Gender Roles After the Russian Revolution

           Throughout the 1920s, the Bolsheviks had a vision of women’s emancipation from housework and oppression, which would allow for sexual relationships to be based on mutual love and respect. The general consensus among Bolsheviks, except for a few who spoke about the immediate attention it was necessary to give to gender issues, was that this vision of gender equality would come into existence only when the socialist state became wealthy enough to collectively take over the domestic chores that had previously been left to wives and mothers. However, it is important to consider this vision within the context of the conditions current to the time and place. The Bolsheviks secured power after a very tumultuous series of events. World War I, in which Russia suffered more casualties than any other nation, was followed by the revolutions of 1917, which in turn were followed by a civil war that was taxing, both physically and psychologically, on the entire population. Because of these events, which both aroused the population’s consciousness and affected many facets of byt, there was an influx of attitudes among Russians about what should be the values of the new life, regarding gender roles as well as other issues. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks’ vision of gender equality never became a reality because of their stubborn belief that the ideal material and economic conditions, in and of themselves, would emancipate women from oppression, without taking into account the development of many conflicting attitudes toward sex from this tumultuous time period.
            By the 1920s, Russians’ family life and their attitudes toward sex and gender were shaped by several factors. On the one hand, the Bolshevik party leaders sought to curb prostitution, the spread of venereal disease, and promiscuity, all of which they felt detracted from the collective effort. However, many young men were still caught up in the revolutionary fervor which sought to destroy all structures and traditions of the old life. They looked down on monogamy, and desired sexual liberation and free love. Those who fell into this category criticized anything that resembled the old, “bourgeois” family of meshchanstvo, or petty bourgeois values. They thought that the legalization of divorce and abortion signaled a total loosening of sexual mores. In addition to this, soldiers returning from the civil war brought back with them a machismo and lack of sexual restraint. The Bolsheviks in turn criticized these sexual libertines of meshchanstvo for their detrimental rebellion against all values inherited from the pre-revolution era merely on principle, without understanding how their actions fit into the scope of future tasks. Added to all of these new attitudes, was the inescapable fact that everyone had values and habits that were at least partially drawn from the pre-revolutionary way of life, and their disintegration would take many years, perhaps generations, to occur.
           The Bolsheviks had in mind two types of families that existed at the time. One was the destitute worker’s family, in which both parents often worked in factories, rarely seeing each other or their children. The change in economic conditions and the increased effort to industrialize caused a flood of rural peasant families to move into large urban industrial areas, where the children were often hungry and left to roam the streets. The other was the bourgeois patriarchal family, often arranged with material calculations in mind, and bound together by the Orthodox Church. From the socialist viewpoint, capitalism oppressed women because it forced them into the workplace to supplement their husbands’ paychecks without relieving them of the load of domestic chores they faced, such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Only the socialization of domestic chores in collective cafeterias, laundromats, kindergartens, etc., the Bolsheviks believed, could emancipate women from their state of oppression, and allow them to remain productive citizens in the workplace. Unfortunately, it was acknowledged that the economy and industry were far from being able to implement a complete socialization of domestic chores.
           Some Bolsheviks, such as Aleksandra Kollontai, and L.A. and L.M. Vasilevsky, were not content to wait for material conditions to dictate sexual relations, and attempted to communicate the pressing need to address the attitudes of the population toward sex. Kollontai believed that in the new society, women should not be dependent on a man, but should look to the collective for support. She reproached sexual unions involving “unwinged eros”—sex without a spiritual component, advocating instead “winged eros”, in which “in the person experiencing love for another person, there are aroused and there appear simultaneously those qualities of the spirit which are necessary for the builders of the new culture: directness, sympathy, a wish to help others” (91). The Vasilevsky’s believed that youths must be socially educated about sex from a young age, rather than forcing them to learn about sex on the street or from other uneducated sources: “Our sexual life can be made healthy only when our younger generation is raised with new, more worthy views on the role and desirable character of sexual life” (96).
           These attempts to draw attention to the reform of sexual habits and attitudes, however, were combated by a more predominant Bolshevik viewpoint, as reflected in the writings of P. Vinogradskaya: “in the future society, where the successes of production will make it possible to fully develop all sides of the human personality [my italics], each person will have enough freedom in life and in action to allow that forms of mutual relations between the sexes be determined people’s personal inclinations” (118). Most Bolsheviks saw issues of sex and gender as superfluous and not worthy of any thought, at least until the socialist state became wealthy enough to free people from all forms of oppression. Vinogradskaya emphasizes that “the possibility of a wide realization of such personal tastes [on sex] depends first of all on the economy, on how far ahead the construction of socialism has marched, on how great the surplus product of society is” (Visions, 118). From this it is clear that many Bolsheviks did not see sex or gender roles as pressing issues. One of the most important Bolshevik voices, that of Leon Trotsky, while sharing the popular Bolshevik belief that material conditions would ultimately dictate gender equality, also recognized the importance of raising the standard of culture and education for individuals of the working class in altering gender attitudes. Even with Trotsky, however, the bottom line remains that “the physical preparations for the conditions of the new life and the new family, again, cannot fundamentally be separated from the general work of socialist construction” (82). Trotsky saw the two processes of raising the standard of culture among the working class and raising the wealth of the socialist state as intimately connected, but ultimately, like the majority of Bolsheviks, was reluctant to focus on sexual equality as an end in itself, instead believing it would occur once the proper economic conditions were realized.
           The atmosphere surrounding gender roles during the 1920s was a very convoluted one, consisting of a variety of conflicting beliefs from a number of sources, varying in their degree of reliability. Even within the vanguard Bolshevik party, which espoused gender equality, women were often derided and rarely given positions of leadership or prominence. For all of these reasons, it is understandable why the population was unsure of where to draw their values on gender and sex from. While it was thought by most that gender equality would occur, few Bolsheviks believed that it was an objective that needed special and individual attention. Rather, it was seen as a secondary issue that would resolve itself once other issues, namely economic ones, were resolved. It was this reluctance to view gender equality as an end in itself that led to a stagnation of gender advancement and a reinforcement of the double standards of sexual behavior and oppression of women.

Works Cited:
Trotsky, Leon; Kollontai, Aleksandra; Vasilevsky, L.M. and L.A.; Vinogradskaya, P. Bolshevik            Visions. Ed. William G. Rosenberg. Ann Arbor Paperback. Ann Arbor, MI, 2002.