Daughters of Rabotnitsa: Lessons From The Russian Revolutionary Women’s Movement

FEBRUARY, 1917. Scores of women textile workers take strike action on their own initiative. The strike mushrooms into mass meetings and demonstrations throughout Petrograd. Slogans rapidly evolve from the demand for bread to the end of the war and the overthrow of the autocracy. Students and working men join in the demonstrations, doubling their size by the following day. Many soldiers refuse to repress the movement, with some Cossacks even fighting the police in defense of the demonstrators. Workers’ councils, modeled on the events of 1905, are formed by the 27th. So commenced the Russian Revolution!

Some claim the action of women workers around economic demands was wholly spontaneous and a revolutionary situation developed without political leadership. The reality, before and after the strikes which kicked off the February Revolution, was one of patient long-term organizing.¹ And the work of winning women to the struggle for socialism and developing a program capable of meeting their specific needs was one which continued to October and beyond, particularly during the early days of the Soviet Union.

While the experience of the Russian Revolution may seem distant today, the lessons of the Bolshevik women’s movement must be heeded in the current moment. Right now we are undergoing a wholesale reactionary offensive against the rights of women and of queer and trans people—our immediate task is to wage defensive struggles against it. In the Bolsheviks’ strategic work towards developing women’s radical consciousness, we see the potential for a revolutionary socialist feminist movement uniting defensive struggles into a wider transformative social force. Such a movement can and must, like our forbears, challenge the foundations of capitalist rule. This is the force DSA must fight to unleash.

Rabotnitsa and the Revolutionary Socialist Tradition

On International Working Women’s Day in 1914, the Bolshevik party established a new publication centering the struggle for women’s liberation. Called Rabotnitsa, or “The Working Woman,” it followed a special edition of Pravda that had foregrounded women’s struggles the previous year. Its editorial board included prominent Bolshevik women such as Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, and Nadezhda Krupskaya. Remarkably, the publication was granted an official permit from the Tsarist regime, only for most of the Editorial Board to be arrested at its second meeting days before the release of the first issue. Rabotnitsa carried articles such as “Wave of Disease Among Workers,” which dealt with the mass poisonings of working women at the Treugol ‘nik Rubber Factory in St. Petersburg and other rubber factories across Russia. Reports like this were utilized by Rabotnitsa to link working women’s immediate needs and struggles to the necessity of a different social order. The journal became wildly popular in a very short period of time, garnering a large volume of correspondence and selling the whole print run of each issue.

Rabotnitsa was suppressed alongside other socialist and workers’ publications by the Tsarist state at the outbreak of the First World War and was relaunched after the February Revolution. Beyond just publishing, Rabotnitsa functioned as a collective organizer, with demonstrations and meetings of working women organized under its auspices. Rabotnitsa’s public forums discussed questions like the struggle against imperialist war, the high cost of living, and other key issues.

During the unrest of the July Days, when most Bolshevik publications again faced prohibition and censorship, Rabotnitsa was able to express the politics of revolutionary Marxism. An excerpt from one article from just days before the October Revolution, “What Road to Take?” read:

Hunger, the high cost of living, the attack of the enemy army — all these disasters have been hanging over our heads like a leaden cloud. Every hour of  such a state of things only intensifies our suffering. The mother’s heart bleeds at seeing the deprivations which proletarian children suffer today. Wives sob over the participation of their husband-sailors in the fighting on the cold ocean waves. There is one salvation — in place of that government which by its criminal policies has led the capital of revolutionary Russia into jeopardy it is necessary to establish the power of those who have an interest in the quickest end to the war, who need land, who demand control over production; in other words, the working men, peasant men, working women and peasant women must themselves stand in defense of their rights; must become the masters of republican Russia. Not the Kadet or Defensist-Socialist ministers should govern and play the masters in Russia, but the workers, peasants, and sailors themselves with the help of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies.²

Rabotnitsa’s article expressed the urgent political tasks of the day: an end to the imperialist world war, expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, total independence of the workers and peasants from the bourgeois liberals, and the need for soviet power. The suffering endured by working-class women wasn’t flavor text but instead a social phenomena which could be ended, and doing so depended on proletarian men and women organizing together in the fight for socialist revolution.

At the time of the October insurrection, the journal had organized the First All-City Conference of Petrograd Working Women. Its proceedings were paused at the outbreak of armed struggle, whereupon the 500 delegates participated directly in the seizure of power and promptly resumed the conference upon completion of the task at hand.

After October

The historical Marxist understanding of women’s oppression, shared by the Bolsheviks, is that the nucleus of women’s oppression is the patriarchal family. The patriarchal family is the primary social unit where the exploitation of what we now call social-reproductive labor takes place: dishwashing, laundry, child-rearing, and much more. After the revolution, the early Soviet government declared the equality of women under the law and was tasked with how to attack the power of this age-old institution. 

On this basis, the first All-Russian Conference of Working Women and Peasant Women was convened in November of 1918, with the 1,147 delegates far surpassing the expected attendance of 300. This conference addressed a wide number of social questions and laid the foundation for the establishment of the Zhenotdel, the Women’s Department of the Communist Party, stewarded by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai.³ The Zhenotdel undertook mass educational campaigns among women, establishing over 25,000 literacy schools and informing women of their newly-won legal and social rights, particularly in Central Asia. It also produced a wide number of women’s publications modeled off of Rabotnitsa, chiefly Kommunistka (“The Communist Woman”). 

Fundamentally linked to the mass women’s movement cultivated by the Zhenotdel and the Communist Party was the legalization of divorce and the full integration of women into everyday life. Bodily autonomy, vital to social equality, was upheld by the landmark legalization of abortion for the first time anywhere in history by the Soviet Union in March 1920. But legal rights and education, and even the ability to terminate pregnancy, were not enough to accomplish the withering-away (otmiranie) of the patriarchal family: the crucial step was to socialize social-reproductive labor, freeing women from “domestic slavery”. The Soviet state established collective laundries, cafeterias, and nurseries to remove the double-burden working women faced, although difficult wartime and post-war conditions limited their proliferation.

Cisheteronormativity reinforces and reproduces the patriarchal family; the revolutionary movement attacks the power of the family and thus the social basis of those attitudes. The Bolshevik government abolished all anti-gay laws when it repealed the Tsarist penal code and made conscious advances for queer and trans people. The head of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene Grigori Batkis declared “the absolute noninterference of the state and society into sexual matters” except where there is “force or duress,” and the Soviet state treated homosexuality as a natural occurrence on this basis.⁴ Commissar of Foreign Affairs Grigorii Chicerin was openly gay, as was the poet Mikhail Kuzmin. Soviet physicians traveled to Berlin to visit Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in 1923, and the director of the Institute of Neuro-psychiatric Prophylaxis in Moscow Lev Rozenstein studied lesbian lives and encouraged self-acceptance. Instances of same-sex marriage and even primitive gender-confirming surgeries were also recorded. ⁵

These early advances had limitations, rooted in both material and social constraints; however, they show the tremendous possibilities opened up by the revolutionary government. A country plagued by mass illiteracy and subject to the dominance of the reactionary church was, in a few short years, transformed into a place where women won social gains that wouldn’t be secured in the United States until decades later.

Challenges and Rollback

The difficult conditions faced by a Soviet Union encircled by imperialist military and economic forces led to a lack of support for many social services. The decimation of the Russian working class over the course of the Civil War led to the dilapidation of the workers councils which were the Soviet Union’s democratic backbone. Those advanced workers who survived widely became party, state, and military officials. The cohesion of these officials into a bureaucratic layer during difficult and isolating conditions led to a conservative political shift among many in the Communist Party, subordinating wider political aims to national interests. 

Over the course of early Soviet history, multiple factions emerged in the Communist Party around key political questions such as the Workers’ Opposition, of which Kollontai was a part, and the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. After the defeat of the Left Opposition in 1927, this bureaucracy took power in the form of a political clique headed by Stalin. Stalinism consciously eroded the social gains the October Revolution had won for women, with the family now proclaimed as the “fighting unit for socialism,” homosexuality and abortion recriminalized, and gays driven out of Communist parties internationally.⁶

Political Gains, Political Retreats – the Postwar Social Movements

In the latter half of the 20th century, advanced capitalist countries were forced by mass movements, strikes, and victorious anti-colonial struggles to provide concessions and social gains on a large scale. These are the very gains now under attack, alongside newer victories such as those won by trans people. The autonomous movements which achieved these gains are widely seen as an inspiration by activists today, with a number of organizations popping up in local areas aimed at organizing among specific oppressed strata, most notably the black and latino communities.

In the 60s and 70s, feminist and gay organizers adopted this approach as a reaction to the homophobia and misogyny that existed in many Stalinist and Maoist organizations at the time. The Revolutionary Union declared that “male homosexuality reinforces male chauvinism in its refusal to deal with relationships with women,”⁷ the Workers Viewpoint Organization stated bluntly that homosexuality was “a form of social sickness, a form of social perversion,”⁸ and women in many organizations were expected to be the “movement secretaries and shit-workers”, preparing food and literature, cleaning up after meetings, and more.⁹ 

Organizing on a separate or “sectoral” basis provided a freedom to discuss the problems faced by women and queer people on the left and in society as a whole. However, this strategy contained its own contradictions. A gay communist organization called the Lavender & Red Union (L&RU), formed in Los Angeles in 1974, played a leading role in a boycott of Studio One, a gay bar with racist and misogynist admittance practices. The L&RU also led a union organizing drive and strike at the Gay Community Services Center (GCSC) in 1975, and for this the L&RU was excluded from that year’s pride parade, only to out-organize it by building a 600-strong “Liberation Contingent.” The experiences of the Studio One boycott and GCSC strike led the L&RU to write that the gay movement was rooted in 

…an ideology in which the world is divided between Gay and non-gay people and ignores class contradictions. Such a world view goes hand-in-hand with the boss rule at GCSC, making it difficult for the workers to view other Gay people as bosses and as enemies and other workers, unions, etc. as allies.¹⁰

Around the same time, many socialists, feminists, and radicals were implanting themselves in working-class jobs, a process much like today’s rank-and-file strategy. Members of Oakland Women’s Liberation were active among phone operators at AT&T, who were overwhelmingly women, and started a group called the Operators Defense Committee (ODC). The phone companies were the site of intense class struggle in 1971. Shortly before the major Communications Workers of America (CWA) strike that summer, the male-dominated IBEW local in Oakland went on strike, and while the ODC issued a call to respect their picket line, many active feminists who worked at AT&T scabbed on the IBEW.¹¹ Militant phoneworker Marjorie Stamberg recalled her “union sisters” saying that because the IBEW was composed mostly of men, and because women were more oppressed, they had no obligation to support the strike: “This really shocked us because we had been organizing women on a feminist strategy around their own oppression and it did not lead them to understand the need to forge real links with the rest of the class, but it led them to become strikebreakers.”¹²

This class-neutral ideology of sectoralism, which drew a vertical line grouping together all members of an oppressed strata without regard for class contradictions, justified actions which served as an obstacle to solidarity and to class struggle. The political logic of this approach provided the basis on which organizations born from the “new social movements” became increasingly integrated into the Democratic Party and capitalist politics-as-usual, with Gloria Steinem addressing the Democratic National Convention as early as 1972. We’ve seen where that road led.

In contrast to sectoralism, the approach of the mass social-democratic and communist parties of the 20th century was to create specific bodies for work within the party among specially-oppressed strata, including women. Rabotnitsa, the Zhenotdel, and the International Bureau for Socialist Women before it were examples of this model. In the US, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) established a Women’s Commission and publications oriented at women on a similar basis. Perhaps the most notable application of the perspective of “special work” was the noble history of CPUSA activity in the black liberation struggle, based on the Communist International’s insistence that they break from the colorblind, racist positions taken by the early US socialist movement. The tradition exemplified and shaped by the Russian Revolution and its aftermath is one of intransigent struggle against all forms of oppression and chauvinism in society and among the working class.

DSA Must Build a Revolutionary Feminist Movement!

We are in an urgent political moment, one that feels dire for many. In an effort to carry out a program of excluding queer and trans people from public life, the right uses all possible pretext to whip up anti-trans hysteria. Abortion rights and reproductive healthcare in general is under siege. Hysteria over the presence of trans women in sports proffers a pretext for racist attacks on cis women athletes like Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif, while queer women have been profiled in public restrooms on suspicion of being trans. 

The reactionary agenda is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to take advantage of prejudiced attitudes among some sections of the working class to distract from widespread attacks on their living standards. Decades of “Culture War”, from the Moral Majority to now, have built a reactionary media and political ecosystem resistant to any changes in gender and sexual norms. Secondly, this offensive is a uniquely reactionary attempt to resolve the “crisis of care” in our society. This crisis, rooted in the purposeful depletion of educational and social services, likewise leaves many workers struggling to feed and care for their children. Reactionary pushes to restrict bodily autonomy and forcibly reassert cisheteronormativity serve to violently reconstruct the predominance of a more “traditional” set of bourgeois family relations; they also allow for a greater exploitation of social-reproductive labor. 

The situation can appear bleak. Today, we do not have a mass working-class party nor even an organized mass women’s movement that can fight back against Trump’s attacks. DSA, however, can play a key role in cohering both. Build the party by building the fightback, build the fightback by building the party!

The force with the social power to counter the offensive against trans and reproductive rights is the organized working class, and workers and their unions are already taking the initiative. SEIU 1199 issued a statement in February condemning the administration’s attacks on trans healthcare and pledged to both oppose them and to fight for protective measures in union contracts.¹³ The United Steelworkers won gender-affirming care coverage at US Steel in 2022,¹⁴ UFCW 663 won protective contract language at multiple workplaces,¹⁵ and the American Federation of Teachers has mobilized to defend the rights of trans students and educators. Crucially, unions such as Painters Local 10 have shown up consistently in demonstrations for trans and reproductive rights, and SEIU’s Committee of Interns and Residents in California worked with DSA to organize a protest on February 6 against attacks on trans healthcare at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.¹⁶ DSA members in the labor movement can and must utilize our national Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Labor Toolkit to replicate these examples in their union locals! ¹⁷

In the electoral arena, DSA campaigns have raised demands with many similarities to what the historic socialist movement fought for to end women’s oppression. The most prominent example is the Zohran campaign’s demand for universal childcare, a demand that both addresses the felt needs of millions of New Yorkers and shows the potential for a world where women aren’t condemned to the double burden of wage labor and social reproduction. By building a base in the labor movement and working-class communities through union and electoral work, and through community opposition against school closures and attacks on public services, DSA can cohere the energy necessary to wage bold campaigns across the country for transformative demands that meet working-class needs. Here are some things chapters could fight for, alongside defensive demands opposing Trump’s attacks: 

• Universal childcare and preschool.
• Municipal reproductive and gender-affirming care clinics.
• Community kitchens and public grocery stores.
• Massive expansion of social housing.
• Paid parental leave.
• Fare-free public transportation.
• “Baby basket” programs providing food staples and essential goods to parents of young children.

To bring together anti-oppression struggles and the fight for working-class demands, DSA must establish a political center that can build a socialist pole while also developing the movement as a whole. Our national leadership should work with the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy commission to reach out to chapters nationwide to make a comprehensive map of which have a TRBA and/or Socialist Feminist Working Group; those without one should receive guidance in establishing such bodies. To help guide and coordinate this work, DSA should launch a dedicated national publication for the movement, modeled off of Rabotnitsa. A dedicated outlet, even if online-only, can be a platform to share reports on local struggles, provide political education, and foreground debates over strategy. As a collective organizing tool, such an outlet could also prepare printable materials for chapters to use as tools for recruitment and intervention. National and regional events could be held under its auspices online or in-person for organizers to discuss and congregate, similar to a Troublemakers’ School or a National Activist Conference. Most crucially, it will be a tool in DSA’s hands to build and intervene in the broader feminist movement on an explicitly socialist basis. In 1917, a publication was able to organize the First All-City Conference of Petrograd Working Women which took part in a revolution in the middle of its proceedings—what can a similar publication lead women to win today?

¹⁸

1. https://jacobin.com/2017/05/women-workers-strike-russian-revolution-bolshevik-party-feminism ↩︎
2.  “How the Bolsheviks Organized Working Women: History of the Journal Rabotnitsa” in Women & Revolution no. 4, Fall 1973. ↩︎
3. “Early Communist Work Among Women: The Bolsheviks” in Women & Revolution nos. 10-11, Winter 1975-76 and Spring 1976. ↩︎
4. Quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935) (Ojai, CA: Times Change Press, 1995) 71-73. ↩︎
5. Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 141, 169. ↩︎
6. See Leon Trotsky, “Thermidor in the Family” in The Revolution Betrayed. ↩︎
7. Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union on Homosexuality and Gay Liberation, reprinted in “Towards a Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question,” Los Angeles Research Group, 1975 (Foreign Languages Press edition, 2020). ↩︎
8. Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1976. ↩︎
9. Evelyn Goldfeld, Sue Munaker, and Naomi Weisstein, A Woman is a Sometime Thing; Or, Cornering Capitalism by Removing 51 Percent of Its Commodities, 1974. ↩︎
10. “In the Aftermath: the GCSC Strike!”, Come Out Fighting no. 8, December 1975, 5. ↩︎
11. “Class Struggle in the Phone Company” in Women & Revolution no. 5, Spring 1974. ↩︎
12. “Stamberg: ‘Consistent feminism leads to… strikebreaking’” in Women & Revolution no. 18, Spring 1979. [emphasis in original] ↩︎
13. https://www.1199seiu.org/media-center/1199seiu-nations-largest-healthcare-union-defends-transgender-rights-healthcare-access ↩︎
14. https://transequality.org/news/usw-tldef-ils-secure-health-care-victory-workers-us-steel ↩︎
15. https://www.ufcw663.org/blog/2024/06/14/protecting-transgender-rights-through-contract-language/ ↩︎
16. https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2025/03/how-health-care-workers-are-defending-their-transgender-patients-trump%E2%80%99s-attacks ↩︎
17.  Pride At Work also has a great contract language guide https://www.prideatwork.org/bargaining ↩︎
18. All images from the Rabotnitsa archives at: https://rusneb.ru/collections/2683_zhurnal_rabotnitsa/ ↩︎