Thank you for your important comment. The next volume of the Comintern Publication Project will present extensive archival documentation of the first and second conferences of Communist women, together with related material.

The Spanish version of your article on the Communist women’s movement can be accessed here
http://www.ips.org.ar/?p=2817#_ftn16
I think you didn’t mention Inessa Armand and her role in organizing the First International Conference of Communist Women in July 1920.
R. C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 258-59
“Inessa Armand was the dominant figure at the conference. She sat on its presidium, chaired its formal sessions in the Kremlin, and introduced the major resolutions.”

Best wishes

Daniel

Please feel free to translate and publish “The Communist Women’s Movement” with an acknowledgement of this website. Thanks for pointing me toward the stimulating IPS website. John Riddell

I’ve found your article really interesting. I’d like to include a Spanish translation of your article on our blog http://www.ips.org.ar. We are a Marxist institute based in Buenos Aires -called Instituto del Pensamiento Socialista, we post different Marxist author’s articles, and we’ve published several works (we have recently published the Spanish editions of The Case Leon Trotsky and Women, State and Revolution by Wendy Goldman).
Please, let me know if we should include any other information -besides the blog, in the translation.

Regards,
Celeste Murillo

The best practices of the Second International in terms of women’s rights that I know about were carried out in the United States and Germany. For example, I think that the reason we won women’s suffrage in a number of critical states in the pre-WWI United States had to do with the work of the SP. Kate Richards O’Hare, a socialist agitator considered second only to Eugene Debs, was also a popular speaker for women’s suffrage. Socialist women were also active in the birth control/sex education movement of that period and in some cases were involved in helping provide abortions. English socialists were even more able to provide information about birth control to the working class–in the U.S., because of repressive legislation, it was difficult for even the medical profession to learn about birth control! Antoinette Konikow, who was on the SP’s women’s commission, was a founding CPer. (But when she went to the USSR in 1926, she was very disturbed by the fact that they were not interested in birth control–only abortion–as a woman’s right.)

Many of these socialist activists joined the Third International and brought their ideas and organizational methods with them. However I was surprised by the high figures for women’s membership in Czechoslavkia & Norway! I believe the US & German SPs in pre-WWI never had more than 10% women, even with all the campaigns they carried out.

Although socialists, like feminists, didn’t campaign around domestic violence or sexual harassment back then, both did support the right of divorce, which was how they viewed the problem of domestic violence. No one talked about either concept then because those concepts developed out of the 2nd wave of feminism in the 1960s.