The Social Basis of the Woman Question

Introduction

Kollontai wrote “The Social Basis of the Woman Question” in 1908 in connection with the First All-Russian Women’s Congress in St Petersburg, where she and a group of women workers argued against the liberal feminists; the book appeared in 1909. Drawing on Marx, Engels and August Bebel, it traces the position of women to economic conditions and argues that the demands of bourgeois feminism – the vote, access to the professions, property rights – leave the situation of working women largely unchanged. Real equality requires the end of the household as an economic unit, social provision for maternity and childcare and the liberation of the working class as a whole. The book established Kollontai as the leading Marxist theorist of the woman question in Russia and is a key text in histories of the Russian women’s movement (Stites 1978).

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