the gender
expression that was its hallmark in his own words, perhaps
limited by his own concepts: "The members of the communes
shared money, food, and possessions. The women particularly
expressed their contempt for existing society by violating its
rules of dress. They wore their hair straight, their clothing
severe and comfortable, glasses whenever they needed them, and
particularly violated convention by smoking. A unisex effect
was striven for, not in the wearing of trousers, which was
unthinkable, but in the abandonment of everything that made for
femininity and for regarding women as sex objects." ("Soviet
Women")
Between 1905 and 1917, two clear currents emerged in Russia
that vied for leadership in the women's movement. One was
socialist, seeking nothing less than the complete liberation of
all workers and peasants from class domination. The other was a
feminist grouping that was more middle- and upper-class in its
composition and political orientation. It focused its struggle
on the right to vote--an important bourgeois democratic
demand.
In December 1908, for example, the feminists organized a
Russia-wide congress in which more than 1,000 delegates took
part. Only 45 working women were present and not one single
woman from the peasantry--the class that represented Russia's
vast majority of laborers.
The revolutionary women's current looked very different. In
1913, the Bolsheviks organized an important first celebration
in Russia of Inter national Women's Day. Their organizing was
in sharp distinction to a January congress on women's education
convened by liberal intellectuals to which only a few women
workers had been invited.
The Bolsheviks knew that in the repressive political climate
of that year, the police would not issue a permit for a
demonstration. So they secured the Grain Exchange for a
"learned symposium." On the day of the event, March 8, the
federal police--who were present at all meetings and could end
any gathering at a whim--filled the first two rows in the
hall.
The speakers at the Bolshevik-organized event were all
women--working women. One of the leading voices at the meeting
was a 25-year-old weaver who had been a member of her union
executive board for six years. The weaver described the class
composition and mood of the event: "No matter how poor the
working women were, on 'their day,' the first holiday of women
in Russia, they put on the very best they had, and the packed
hall looked like a meadow in May from the brightness of the
colors. ... [The police] didn't succeed in spoiling our
holiday, although every speaker had to get her most private
thoughts across to the audience as though breaking through the
alert silence of the first rows." ("Soviet Women")
The outbreak of the inter-imperialist World War I in 1914
illuminated the bourgeois political foundation of those who
identified with the feminist current. According to Richard
Stites, a researcher in Denmark, "The feminists were rhapsodic
about the great possibilities of serving the [Russian]
fatherland and, in return, gathering political dividends for
themselves. They showed no subtlety in connecting their
'sacrifices' to eventual payment in the coin of women's
suffrage." ("Soviet Women")
Stites notes it was not well-to-do movement women who did
most of the sacrificing during WWI. It was the women and men of
the laboring classes who sacrificed.
And women workers paid with their sweat in toil, too. The
percentage of women workers in factories had reached 30 percent
of the total when the war broke out.
By 1917, as the imperialist war brought hunger and want,
death and disability, thousands of women in the St. Petersburg
needle trade walked out on strike, marching through the streets
demanding "peace, bread and land." Male workers joined them,
swelling the ranks of protest to 90,000.
That strike broke out on March 8--International Women's
Day--and it was the first shot of the anti-capitalist Russian
Revolution.
Capitalism's historical task
Capitalism in Russia, like feudalism, relied on the
patriarchal family structures as economic units. The rule of
capital accumulation created its own super-structure of law,
religion, politics and education to justify the inequality of
its economic base. And it enforced this economic and social
injustice with brutal state repression.
World War I--an outgrowth of capitalism's drive to expand
its relentless search for profits beyond its own border--was
also having a profound impact on patriarchal family relations.
The war uprooted millions of peasants and workers in Russia and
elsewhere, disrupting planting and harvesting, production and
family reproduction.
This clash of imperialist titans over who would steal the
land, labor and resources of colonized peoples only profited
the imperial victors. The war was slaughtering tens of millions
of laborers and oppressed peoples, and exacerbating the
super-exploitation and suffering of peoples caught in the grip
of colonialism.
Capitalism, in relation to feudalism, was a progressive
force in that it was a superior economic system--a qualitative
leap in human productivity. Capitalism eradicated much of the
medievalism of feudal autocracy with its need for science and
technological advance. Capitalism socialized the artisan's
individual tools, forging them into massive means of
production. It galvanized a working class.
But the social relationship of capital--of exploiter and
exploited--is a brutal one for workers and oppressed
peoples.
And capitalism in Russia was too weak and too subordinated
to the existing imperialist countries to even fulfill its
bourgeois democratic promises to the masses. The brief liberal
capitalist regime ushered in by the February 1917 Revolution
solved none of their problems. It couldn't get out of the war
that was killing the workers and peasants because the ruling
class had imperial ambitions. It couldn't distribute the land
to the peasants. And it couldn't meet the most elementary
demands of the workers. Thus, the Bolshevik slogan of "Bread,
land and peace" won the masses over to the need for a second
revolution.
And this revolution in October 1917 created a workers' state
that began the work of uprooting the entire trunk of
ruling-class economic structures. It was no accident that one
of the first acts of the Bolshevik government was to abolish
the tsarist anti-gay and anti-woman laws.
Next: Bolshevik Revolution advances women's and gay
rights.
Sources:
Laura Engelstein: "The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search
for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia." Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992.
Healey, Dan. "Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The
Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent." Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Healey, Dan. "The Disappearance of the Russian Queen, or How
the Soviet Closet Was Born." Russian Masculinities in History
and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Mandel, William M. "Soviet Women." Garden City: Anchor
Books, 1975.
Worobec, Christine D. "Masculinity in Late-Imperial Russian
Peasant Society." Russian Masculinities in History and Culture.
New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Reprinted from the July 22, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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