Women, Resistance and Revolution (20 page)

The question of women’s clubs arose in quite different contexts. The Russian revolutionary movement at the end of the nineteenth century was passionately committed to women’s emancipation. The strong emphasis on personal emancipation along with the movements for economic and political change, and the remarkable participation of women in the revolutionary groups, encouraged a theoretical climate in which women’s emancipation was stressed as a crucial aspect of the revolutionary movement. Women from rich families sought higher education so they could go out into the villages as teachers, doctors and nurses. They wanted to live fuller and more useful lives. Many of them flocked to the university at Zurich in the early 1870s. Stepniak in
Underground Russia
describes their politicization: ‘But on arriving in the country of their dreams, they found not only schools of medicine there, but also a great social movement of which many had no conception.’
²⁶

From among the groupings at Zurich came an important basis both in terms of theory and of personal contact for much subsequent
revolutionary activity. But even in this situation, which was explicitly sympathetic to the ideas of women’s emancipation, and in which every woman had made an exceptional step in actually seeking higher education, women experienced particular problems within the revolutionary movement as a whole. A group of women therefore decided to start their own club from which men were excluded. The reasons given were that in meetings where men and women were present, women mostly remained silent, not so much because they knew less, but because they did not know how to speak and articulate their knowledge. They wanted to develop their confidence and ability to express themselves together without men. The older women opposed this. They thought the exclusion of men would mean that the discussion became one-sided and declined in interest. After six weeks the club split on this issue. Another group was formed of women who lived in the same hostel. They had a self-education and discussion circle in which they discussed social ideas, philosophy, the events of the Commune. Vera Figner, later to become prominent in the Narodnaya Volya group, was a member of the circle, although they had not asked her to join at first because her husband was known to be contemptuous and they mistakenly assumed she shared his attitude. About the same time another women’s club or circle was formed in St Petersburg, to which Sofia. Perovskaya and the Kornilova sisters belonged. They discussed both the social and personal aspects of women’s liberation. When Perovskaya and the Kornilova sisters joined another circle which included men the other women were extremely indignant. However, they all finally merged with the men’s circle and became one of the pioneer groups in the popular movement of going to the people.

The functions of the women’s clubs extended beyond discussion and organization. They were sometimes also a means of organizing home life in a cooperative manner. In March 1848
La Voix des Femmes
reported a demonstration of young working women aged between fifteen and thirty, neatly dressed and of respectable appearance, with a banner inscribed ‘Vesuviennes’. The Vesuviennes not only formed a club, but having no men to support them, and no families, had organized themselves communally. They had strict rules: wealth was divided, food and lodging were guaranteed, each woman received ten francs a month. Their first commune was in Belleville. They marched in a disciplined manner to the Town Hall
where they asked for assistance from the government. The Vesuviennes maintained that women should bear arms in the Garde Civique and form a reserve force for the military forces.

In the Russian revolutionary movement communes also appeared. Chernychevsky’s novel
What is to be Done?
had a great influence from the 1860s onwards. In the book the heroine organizes a cooperative workshop and forms resolutely platonic free unions. In St Petersburg workshops and communes appeared modelled on this idea. They were particularly important in providing homes and shelter for women workers and students who had left parents and husbands. It was believed too that it was necessary to create alternative cultural forms of association before the revolution. One of the Kornilova sisters describes these: ‘The material conditions of the inmates varied, but resources were regarded as common property. Mutual help was acknowledged as the supreme rule of the common life.’

Not only did the commune make living cheaper and provide companionship and security, it also acted as a kind of educational force; those who were better educated influenced the others. It was seen too as a way of realizing:

… our socialist ideas in practice in our private lives, and whilst we were no better housed, but rather worse than the factory workers, we were not obliged to distinguish between mine and thine among comrades. The commune meant much in particular to women from the provinces. Not infrequently there were some among them who had broken completely with their rich and influential families and arrived penniless with the object of studying. Of course they all hoped to find work of some kind. But without acquaintances or connections they very seldom succeeded. Many women would have been utterly lost but for the mutual help within the commune, without in fact the youthful support of youthful comrades. Everything conventional and insincere in our mutual relations was absolutely ruled out, not the smallest regard was paid to outward appearances, and we lived among friends as if in the innermost family circle.’
²⁷

Thus the communes arose partly from the practical needs of women, but they also served to create new forms of the family within the revolutionary movement. They at once served to bind the revolutionaries together by personal as well as political ties and to create in microcosm the beginnings of a new culture. A characteristic of the Russian movement in the 1870s as well as in France in the 1840s
was a strong emphasis on personal emancipation. The dangers of this emphasis are apparent. There is a tendency to try to create the new world by a personal act of will and the way in which cultural change grows out of material circumstance is neglected. Very often the energy and heroism which comes from such an emphasis are dissipated in disillusion and defeat. On the other hand, some kind of understanding that revolutionary political consciousness and activity must affect individuals as personal and private beings as much as in their external and public work is necessary if movements are to survive attack and persecution without breaking and dividing into warring factions under the strain. Because of the particular problems women face they have always seen this very clearly as soon as they become involved in any numbers in revolutionary work. The emphasis on the importance of the personal questions of liberation has not only recurred again and again whenever there is a high degree of participation of women, it has almost been a precondition for the mobilization of women in any significant numbers.

An account of a women’s prison in the biography of Marie Spiridonova, the social revolutionary, illustrates this well. It was necessary to create their own community if they were to emerge from prison able to play any useful part in revolutionary work. They studied intensively anatomy, biblical texts, Darwin, medicine, mathematics, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Indian philosophy, Pascal, Tolstoy, Marx, Herzen. There were strict regulations about not talking in study times as privacy was impossible. They read anti-revolutionary thinkers with special care. Kakhovskaya, one of the youngest among them, said:

We found ourselves forced to review our whole intellectual armoury, to rethink all our principles, to establish carefully the fundamentals of our philosophy of life. For we had all come into the Revolution very young, taken by the emotional waves of the movement.… In our search for spiritual and moral enlightenment we therefore made ourselves thoroughly familiar with the entire artillery of our ideological opponents.
²⁸

They believed that you only had the right to call yourself a convinced socialist and atheist when there was no system of metaphysics which could confute you and when you carried your principles over into personal life with all their implications.

They tried to overcome the conditions of the prison by imposing not only an external discipline but by internal discipline as well. Every action however small was examined with relentless self-analysis. Every law was not simply to be observed but to be observed without hypocrisy. The enclosed world of the Katorga bred its own introspection. This was encouraged by the predominance of social revolutionaries and anarchists among the prisoners, who tended to think in moral and ideal terms rather than in real and strategic ones.

Spiritually it gave them great strength but politically it carried its own weaknesses. One inmate, Bitzenko, who was later to become a Bolshevik, pointed this out:

The destruction of all values continued until it threatened complete annihilation of everything.… They questioned even the fundamental aims for which they fought and so arrived by degrees at the threshold of all life’s mysteries. In the end they found themselves confronted by sheer nothingness and the abyss. What was the meaning and justification of life? Where was truth and what was it? Where and what was the real criterion of good and evil, justice and morality? What was the real meaning of progress? Was socialism really necessary? Where was the true path to the salvation of the world? Could our struggle involving the use of the force of arms be justified? Was it not possible that far more could be attained by another method – the influence of an honourable personal life? Consideration of all those questions from the point of view of the class whose interest they had undertaken to defend did not satisfy them. They would not be satisfied with anything less than the absolute

The conflict between these two approaches to the revolutionary life was to appear in various disguises and under different names in many kinds of revolutionary circumstances. Bitzenko proved for the short term to be correct. But the question of the manner in which the external world of revolutionary practice penetrates the inner world of consciousness, and how this affects the revolutionaries’ action, has not been answered satisfactorily. Nor have the consequences of this interaction been seriously discussed in terms of their effect upon organization. Yet the course of revolutionary movements indicates that this is a vital question. Because the oppression of women operated as much on a personal as a public level, of necessity women inclined towards demands and modes of organizing in which these combined. But because there was no theory to connect, explain and
extend the practical discoveries of revolutionary feminism, the significance of the women’s activity was obscured and forgotten. The women’s movements themselves faced not only the difficulties common to all revolutionaries, but a particularly fierce opposition from the right which was sexual as well as political, and an ambiguity among revolutionary men, some of whom agreed with Proudhon that women’s role was not in ‘la vie exterieure’ but belonged to ‘la vie interieure’. The implications of sexual repression and authoritarianism could not be worked out convincingly in the nineteenth-century context.

Probably the most difficult problem revolutionary women had to contend with lay not in the attitudes of men right or left, but in their own terrible timidity, the result of centuries of oppression. They dropped back easily into the fatalism which sprang from the impossibility of control over their pregnancies, their inexperience in control, organization or initiative, which meant it was always a desperate struggle not to pass responsibility onto someone else, and in the practical difficulties which continually stifled their aspirations to ‘la vie exterieure’.

The German social democrat Adelheid Popp describes how at her first meeting she took every reference to the apathy of working women personally. She felt she had to speak in defence of her sex. She lifted her hand. ‘They cried “Bravo” before I opened my mouth; merely from the fact that a working woman wanted to speak. As I mounted the steps to the platform my eyes swam and my throat was parched. I felt as though I was choking.’ She dwelt on the mental poverty of working women. ‘I demanded enlightenment, culture and knowledge for my sex, and I begged the men to help us to them.’
³⁰

She reeled under the applause and began the painful task of writing her first article, with only three years of schooling, no notion of spelling, and her letters like those of a child. At home she met bewilderment and opposition. Her mother wanted her to marry normally and be a wife. But she still felt the overwhelming necessity of continuing in her way of trade union and revolutionary militancy, and in the long struggle towards self-education:

When I felt the necessity of writing how I became a socialist it was solely with the wish of encouraging those numerous working women who possess hearts full of a longing to do something, but who always draw back again, because they do not trust their own capabilities.
³¹

If women experienced the lack of ‘trust’ of ‘their own capabilities’, common to people who have always been despised, this combined with their role in the family and at home to make an active political life incredibly difficult if not impossible. So many of the women who were politically involved had to renounce the normal life of women. This element of renunciation and self-denial bred a kind of stiffness, a lack of humour, which appeared to people on the outside as an unnatural fanaticism. Though sometimes revolutionary women quite consciously chose to combine the internal and external worlds, it was extremely difficult. A Russian comrade wrote to the Marxist and feminist Dora Montefiore just before the Russian Revolution:

I am a mother. I shall not be spared in this life anything that concerns a woman’s lot. In my time of life – I am thirty-two – a woman feels very strongly – though often unconsciously – the want of motherhood, and I am no exception to the rule.
³²