Crashing the PartyThe radical legacy of a Soviet-era feminist

SOVIETECA

In recent years, American and Western European policymakers and business leaders have been forced to confront stark gender imbalances within prestigious and well-paid fields, including medicine, science, and engineering. Although some wish to lay the blame on intrinsic neurobiological differences between the sexes, a glance toward the East deflates this argument. In 2015, an OECD report on health found that six of the top 10 countries with the highest percentage of female doctors are in Eastern Europe. An astounding three-fourths of all doctors in Estonia are women, compared to only one-third of the doctors in the United States. A 2015 UNESCO report determined that Eastern European countries have far more women working in the fields of research and development than in Western Europe. Of the top 10 European nations with the highest percentage of women working in the “high-tech sector,” eight of them are in the East.

The reason behind this is simple: The legacy of decades of state socialist rule means that women face far fewer barriers to professional success in Eastern Europe than they do almost anywhere else. At the most fundamental level, the region’s post-1989 constitutions continue to assert that women have equal rights as men. Many nations also offer explicit constitutional commitments to mothers. For example, Bulgaria’s constitution guarantees “prenatal and post-natal leave, free obstetric care, alleviated working conditions, and other social assistance.”

Of course, enlightened constitutions do not eradicate everyday sexism, and Eastern European societies are still infused with male chauvinism. But the culture of state socialism did profoundly shift attitudes and make it more socially acceptable for mothers to work full time. Almost three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gender pay gap is smaller in Hungary than it is in neighboring Austria. More significantly, 73 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 6 attend formal kindergartens in Hungary, compared to only 26 percent attendance in Austria among children the same age. This state of affairs can be traced back to the work of Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian aristocrat with a zeal for social justice and women’s rights.

History is littered with tales of the oversized ambitions of men. But to Kollontai, the early years of the Russian Revolution offered an opportunity for men and women alike to pursue “magnificent illusions, plans, ardent initiatives to improve life, [and] to organize the world anew.” The revolution dreamed of sweeping away autocracy and feudalism to liberate the Russian workers and peasants from centuries of exploitation. Kollontai seized upon the ideal of a more egalitarian world to promote the interests of the most downtrodden: women. Observing Kollontai in Petrograd in the years after the revolution, the American journalist Louise Bryant noted, “She works untiringly and, through persistence born of flaming intensity, she accomplishes a tremendous amount.”

Born in St. Petersburg in 1872, Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was raised in relative luxury. Her father was a general in the tsar’s army, and her mother, the daughter of a wealthy Finnish businessman, had fled an arranged marriage to be with Alexandra’s father, though she later promised Alexandra’s sister to a well-to-do man 40 years the girl’s senior. The young Alexandra abhorred the idea of being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Over her parents’ wishes, when she was 21 she married a poor cousin, Vladimir Kollontai, and bore him a son.

Russia at that time was in the midst of great social flux. The Emancipation Reform of 1861 had freed the serfs from their feudal masters and coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism. Liberated peasants flocked to urban areas, and cities like St. Petersburg teemed with former serfs with nothing but their labor to sell. The social upheavals of the late 19th century and the growing influence of Marxism across Europe inspired many opponents of the tsar, whose secret police dispatched countless would-be reformers and revolutionaries to the frozen lands of Siberia.

Against this backdrop, Kollontai began agitating with female textile workers...