Aleksandra Kołłontaj

Dzieła

• 1909Społeczne podstawy kwestii kobiecej

  Polemika z burżuazyjnym feminizmem: równość kobiet zależy od wyzwolenia klasy robotniczej i uspołecznienia prac domowych.

• 1923Drogę skrzydlatemu Erosowi!

  List otwarty do młodych robotników wzywający do miłości opartej na równości, towarzyszeniu i wolności zamiast na posiadaniu.

Stanowisko

Kollontai is on the map as a leading theorist of socialist feminism. Following Engels’ “The Origin of the Family” and Marx, she argued in “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” (1909) that the subordination of women is rooted in property and the family economy, and that bourgeois feminism, which seeks equal rights within the existing order, cannot free working women. Liberation requires that housework, cooking and childcare become social tasks and that the family as an economic unit give way to a community of free individuals. In articles and stories of the early 1920s she called for a “new morality” in which love rests on equality and comradeship rather than possession and dependence. As commissar she worked on the protection of mothers and infants. Party critics attacked her writings on love in 1923, and opponents ascribed to her the so-called “glass of water” theory of sex, which she did not hold. The Workers’ Opposition defended trade-union control of production against the party bureaucracy. As a diplomat she survived Stalin’s purges, in which many former comrades, among them Alexander Shliapnikov and her former husband Pavel Dybenko, were killed; she did not speak out publicly against them. The women’s movement of the 1970s rediscovered her writings.

Życie i kontekst

Alexandra Kollontai was born in St Petersburg on 31 March 1872, the daughter of General Mikhail Domontovich. In 1893 she married the engineer Vladimir Kollontai, with whom she had a son. A visit to the Kreenholm textile mills in Narva in 1896 turned her towards socialism; in 1898 she left her family to study economics in Zurich and then in England. She joined Russian Social Democracy, worked among women workers in St Petersburg and had to emigrate in 1908; abroad she worked with German and Scandinavian socialists, and in 1915 she joined the Bolsheviks. Back in Russia in 1917 she became a member of the Central Committee and People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, resigning in March 1918 over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. With Inessa Armand she built up the party’s women’s department (Zhenotdel), which she led from 1920 to 1922; in 1921 she was one of the leaders of the Workers’ Opposition, which the party congress banned. From 1922 she served abroad as a diplomat, in Norway, Mexico and from 1930 Sweden, where she became ambassador in 1943 and took part in the armistice negotiations with Finland in 1944. She returned to Moscow in 1945 and died there on 9 March 1952.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Social Basis of the Woman Question (Sotsial’nye osnovy zhenskogo voprosa, 1909)
• Society and Motherhood (Obshchestvo i materinstvo, 1916)
• The New Morality and the Working Class (Novaia moral’ i rabochii klass, 1918)
• The Workers’ Opposition (Rabochaia oppozitsiia, 1921)
• Make Way for Winged Eros (Dorogu krylatomu Erosu!, 1923)
• Love of Worker Bees (Liubov’ pchel trudovykh, 1923)