Equality & Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917 (review)

In Equality & Revolution Rochelle Ruthchild forcefully and persuasively argues that we need to pay more attention to Russian women’s success at gaining the vote in 1917. Their achievement has been minimized not only by historians who have overlooked questions of gender, but also by those still in the thrall of Soviet disdain for so-called “bourgeois feminism” and those whose vision has been distorted by the short-lived existence of Russian democracy. This oversight, points out Ruthchild, obscures that fact that women in the tsarist empire beat their Western sisters to the electoral punch by several years and got the job done in a much shorter time span.

Ruthchild introduces some of the leading figures in Russia’s women’s movement, drawing lines of continuity between their activities in philanthropic organizations and publishing, and their foremothers’ efforts to open doors to women’s education in the mid-nineteenth century. Ruthchild challenges the conventional wisdom about Russian female activism that had radical women abandoning feminism for broader liberation concerns; many women on the left remained committed to women’s rights, just as connections of friendship and family often bound together women of different political stripes. Generally speaking, women in the opposition “helped develop a framework for the specifically woman-centered political activism” (13) that surfaced during the Revolution of 1905. Ruthchild demonstrates how swiftly a women’s political movement coalesced alongside the overall challenge to tsarist authority during that revolutionary year. In Finland defiance of Russia’s imperial rule opened the door to voting rights for women over the age of twenty-four. Disputing prevailing narratives of strict polarization between women in Russia’s feminist and radical movements, Ruthchild shows how friendships and organizational experiences linked ideological opponents. Even though some women in the feminist movement stood ready to sell out their peasant and working-class sisters by limiting suffrage to propertied females, many such ‘bourgeois’ feminists supported and strove to organize and assist women workers and peasants.

Ruthchild traces feminist strategies to gain support for female suffrage from the male representatives in Russia’s first three parliaments (dumas). She analyzes the efforts of female activists as they struggled to engage in activities similar to those of their European suffragist counterparts: circulating petitions, organizing meetings, lobbying men in powerful positions, and publishing journals—albeit within the constraints of tsarist censorship and post-1905 repression. Though their chance for an expanded electorate faded by the Third Duma’s 1907 convocation, women’s efforts had not been in vain: “by 1908 on the liberal-left spectrum no significant opposition to women’s rights remained” (101). Support for women’s suffrage continued to expand. In her discussion of the 1908 First All-Russian Women’s Congress, Ruthchild reveals that the question of suffrage had more relevance than other historians have realized; the vote was in fact a central demand not only for women from privileged strata but for female workers. In turn, most of the congress resolutions “reflected progressive democratic and oppositional views similar to those in the programs of the main left and liberal parties” (136). By 1914 one had to look all the way to the extreme right wing to find opponents to female suffrage.

The repression of Russia’s feminist movement by the Bolsheviks in late 1917 has dimmed the light that should shine on its tremendous achievement: the right to vote. Ruthchild pays long overdue tribute to the women who forced the hands of the Provisional Government, just as she illuminates women’s indispensable role in the downfall of Nicholas II. Although most accounts disparage women’s gatherings on March 8, 1917 as spontaneous, characterizing men’s subsequent actions as the real and conscious precipitant to revolution, Ruthchild hails women’s activities on that International Women’s Day as the true “catalyst” (219). Women did not only demonstrate for bread on March 8; they persuaded male co-workers to leave factories and their “presence swayed soldiers...