Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917

Chapter 5

5 The First All-Russian Women’s Congress THE WOMEN’S PARLIAMENT (ZHENSKII PARLAMENT) I sit in my hut, await more births, and think of the Women’s Congress. —Letter from a midwife to Anna Shabanova,  T  small electric lamps illuminated the spacious Alexander Hall (Aleksandrovskii zal) in the St. Petersburg City Hall on the night of December , . A substantial crowd had gathered by eight o’clock, filling the hall to over- flowing. The City Hall had been the scene of many other meetings and conferences , but this was the first time that the participants, numbering more than a thousand, were almost entirely female. They had gathered to attend the First AllRussian Women’s Congress (Pervyi Vserossiiskii zhenskii s”ezd), held from December  through .₁ The Kadet Ariadna Tyrkova, a Women’s Congress organizer, considered it an unprecedented show of female solidarity; many called it the “first Russian women’s Parliament.”² Fur-clad women mixed with plainly dressed women physicians; all wore the official Women’s Congress badges, which proclaimed “equal responsibilities, equal rights” (ravnyia obiazannosti, ravnyia prava). Off to the side, a small modestly dressed group of women workers eyed the scene. Alexandra Kollontai, then a Menshevik and more elegantly dressed than most of her arch102 rival feminists, urged her worker comrade Klavdiia Nikolaeva forward in the glittering surroundings: “Be bolder, Klava, be bolder.”³ “‘The woman question’—say the feminists—is a question of ‘rights and justice .’ ‘The woman question’—answer the women workers—is a question of a crust of bread.” Thus began Kollontai’s speech at the Women’s Congress.⁴ Pursued by the police, Kollontai could not personally deliver her talk; she had to abandon her comrades a day before the congress ended. The most prominent Russian socialist feminist was forced to flee on December , remaining in western European exile for almost nine years.₅ Nevertheless, her interpretation of the  congress, emphasizing its “bourgeois” delegates and its “bourgeois” politics, remained the dominant narrative throughout the Soviet period and still has strong resonance. Even today, when all things Soviet are challenged, the Soviet-era equation of “bourgeois” and “feminist” persists despite the best efforts of a new generation of women’s history scholars.₆ Continuing her critique in The Social Origins of the Woman Question, published by Maxim Gorkii in , Kollontai, in her most detailed attack against the feminists and specifically the  congress, wrote: “To resolve to demand equal rights with men, a woman must above all be economically independent.”⁷ Kollontai had set up a straw woman, for most feminists sided with her. At the  congress the overwhelming majority of delegates agreed about the importance of economic issues to women and about the need for systemic change. The fiercest debates occurred not in the second section, on the economic situation of women, but in the third section, devoted to the political and civil status of women. The most contentious issue was not bread but ballots. Congresses, popular in the United States and Europe, came to Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within a context in which free expression was heavily regulated by the state, they provided relatively open forums, a venue “for public debate on a wide range of national policy issues, many of which, such as corporal punishment, universal public education, and government economic policy, were highly controversial.”⁸ Although part of this phenomenon, the Women’s Congress has been largely invisible in the historical literature. Yet this forum for discussion about the status of Russian women won great attention at the time. Its feminist initiators wanted to show that women could successfully organize a large political gathering, deliberate, and make proposals. Despite the many obstacles put in their path by the authorities, feminist activists succeeded in organizing the largest women’s legal gathering in prerevolutionary history. Three years after women insisted on their place in the public debates about rights bursting forth during the  revolution, the Women’s Congress opened 103 THE FIRST ALL-RUSSIAN WOMEN’S CONGRESS at a time of increasingly reactionary government policies. Earlier in , government officials, fearful that education radicalized women, had barred the admission of women to Russian universities.⁹ Despite the repression, the congress provided a forum for airing a wide range of data, factional disputes, and consensus opinions in a relatively open atmosphere. The Women’s Congress revealed lines of separation . For radical feminists, women’s oppression was primary and patriarchy the root of all...