Comments on: Women’s Day in Russia 1917: A day to prepare for victory https://johnriddell.com/2017/03/06/womens-day-in-russia-1917-a-day-to-prepare-for-victory/ MARXIST ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Thu, 11 Mar 2021 22:11:18 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.10 By: John Riddell https://johnriddell.com/2017/03/06/womens-day-in-russia-1917-a-day-to-prepare-for-victory/#comment-18273 Thu, 11 Mar 2021 22:11:18 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=3458#comment-18273 In reply to Rochelle G. Ruthchild.

Thanks, Rochelle, for your helpful and accurate comment. Bolshevik/Communist culture at the time in question, 100 years ago, was loaded with many desparaging statements about women’s alleged backwardness. True, women were numerically a minority in socialist organizations, but there were strong cultural, material and sometimes legal barriers to their involvement. Clara Zetkin pointed in the right direction, in a talk to a Comintern congress, when she said that women were more advanced in that their minds were not as weighted down with the wrong ideas of bourgeois and opportunist thinking. I hope you’ll keep in touch. John Riddell

]]> By: Rochelle G. Ruthchild https://johnriddell.com/2017/03/06/womens-day-in-russia-1917-a-day-to-prepare-for-victory/#comment-18272 Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:44:33 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=3458#comment-18272 Good that you have published this, but you don’t address the gender implications of the leaflet, that women workers are relatively more backward than male workers. Yet it was women who often took the lead in February, urging male workers to join them in leaving the factories and going on strike.
Russian feminists are also invisible in your telling, altho they were among those who organized International Women’s Day demonstrations on February 23.
There are a number of books and articles about Russian women workers, activists, and feminists, including Choi Chatterjee’s book about International Women’s Day, Rose Glickman’s about Russian Factory Women, and my own, Equality and Revolution, about the feminist movement. Why aren’t they included?

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