Alexandra Kollontai: Speech

Alexandra Kollontai:
Third Congress of the Communist International
Report on Communist Women’s Movement
July 8, 1921

How can we reach the broad masses of women? The Communist Party, like the Social Democratic Party before it, has always told us that the doors of the Communist Party stand open for women. So women should come to us, to our party. Unfortunately, we must recognize that we have not yet won women for our goals. That raises the question whether we must not use other means to win over these broad layers of women—methods that take into account women’s distinctive role in society. This is true not only in bourgeois society but to a certain degree in the Soviet republic, where women still have a special social situation, including within the family, a situation different from that of men. In order to take this into account, we too have to build a new apparatus. As a result, we also saw how essential it is that every party has such an apparatus, such an organization. This is not a new decision, comrades. The decision was made last year at our previous International Conference of Communist Women.

But as Comrade Zetkin said, so far only in a few countries have the parties carried out this decision, because it was taken only at our conference and not at the International congress. In our view, if the decision is now successfully adopted here, it will perhaps spur comrades to establish this structure in their own countries, where this is possible. I believe we are now in a position to create this structure, which must be simply a special party organization. We should minimize as much as possible giving the impression that it represents only women’s special interests and that only women will be active there. Its work should not have that character. These are special structures with defined powers to carry out defined tasks. These structures must work not only among women. I would like to point out that here in Russia, for example, it is quite evident that the women we have already reached, the broad masses of working women and peasants, are already sympathetic to us. Unfortunately, however, our own comrades in the party still resist drawing women into active work and into posts where they are chosen by the broad masses and in which they are to carry out important work.

So in my opinion, comrades, you must adopt the goal of creating this structure. It is not intended only for work among women; it must also serve for work among male comrades. We name this structure not a women’s committee but a committee for work among our comrades, so that we can finally overcome the previously existing situation. Women are party members. In Soviet Russia they undertake the entire and enormous burden of construction. But when a woman is placed in a responsible post, people always think, ‘Well, really a man would be more suitable.’ In capitalist countries the task is still posed of drawing women into the organization itself….

In Soviet Russia, where everyone has the obligation to work, we already face a large, new problem—not just in drawing women into the organization, but in employing the energies of proletarian and peasant women to create a new system of production and a new social order. All workers are now utilized and registered, and as a result the position of women in society changes. The Soviet republic and the October Revolution have thus launched a revolution perhaps much greater than the winning of equal rights for women. On the other hand, the party faces the question of educating women to be active as a creative force.

In Russia we have our special structure for work among women. Please bear in mind that it is not a separate organization, it is a structure in which our male and female comrades work together—although unfortunately the men are too few in number.

It was our committees that introduced initiatives in a large number of questions, such as the abolition of the old law banning abortion, the struggle against prostitution, the protection of mothers, the universal people’s militia, and other questions. Did any of this weaken our work in Soviet construction? Not at all, we have enriched it, and that is the initiative of which Comrade Zetkin spoke. That is why we believe that these structures, intended to involve the broad masses, require special methods, tactics, and organizational forms. Women receive thereby a certain flexibility for action while remaining integrated into the struggle as a whole. At the same time, in the struggle in bourgeois countries, these structures will enable us to be prepared, at the most difficult moments, to make backward women into Communists and convince them that the deliverance of women can be achieved only through the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the soviet countries, where our structures assist the party in the colossal, difficult, and necessary task of construction of a new social system and socialist order, we must encourage male and female workers to continue the great struggle for communism on a world scale. (Loud applause)