“Tatiana OSIPOVICH Communism, feminism, women’s liberation and Alexandra Kollontai The topics included in the title of this article are not popular in modern Russia...”

WOMAN IN SOCIETY

Tatiana OSIPOVICH

Communism, feminism, women's liberation

and Alexandra Kollontai

The topics included in the title of this article in modern Russia

are not popular. It is customary to write about them with condemnation or

playfully ironic style. I would like to immediately warn the reader -

I'm not going to stigmatize or entertain. The purpose of this article is entirely

friend. In a sense, this is an attempt to begin a reassessment of the history of Russian feminism, which has been reviled, discredited, ridiculed and firmly forgotten. According to feminist authors, falsification, ridicule, censorship and prohibition are the main means of patriarchal culture's struggle against the feminist movement. The attitude of Soviet culture towards A. Kollontai confirms the correctness of this statement. Back in the 20s, Kollontai’s feminist ideas were condemned and excluded from the theoretical “heritage of Marxism.” Soviet historians are bashfully silent about them, and the Soviet average person sees in them the reason for the post-revolutionary deterioration of morals. To this day, the name Kollontai is associated with the notorious “glass of water theory,” according to which meeting the needs of gender in a new society is as easy as drinking a glass of water. And although Soviet scientists do not confirm Kollontai’s involvement in this theory, they are also in no hurry to refute the accusations. Without a doubt, Kollontai’s ideas about women’s emancipation are not without miscalculations, but this does not justify keeping silent and belittling her merits. A review of the evolution of Kollontai's views on the position of women in the modern world - an evolution that in its own way reflects the metamorphoses of the communist utopia - is the task of this article.

First of all, it is necessary to define the concept of “feminism”. In the former Soviet Union it was deliberately distorted. For many years, feminism has been defined as the general name for movements in the “bourgeois” women’s movement aimed at equalizing the rights between men and women while preserving the foundations of the capitalist system. Both the adjective “bourgeois” and the question of preserving the capitalist system are speculations of Russian socialists. Feminists define feminism as a movement whose goal is complete and comprehensive equality. This definition is given in almost all Soviet encyclopedias. However, some of the most prestigious of them, such as the Philosophical Encyclopedia (1960), do not consider it necessary to include information on either feminism or women's issues.

Osipovich T.I. - Professor of Russian Language and Literature at Louis and Clark College in Portland (Oregon, USA).

"women. At the same time, their class, religious or any other affiliation is unimportant2. The distortion of the definition of feminism occurred as a result of the political struggle that Russian socialism declared on feminism at the beginning of the 20th century. Ironically, Kollontai played an important role in this falsification, which modern Western feminists consider one of their first theorists. How did this happen?

–  –  –

At the end of the 19th century, when Kollontai first became interested in the “women’s question,” socialism not only included the solution to this issue in its program, but also declared itself the only political movement capable of resolving this issue completely and finally. She admitted later that the promises of socialism played an important role in Kollontai’s decision to join the movement. “Women and their fate occupied me all my life,” she once wrote in her notebook, “and it was their fate that pushed me towards socialism.”3

In addition to promises to solve the problem of female oppression, socialism offered Kollontai a general explanation of the causes of this oppression.

Marxist theorists believe that the enslavement of women under capitalism, as well as the exploitation of the proletariat, is caused by the division of labor and private property. Due to lack of funds, the proletarian is forced to “sell” his labor to capital. For the same reason, a woman offers herself to a man as a prostitute, kept woman or wife (!). The role of a bourgeois wife is complicated by the fact that her responsibility includes not only satisfying the sexual needs of a man (the only role of prostitutes and kept women), but also the reproduction of legal heirs, as well as housekeeping. Moreover, bourgeois morality requires one to be hypocritical about the presence of marital love even where there is naked economic calculation. According to Marxism, a woman worker experiences double oppression - from capital and from the bourgeois family. Its liberation will occur together with the proletariat as a result of the victory of the proletarian revolution, which will destroy private property, and with it the bourgeois family. Marxism does not go into detail about what form relations between the sexes will take in a socialist society, asserting only that they will be cleared of economic interests and will be based on mutual love, freedom of choice and complete equality.

The Marxist idea that social revolution must precede sexual revolution, and women's equality will come as a result of class struggle, becomes central to Kollontai's works on the women's issue in the pre-revolutionary period. This idea is her main argument in the fight against the feminist movement that arose in Russia at the beginning of the century. Kollontai declares war on feminists because he sees in their activities an attempt to distract Russian women from the class struggle of the proletariat and cause a split in the socialist movement. She does not miss the opportunity of ideological confrontation with the “bourgeois equal rights”, proving that their demand for political and civil equality under the existing system serves the interests only of women. The American Academic Encyclopedia (1985), for example, defines feminism as “a movement advocating full civil equality of men and women in the political, economic and social spheres of life” (vol. 8, p. 48).

K o l o n tai A. From my life and work. M., 1974, p. 371.

The Marxist point of view on the women's question was first outlined in the books of A. Bebel “Woman and Socialism” (1879) and F. Engels “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884).

the propertied class, not the working class. Kollontai's accusation is not entirely fair. Already at the first Russian all-women’s meeting, which met in St. Petersburg in 1905, the development of a “unified women’s platform” was at the center of discussions. Kollontai is right, however, that there were no women of proletarian origin in the Russian feminist movement. But in fairness, it must be said that they were not then in the Russian socialist movement.

Radical Marxist feminism

Since 1905, Kollontai has been conducting extensive propaganda of Marxist ideas among Russian working women, so as not to lose them to the popular “bourgeois”

feminism. The most difficult thing, however, is to convince the male majority of one's party of the need to carry out such work. She will remember this time with bitterness in her autobiography: “Even then, for the first time, I realized how little our party cared about the fate of Russian women workers, how insignificant its interest in the women’s liberation movement was.”5 And it is possible that not only with the goal of “criticizing feminism”, but also with the hope of convincing Russian socialists of the importance of his cause, Kollontai wrote two serious scientific works - “The Social Foundations of the Women’s Question” (1908) and “Society and Motherhood” (1916).

“The Social Foundations of the Women's Question” is the first contribution of the Russian author to the theory of Marxist feminism. The main idea of ​​the book is the call to direct the efforts of the women's liberation struggle not against “external”

forms of oppression, but against the causes that “gave birth” to it6. In other words, unlike Russian feminists who seek government reforms to improve the status of women, Kollontai insists on the destruction of government itself as the most important condition on the path to full and comprehensive women's equality. Kollontai also requires a radical break in traditional family relationships. Until, she writes, a woman is economically dependent on a man and does not directly participate in social and industrial life, she cannot be free and equal.

The position of the author of “The Social Foundations of the Women's Question” can be characterized as radical Marxist feminism. It is no coincidence that Kollontai’s ideas on the issue of women’s liberation were criticized on both sides. Russian feminists hated her for her political radicalism, and Russian socialists accused her of feminism.

But since Kollontai never doubted the need for the proletarian revolution and did everything to implement it, the Russian socialists not only did not refuse her assistance, but, on the contrary, under the pressure of her convincing arguments, they eventually realized the need for revolutionary propaganda among women. Thus, Kollontai becomes not only the leader of the Russian women's socialist movement, but also an expert on the “women's issue” for his party comrades. In 1913, the Social Democratic faction of the Russian State Duma approached her with a request to write a section on maternity insurance for a new bill. As a result of serious research work, the book “Society and Motherhood” appears.

This. perhaps Kollontai's most significant publication. Huge in terms of K oI I o nta i Alexandra. The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Women.

New York. Schocken Boock, 1975, p. 15 (my back translation from English - T. OH The book was first published in Germany (“Autobiography einer emenzipierten Kommunistm” Munchen, Verlag Rogner und Bernhard, 1970). As far as I know, “Autobiography” was not published in the Soviet Union.

K o l o n tai A. Social foundations of the women's issue. St. Petersburg, 1909, p. 224.

volume (more than 600 pages) and rich in facts collected in it, the book analyzes the situation of factory workers based on material from many European countries. Using data from medical and production statistics, as well as numerous historical information, the author proves that hard factory labor turns motherhood into a “heavy cross.” Horrible work and difficult life are the cause of women's and children's diseases, high infant mortality, homelessness and deprivation of children. However, Kollontai’s main merit is not so much in her criticism of the conditions of contemporary factory work for women, but in the conclusions that she draws from this. Her predecessors, as a rule, declared the incompatibility of women's work and motherhood. Kollontai believes that such a combination is possible and necessary. But, firstly, the nature of women’s work must change and its conditions improve, and, secondly, society must recognize the need to protect and ensure maternity through state insurance. In many economically developed European countries, Kollontai writes, the first steps towards public concern for motherhood have already been taken. Large industrial enterprises offer their employees birth insurance. However, this innovation is very limited: the insurance compensates for lost wages only for a short postpartum period, after which the employee-mother does not receive any assistance. This situation is unacceptable - the health of a working woman and her child, as well as child care during the mother’s productive employment, should become the responsibility of the state.

Kollontai’s ideas on state provision of motherhood and childhood are still relevant. There is still ongoing debate about the role of women in society. Should it work? Being at home with children? Combine both? Adherents of patriarchal culture dream of returning women to the traditional role. Their opponents remind us that along with this, its traditional inequality will return, because society, as it exists now, economically rewards and surrounds with prestige not the mother and the housewife, but the worker and the working woman.

Attempts to combine a woman’s professional work with her traditional role of mother and wife have also been recognized as untenable. In practice, the double role turned into a double burden, the burden of which not everyone can bear. Kollontai's proposal to shift the care of mother and child from the shoulders of the family to the shoulders of the state is one of the possible solutions to the problem.

She develops this issue in her programmatic work “The Family and the Communist State” (1918), which she repeatedly reprints and gives at lectures and rallies in the first years of the revolution.

Unlike Society and Motherhood, The Family and the Communist State is not so much a sociological study as a social utopia, describing society as it should be. In this society, family does not exist. Kollontai proves that the family loses its functions even under capitalism, because the foundations on which it rests disappear. What was the traditional family based on? Firstly, on a common farm that is necessary for all family members. Secondly, on a woman’s economic dependence on her husband-breadwinner. And thirdly, on the need to care for children. But under capitalism, small households cease to produce any material assets. This becomes an area of ​​large production. The man ceases to be the sole breadwinner of the family, because his wife also goes to work. And, finally, the upbringing of children in connection with the mother’s employment in proletarian families is left to the street, and in wealthy families - to hired nannies.

What remains of the functions of the traditional family in the new society, where an equal female worker must also be a mother? Not so much, Kollontai believes, - housekeeping and raising children. Moreover, the economy of a modern family, without producing any material assets, requires only the daily expenditure of labor necessary for preparing food, cleaning the home, washing and mending linen.

The new communist society will free women from this unpleasant and ineffective work. It will replace domestic labor with efficient public services. Numerous canteens, kitchens, laundries, clothing repair shops, etc. will be created.

There is no need to “mourn” the disappearance of individual farming, Kollontai notes, because a woman’s life will become “richer, fuller, more joyful and freer”7.

The communist state will take upon itself not only the burdens of the household, but also the care of children. Experienced teachers will look after children at playgrounds, nurseries, and kindergartens.

Schoolchildren will receive an excellent education, free housing, food, clothing, and textbooks. And as if forestalling possible objections, Kollontai adds: “Let working mothers not be afraid; communist society is not going to take children away from their parents, tear a baby from the mother’s breast, or forcibly destroy a family. Nothing like this!".

It will “take upon itself” only the “material burden of raising children”, while the joy of fatherhood and motherhood will be left to those who are able to understand and feel these joys.”8 But at the same time, it is still expected that children will live in groups, and parents who decide to participate in their upbringing will learn “not to make a difference between yours and mine (children - T.O.), but to remember that there are only ours children, children of communist labor Russia”9.

Of all the responsibilities towards children, parents only have the birth of a healthy baby and caring for him while he is too small for the children's team. But here, too, Kollontai demands women’s independence from male guardianship. She believes that the state should take care of the mother and baby. “There should be no lonely, abandoned girls-mothers, abandoned wives with babies in their arms. The labor state sets as its goal to provide for every married and unmarried mother while she is feeding the baby, to build maternity homes everywhere, to introduce nurseries and lullabies at every enterprise in order to enable a woman to combine useful work for the state with the responsibilities of motherhood.”

The absence of any family responsibilities will create, according to Kollontai, the conditions for the emergence of a new form of communication between the sexes. In his ideal, Kollontai sees this communication as a monogamous marriage - “a comradely and cordial union of two free and independent, earning, equal members of communist society.” In this union there will be no domestic “slavery” of women, inequality, or a woman’s fear of being left without support with children in your arms if your husband leaves, and therefore such a union will be more joyful and happy than the marital relationship of the past.

The ideas that Kollontai expresses in his communist-feminist utopia were not new. Socialists predicted the death of the family and new marriage relationships long before the book “The Family and the Communist State” appeared. The predictions, however, have not yet come true. The family turned out to be more viable than expected Kollontai A. Family and the communist state. M.-P., 1918, p. 15.

There, p. 21.

There, p. 23.

There, p. 20.

There, p. 21.

Kollontai and her predecessors. What was their mistake? First of all, in recognizing only the economic and social, and not the spiritual and mental, significance of the family. Moreover, the economic and social function of the family is perceived negatively - it is seen as unpleasant and ineffective household work and burdensome care for children. Apparently, the socialists of that time could not imagine that, under certain conditions, household work and raising children could become a source of joy and pleasant leisure. They clearly exaggerate the rationality and attractiveness of the public service sector. But most of all they are mistaken in their view of man and his ability to appreciate and accept the ideology of communism.

New woman

The Marxist idea of ​​the disintegration of the family in the communist collective, although important for understanding Kollontai’s position, does not play a significant role in the history of feminism. More important is her contribution to the development of the psychological aspect of women's emancipation. Kollontai was one of the first to notice that declaring women’s political and civil equality does not mean actually making her equal.

Simultaneously with economic and political reforms, society must seriously reconsider traditional relations between the sexes and reassess values ​​in sexual morality. Kollontai believes that in the new society it is the woman who will have to change first, because for a long time tradition has assigned her a secondary role. She writes about this in the article “The New Woman,” which she first published in 1913, and after the revolution she included in the collection “New Morality and the Working Class.” This article is very important for understanding Kollontai’s subsequent works, and therefore let’s look at it in a little more detail.

Who is this new woman? How does she differ from traditional female types familiar to the reader: a “pure” and sweet girl, whose romance ends with a successful marriage; a wife suffering from her husband's betrayal or guilty of adultery herself; an old maid mourning the failed love of her youth; “Priestesses of love” - victims of sad conditions or their own “vicious” nature? Yes, Kollontai answers, because the new woman is independent and independent, lives by universal human interests and fights for her rights. A traditional woman cannot be imagined without a man, love and family. For centuries, the virtues necessary for playing the role of a lover, wife and mother were cultivated in her - humility, gentleness, responsiveness, emotionality, the ability to “adapt” and give in. These qualities allowed a man to manipulate a woman, to use her support to achieve his personal goals, to seize and strengthen his dominance in life. The new woman refuses to play a secondary role in society, she wants to be a full and complete person.

But to do this, she needs to cultivate new qualities in herself, which until recently were traditionally associated with the character of a man:

1. It is important for a new woman to learn to conquer her emotions and develop internal self-discipline: “Emotionality was one of the typical properties of a woman of the past; it served as both an adornment and a disadvantage of a woman. Modern reality, involving a woman in an active struggle for existence, requires her to be able to overcome her emotions... In order to defend her not yet won rights in life, a woman has to do much more educational work on herself than a man”12.

"2 Kollontay A. New morality and the working class. M., 1919, p. 17.

2. “New women are not prisoners of their experiences. By demanding respect for freedom of feeling for themselves, they learn to allow this freedom for others as well.” This is manifested primarily in a woman’s respect for another woman, for her rival. “In the new woman, the “jealous female” is more and more often defeated by the “human woman””13.

3. The new woman is characterized by increased demands on a man. She “desires and seeks a careful attitude towards her personality, towards her soul. She cannot stand despotism.” “A modern woman can forgive many of the things that would be most difficult for a woman of the past to come to terms with: a man’s inability to provide her with material support, external negligence towards himself, even betrayal, but she will never forget, she will not come to terms with a careless attitude towards her spiritual self.” "

4. A modern, new woman is an independent person. “The old woman did not know how to value personal independence. And what could she do with her? What could be more pitiful and helpless than an abandoned wife or mistress, if this is a woman of the previous type? With the departure or death of a man, a woman lost not only her material support, but also her only moral support collapsed... The modern, new woman not only is not afraid of independence, but also learns to value it as her interests go wider and wider beyond limits of family, home, love”15.

5. The new woman assigns a secondary place to love experiences: “Until now, the main content of the lives of most heroines has been reduced to love experiences.” For a modern woman, “love ceases to be the content of her life; it [love] begins to be given the subordinate place that it plays for most men”16.

6. The new woman is against “double morality” in relations with a man: “Whereas the women of the past, brought up in reverence for the purity of the Madonna, in every possible way cherished their purity and hid, hid their emotions...

A characteristic feature of the new woman is the assertion of herself not only as an individual, but also as a representative of the sex. A woman’s rebellion against the one-sidedness of sexual morality is one of the most striking features of the modern heroine.”17

The new woman as a type, writes Kollontai, could only appear under capitalism in connection with the involvement of female labor in production. By participating in production, a woman acquires economic independence from a man, which is one of the most important conditions for her emancipation. Moreover, it is in the labor process that a woman’s inner appearance changes. The young worker is surprised to learn about the unsuitability of the moral baggage that the “grandmothers of the good old days” provided her with. “The capitalist world,” warns Kollontai, “spares only those women who manage to shed feminine virtues and adopt the philosophy of a fighter for existence inherent in men.

“Unadapted” women, that is, women of the old type, have no place in the ranks of the amateur... Weak, internally passive, they huddle close to the family hearth, and if insecurity pulls them out of the bowels of the family... they limply surrender to the muddy wave of the “legal” "and "illegal" prostitution - they enter into a marriage of convenience or go out onto the street."

The concept of a “new woman”, which would replace the traditional woman who was weak and unadapted for the new world, definitely required a revision of the relations existing in bourgeois society 13 Ibid., p. 19.

14Ibid., p. 20.

15Ibid., p. 21-22.

16Ibid., p. 24.

17Ibid., p. 28-29.

18Ibid., p. 31.

between the sexes. In the second article of his collection, “The New Morality and the Working Class,” Kollontai criticizes the three main forms of communication between the sexes in the capitalist world - legal marriage, prostitution and the so-called “free union.” The basis of a bourgeois marriage, according to Kollontai, is based on two false principles: on the one hand, its indissolubility, and on the other, the idea of ​​​​the so-called “property”, the “undivided belonging” of the spouses to each other.

The idea of ​​the “indissolubility” of marriage contradicts the very psychology of the human personality, which constantly changes throughout life. A person can fall out of love, lose common interests with his partner, meet new love, but a bourgeois marriage protects only family property, and not human happiness. The idea of ​​one spouse having “undivided ownership” over the other is another absurdity of bourgeois marriage, because continuous interference in the partner’s life limits the person’s personality and ultimately kills love. But Kollontai considers prostitution to be a much more frightening form of sexual communication. In addition to the fact that prostitution entails a number of social disasters (suffering, illness, degeneration of the race, etc.), it disfigures a person’s soul and deprives him of the ability to ever experience real feeling.

Kollontai also criticizes the so-called bourgeois “free union”. “Free love” in a bourgeois society is flawed because it introduces incorrect and unhealthy moral ideas brought up by bourgeois legal marriage, on the one hand, and prostitution, on the other. Kollontai sees a way out of the protracted “sexual crisis” in a radical re-education of the human psyche and the formation of a new sexual morality. She talks about this in the third and final article of her collection, entitled “Gender Relations and Class Struggle.”

New relations between the sexes

The relationship between the sexes and the development of a new moral code, according to Kollontai, have the most direct impact on the social structure of society and can play a decisive role in the outcome of the class struggle.

The sexual morality of the bourgeoisie, based on individualism, competition, private property and inequality, has demonstrated complete failure. It must be replaced by a working-class morality based on the principles of collectivism, comradely cooperation and equality. The transition to a new morality cannot be easy, because bourgeois remnants have deeply entered the psyche of modern man. Individualism, a sense of possessiveness and the centuries-old idea of ​​inequality and unequal value of the sexes will remain an obstacle to the formation of new relationships for a long time.

How did Kollontai imagine new relationships between the sexes? Perhaps no idea of ​​the author of “New Morality” aroused more violent resistance than her discussion of possible forms of communication between the sexes in a future proletarian society. As in his work “The Family and the Communist State,” Kollontai argues that “a union based [...] on the harmonious consonance of souls and bodies remains an ideal for the future of humanity.” “But in a marriage based on “great love,” the author of the article reminds, we must not forget that “great love” is a rare gift of fate that falls to the lot of a chosen few.” What is left for others who are not so fortunate to do? Use prostitution? Doom yourself to “erotic hunger” or to a cold marriage without Eros? Kollontai seems that an intermediate period, a “difficult but ennobling “school of love”” can become “erotic friendship”, “love-game” - concepts that Kollontai borrows from the German sociologist G. Meisel-Hess, auto Ibid., p. 43.

pa book "Sexual Crisis". This “love-game” will unite two free and equal members of society into a union that may not always end in marriage. “First of all,” Kollontai writes, “society must learn to recognize all forms of marital communication, no matter what unusual contours they may have, under two conditions: that they do not harm the race and are not determined by the oppression of the economic factor.” A monogamous union, based on “great” love, but “not permanent” and “frozen,” is preserved as an ideal. The more complex a person’s psyche, the more inevitable “changes”20. Realizing that “inevitable changes” in sexual relations fall primarily on women’s shoulders, Kollontai demands that society, firstly, actually recognize the “sacredness of motherhood”, morally and materially supporting the mother and child, and, secondly, secondly, it would reconsider “all the moral baggage that is provided to a girl entering the path of life.” “It’s time to teach a woman to take love not as the basis of life, but only as a step, as a way to reveal her true self.” Let her, like a man, learn to come out of a love conflict not with rumpled wings, but with a hardened soul.”21

The pamphlet “New Morality and the Working Class,” published in the first years of the revolution, is important not only for understanding Kollontai’s position on issues of sexual morality, but also for understanding the situation in the field of sexual relations in the early 20s. As the only woman in the new Soviet government, Kollontai has a unique opportunity to put her ideas into practice. Already in the very first days of the revolution, a law on women's equality was adopted, and in 1918, with the direct participation of Kollontai, the “Code of Laws on Civil Status, Marriage, Family and Guardianship Law” was drawn up. According to this document, only civil registration of marriage is recognized as legal; and although church ceremonies are not prohibited, they are deprived of the right to legalize marital conditions. The new code equalizes the rights of both spouses - the wife can keep her last name, have a separate place of residence from her husband, manage her income and have equal rights to family property. Both marriage registration and divorce procedures are greatly simplified. The concept of illegal children is abolished: those born both within and outside of marriage acquire the same rights. The first Soviet law on marriage and family was immediately recognized as the most revolutionary in the world.

Unfortunately, millions of women in Russia could not only understand this law, but even read it - they were illiterate.

Realizing the backwardness of the Russian working woman and peasant woman, Kollontai took an active part in the creation of the Women's Department under the Central Committee of the Party. The purpose of this department is to organize political, cultural and educational work among women, as well as to create a network of preschool institutions. In 1921-1922, Kollontai was the director of the Zhenotdel. However, Kollontai's political career was unexpectedly interrupted due to her participation in the so-called Workers' Opposition, which was defeated in 1921 at the Tenth Party Congress. Unlike other opposition leaders, Kollontai was retained in the party (out of respect for her past services), but in 1922 she was sent into a kind of prestigious diplomatic exile, which lasted for 30 years.

Artistic creativity of A. Kollontai

Removed from direct participation in the political life of the country, Kollontai does not stop working on women’s issues 20 Ibid., p. 46.

21Ibid., p. 47.

emancipation. In 1923, she published two novellas and several articles and stories focusing on gender relations. The persistent attention to the previous topic is not accidental. Kollontai could not help but see that the equality proclaimed by the state changed little in the lives of women. She would write about this with sadness in 1926: “Of course, women (Soviet - T.O.) received all the rights, but in practice they still live under the old yoke: without real power in family life, enslaved by a thousand small household chores , bearing the full burden of motherhood and even material worries about the family”22. Kollontai’s own personal experience was also no consolation - love relationships, as a rule, ended in fiasco and brought an acute sense of bitterness. Her confession sounds strange and bitter: “...How far I am still from the type of a real new woman who treats her female experiences with ease and even, one might say, with enviable negligence... I still belong to the generation of women who grew up in a transitional period of history. Love, with all its disappointments, tragedies and expectations of unearthly happiness, has played a big role in my life for so long. Too big a role!”23.

It is no coincidence, of course, that everything Kollontai wrote in the first year of his diplomatic “exile” is dedicated to love. The personal motive is obvious.

In 1921, there was a dramatic break with P. Dybenko, with whom they shared many years of love and a common revolutionary cause. The pain of breakup and separation makes you reconsider your past hobbies, think about the meaning of love, and evaluate the place of love relationships in a woman’s life.

Kollontai turns to her past in the hope of finding the reasons not only for her personal drama, but also for the difficulties that stand in the way of every woman who wants to live in a new way. The unexpected turn to fiction is apparently explained by the fact that literary prose was more suitable for understanding the psychological conflict and was more understandable to the simple Russian worker for whom Kollontai wrote. In 1923, two of her books appeared in print - “A Woman at a Turning Point” and “The Love of Working Bees.” The main characters of the books are young, energetic women, actively involved in political, social or industrial activities, economically independent, intellectually developed and, as a rule, unmarried. In many ways, they resemble the type described by Kollontai in the article “The New Woman,” but they differ from it in their “atavistic” behavior in love. This primarily applies to the heroine of the story “Big Love”.

Critics believe that “Big Love” is somewhat autobiographical. It reflected Kollontai’s love affair with the Russian economist Maslov, which took place in Western Europe in 1909 during their political exile. There are suggestions that Kollontai could have been referring to the famous triangle “Lenin-Krupskaya-Armand”24. Be that as it may, the events described in the story could have happened to anyone, and not just to Russian revolutionaries in exile. Kollontai's work tells about the love relationship of a young unmarried revolutionary named Natasha with a married party comrade named Semyon (Senya). Both are active and respected party members and both love each other. Senya is married to a sick, capricious woman of the old type, has several children and must take care of them. Senya and Natasha are forced to hide their love affair, meeting only occasionally under the pretext of doing some business away from the family. 22 K o 11 o n t a i Alexandra. T h e Autobiography of a Sexually E m a n c i p a t e d Communist Women, p. 40.

2 4 P o r t e r C a t h y. “Introduction” i n A. Kollontai “A G r e a t Love” p. 1 7 - 2 0.

Work for the party plays an important role in Natasha's life; it gives her great satisfaction and is highly valued by her comrades. But every time Semyon invites Natasha to a rendezvous, her life changes radically. She suddenly becomes a representative of her gender, nothing more. It cannot be said that Natasha was not happy about the opportunity to see her lover or suffered from remorse over the illegality of the relationship, but every time her meetings with Semyon end in disappointment. This happens not because Semyon is a bad person or does not love her enough, but because a woman’s and a man’s ideas about love and their roles in love relationships are radically different.

Semyon looks at meetings with Natasha as an opportunity to forget about family problems, receive moral and emotional support, rest, relax, and enjoy sex. He always remains the master of the situation - he makes a rendezvous when it is convenient for him, goes to work in the library or visit friends, leaving Natasha alone in the hotel (work and meeting with friends is his usual excuse for leaving home), maintains a serious conversation or begins love games according to your own, and not Natasha’s, desires. It is not surprising that meetings with Natasha improve his mood, stimulate creativity, and increase confidence in his abilities. It's a completely different matter with Natasha. She completely dissolves in her feelings and loses control over her life - she abandons her work, worries about her lover, worries about the future of her relationship. It is she who has to make concessions and sacrifices in order to keep the secret of her love affair from her friends. For hours, or even whole days, she is forced to sit alone in the hotel, while Semyon is free to do what he wants. Even moments of intimacy do not bring Natasha much joy, because Semyon is not sensitive to her mood and does not notice her internal difficulties.

It is important to note that theoretically Semyon believes in women's equality, but in his behavior he is no different from men of the old type.

A woman for him is first and foremost a wife and mother, and at best, a faithful and captivating lover. That is why, in response to Natasha’s remark that her workmates are waiting for her, Semyon disdainfully replies that the party will manage quite well without her.

Semyon's inattention to Natasha's interests and looking at her only as a mistress is slowly killing love. But Natasha, in her “atavistic habit” of submitting to a man in love, remaining silent, swallowing resentment, and enduring humiliation, cannot be called a “new woman.” Only with a great effort of will does she manage to throw off the “shackles” of love passion and regain freedom. At the end of the story, in the farewell scene, Natasha already knows what Semyon does not yet know, that their “great love” has ended.

Kollontai wrote about the conflict between a woman’s universal aspirations and her dream of “all-consuming love” in her article “The New Woman.” It was there that she first calls such love “love captivity” and speaks of the “tyranny of love.” “The new woman,” she writes, “revolts not only against external chains, she protests against the “captivity of love,” she is afraid of the shackles that love, in our crippled psychology, imposes on those who love. Accustomed to dissolving completely, without a trace, in the waves of love, a woman, even a new one, always greets love with cowardice, fearing that the power of feeling awakens in her the dormant atavistic inclinations of the “resonator” of a man, forces her to renounce herself, to step away from the “business.” ", refuse recognition, a life task." Freedom, my favorite thing... and 2 5 K o l l o n t i A. New morality and the working class, p. 26.

Another heroine of Kollontai, Vasilisa Malygina, also chooses loneliness.

Pregnant, she leaves her husband, who has cheated on her and her business, hoping that the workforce will help her raise her unborn child.

Rebellion against the “tyranny of love” does not mean, however, that Kollontai did not believe in the possibility of harmonious relationships between a man and a woman. In an article entitled “Make Way for Winged Eros!”, she dreams of such a relationship. She sees them as a love union of two free and equal members of the work collective, in which love between a man and a woman rests on three main principles: “1) equality in mutual relationships (without male self-sufficiency and slavish dissolution of one’s personality in love on the part of a woman); 2) mutual recognition of the rights of the other, without a claim to own undividedly the heart and soul of the other (a sense of property cultivated by bourgeois culture); 3) comradely sensitivity, the ability to listen and understand the work of the soul of a loved one (bourgeois culture demanded this sensitivity in love only on the part of a woman)”26. Kollontai calls this new feeling “love-companionship.” She believes that only in such a free and equal union can all human potential, both mental and spiritual, and psychophysiological, be realized. She gives a very poetic name to a new type of passion-attraction - “winged Eros”, meaning the spiritualized and inspiring feeling of love.

Has Kollontai seen such love in real life? Apparently not. There are no happy love relationships in any of her fiction. On the contrary, she sadly notes that the Soviet woman not only did not free herself from “moral captivity”

traditional relationships, but, what is much worse, she did not even get rid of her past economic dependence on a man. This became especially obvious in the early 20s, when, due to the country's transition to a new economic policy, thousands of women lost their jobs and were forced to seek financial support in both legal and illegal prostitution. Kollontai speaks about this in his story “Sisters”.

The heroine of the story is a married working mother who, due to her child’s frequent illnesses, loses her job. Soon her child dies and her relationship with her husband deteriorates. He starts drinking, making scandals and disappearing from home, and one day he brings home a prostitute. At night, when the drunken husband falls asleep, two women unexpectedly meet in the kitchen and strike up a conversation.

It turns out that the prostitute is also a woman who has lost her job and is desperate. Both women, one a sellout and the other a married woman living with her husband only because there is nowhere to go, feel a sense of kinship towards each other. That's why the story is called "Sisters."

All Kollontai’s publications of 1923, including the story “Sisters,” are feminist in content. They raise the question not about the need for a proletarian revolution (which, as we know, took place in 1917), but about the need for a revolution in relation to women. This second revolution, according to Kollontai, was clearly late. But it was already too late to talk about it. Kollontai is attacked by malicious “criticism” inspired by the party, accusing the former leader of the socialist women’s movement of philistinism, bourgeoisism, pornography and boulevardism. This is what P. Vinogradskaya wrote in her article: “How could she (Kollontai. - T.O.) be considered one of the leaders of not only the Russian, but also the international women’s communist movement for so long? The question involuntarily arises: why does she still have readers, readers and admirers? Why idealistic phraseology in form and arch-intellectual content Kollontai A. Make way for winged Eros! “Young Guard”, 1923, No. 3, p. 123.

could her works be captivating and appealing even to the working environment? Why could this George Sand of the 20th century, who appeared half a century late and copied her original as a farce copies a tragedy, could be the ruler of the thoughts of the female part of the proletariat, who carried out the greatest revolution in the world and showed the way to the liberation of the proletariat of other countries?

The spirit of these accusations is still present in the attitude of Russian society towards Kollontai and the movement that she led.

The political campaign that branded interest in issues of inequality between the sexes as petty-bourgeois and bourgeois is still bearing fruit. Feminism in the former Soviet Union is viewed with great suspicion, and the works of its leaders, including domestic ones, are still inaccessible to the reader.

V i n o g r a d s k a i P. Questions of morality, gender, everyday life and Comrade Kollontai. “Red News”, 1923, No. 6/16/. With. 210.

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An emancipated woman is not a dream for us, not even a principle, but a concrete reality, a daily happening fact.A. Kollontai

March 19 marked the 142nd birthday of the revolutionary, social activist and feminist Alexandra Kollontai (according to the old calendar, March 31, 1872), famous for her radical views on issues of women’s position in society and sexuality. Many of Kollontai’s ideas were never fully implemented, but they have not lost their relevance today.

"New Woman"

Kollontai promoted the idea of ​​a “new woman” as a certain ideal and a real result of the changes taking place. In 1913, she published the article “The New Woman,” where she describes the image of the “new woman” striving for liberation and independence. The “new woman” actively works on an equal basis with a man and, accordingly, provides for herself independently, participates in political processes and public life.

Before uswoman- a personality, before us is a self-valued person, with his own inner world, before us is an individuality asserting itself, a woman breaking off the rusty shackles of her sex...(p.17).

The Soviet state set itself the goal of involving the female proletariat (workers and peasants) in communist construction. This was done by departments for work among women (women's departments), organized under the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and party committees at various levels, the initiator of which was Kollontai. The goal of the women's departments was to fight for equal rights of women and men, combat illiteracy among the female population, and inform about new working conditions and family organization.

The task of the women's departments is, together with the production bodies, to think over and outline a plan for the use of women's forces in the field of organizing everyday life, without overloading the worker with work beyond the prescribed hours and guaranteeing her minimal leisure time. .

The women's departments existed only until the 1930s. After the 30s, the state rethought its policies and headed for the return of “traditional values”. Kollontai’s radical ideas required large resources that the country did not have. At the same time, supporting a couple family, where the woman is a mother, takes care of the house and at the same time works, relieves the state of a significant part of the worries about social services. This process also has a negative impact on women's participation in the political sphere. Gradually, in the Soviet Union, and subsequently in Belarus, the socio-political participation of women was reduced to the functions of “decoration” and “silent presence” rather than real participation in decision-making.

More than 30% of women are present in the National Parliament of the Republic of Belarus, but the number of women's public associations is no more than 1.5% of the number of all public associations. In addition, women are virtually absent from significant leadership positions. This is a consequence of the general processes of segregation in the labor market. There are few of them in management positions and in highly paid industries.

In his work “The Social Foundations of the Women's Question” (1909), Kollontai provides data on the participation of women in industry: women accounted for 28 percent of all workers. Interestingly, in 2013 in Belarus this figure was 44.1%.

In his works, Kollontai pays great attention to the issues of attracting women to work as the basis of their emancipation, while defending the principle of “equal pay for equal work.” This issue is more relevant than ever in modern Belarus, where the wage gap between men and women is about 26-35%. And every year this gap is increasing more and more; in 1998 this figure was 15%.

Modern Belarusian women are still faced with contradictory attitudes, which, on the one hand, formally postulate equality of rights and opportunities, on the other, actively encourage women to participate in the household and family space, rather than to participate in the socio-political sector.

"Liberation" of sexuality

The theme of sexuality in Kollontai’s works brings to the surface two aspects - the silencing of sexuality as such and the subordinate position of women (the myth of “romantic love”).

Anthony Giddens writes that the concept of romantic love emerged in the late 18th century in response to changes in social relationships. In particular, this was due to changes in the structure of the home - the weakening of men's power over the household and the strengthening of women's control over raising children; and the “invention of motherhood” - with the idealization of the mother and the transformation of motherhood into an institution and ideology.

Accordingly, focusing on the importance of family and love in a woman’s life limits her opportunities in the labor and social spheres, which are represented as secondary and less valuable to her. Alexandra Kollontai questions this hierarchy of values ​​for women and opposes the taboo topic of sexuality. However, Kollontai does not call for “free love”; she criticizes the hypocrisy of moral precepts that support the system of dominance and submission. She writes about the need for a radical change in the entire system, or in other words, the order of social relations.

Love ceases to be the content of her life, love, and begins to be given the subordinate place that it plays in most men. Of course, a new woman also has periods in life when love, when passion fills her soul, mind, heart and will, when all other vital interests fade and recede into the background. At such moments, a modern woman can experience acute dramas, she can rejoice or suffer no less than the women of the past. But love, passion, love are just stripes of life. Its true content is that “sacred” that the new woman serves: a social idea, science, vocation, creativity... And this is its own business, its own goal - for her, for the new woman, it is often more important, more precious, more sacred than all the joys of the heart, all the pleasures passions... (p.24) .

Modern morality makes a laughable demand that a person “find his happiness” at any cost; it obliges him to immediately and unmistakably find among millions of contemporaries that soul in harmony with his soul, that second “I”, which alone ensures marital well-being. And if a person, and especially a woman, in search of an ideal, wanders gropingly, tormenting his heart on the sharp stakes of everyday disappointments, society, perverted by modern morality, instead of rushing to the aid of its unfortunate fellow member, will begin to pursue him with its vengeful fury. condemnation(p.38) .

This view did not receive official support during Soviet times. Sex education is being replaced by “moral education.” There is no access to reliable modern contraceptives. As a result, medical abortion is becoming widespread, that is, the main way to control reproduction and family planning.

Modern rhetoric in post-Soviet Belarus appeals to the return of “traditional values,” designating the family as the main “destination” of a woman. This rhetoric is due to a complex of socio-economic reasons, when an attitude towards traditional values ​​becomes profitable, allowing one to reduce rather than develop social services and social services (more on this). The topic of sexuality remains taboo and closed: sexuality education has not been introduced in schools, and family education is its analogue.

Reorganization of everyday life and maternity protection

In 1919, Alexandra Kollontai’s book “The Communist Party and the Organization of Working Women” was published in Petrograd, which determined that the path to women’s liberation lies through the elimination of heavy household work, through the transfer of all economic and educational functions from the family to the state and to the elimination of all fetters that fettered a woman’s right to free choice and change of sexual partner. Communist life ideally consisted of the following: eating in public canteens, doing laundry in laundries, raising children in kindergartens and schools, caring for the elderly in nursing homes, etc. The first housing projects began to appear that implemented the following principles: dormitories, community houses for families and for singles.

“Separation of the kitchen from marriage” is a great reform, no less important than the separation of church and state, at least in the historical fate of women.

But reducing women's unproductive labor in the household is only one side of the issue of women's emancipation. No less a burden, chaining her to the house, enslaving her in the family, was caring for children and their upbringing. The Soviet government, with its communist policy in the field of ensuring motherhood and social education, decisively removes this burden from women, shifting it to the social collective, to the labor state.

Let working mothers not be afraid; communist society is not going to take children away from their parents, tear a baby from the mother’s breast, or forcibly destroy a family. Nothing like this! ... Society will take upon itself the entire material burden of raising children, but will leave the joy of fatherhood and motherhood to those who are able to understand and feel these joys.

Kollontai raises the issue of the importance of organizing women’s labor protection and social insurance. In her book, The Social Foundations of the Women's Question, she describes examples of legislation in European countries that introduce additional benefits or restrictions on night work for women. In general, measures to protect mothers and their health, in her opinion, should include the following:

These measures should, firstly, help accelerate the economic process that destroys the small family economic unit and, removing the care of housekeeping from the burdened shoulders of professional women, transfers it into the hands of a specially adapted team; secondly, their task is to protect the interests of the child and mother, to develop broad, comprehensive protective legislation, including maternity insurance; finally, thirdly, these measures should strive to transfer concerns about the younger generation from the family to the state or local government, of course, with the indispensable condition of the complete democratization of both.

Here she writes about the necessary standard for protecting the health of pregnant women and women in labor at work: the introduction of an 8-hour working day, a ban on women working in harmful and dangerous industries, leave for 8 weeks before childbirth and 8 weeks after childbirth and child care payments, free obstetric care, as well as educational work on issues of motherhood and child care. These norms were also implemented in reality.

According to the Labor Code of 1922, maternity leave before and after childbirth was 4 months. Feeding breaks and maternity benefits were provided. In order to protect the health of women, restrictions were introduced on the involvement of women in night and overtime work, in particularly difficult and hazardous industries, and underground work. Today in Belarus there is a 3-year maternity leave with payment of benefits. There are still standards for protecting women's health at work.

At the People's Commissariat, Kollontai created the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, which was in charge of mother and child homes, consultations, nurseries, kindergartens, and maternal benefits for female workers. In the early 1920s, the Department of Maternal and Infant Protection created its own publishing house, which produced books and brochures in millions of copies. From 1926 to 1927, the total circulation of publications on the care of young children is 1.5 million copies. Considering the fact that almost half of the female population is illiterate, printed propaganda is supported by the mass publication of posters, public speeches by pediatricians, and the creation of “health corners” in clubs and reading huts.

Networks of nurseries and kindergartens are gradually being created. In the post-war period and until the beginning of the 90s, on the territory of the Belarusian SSR the number of kindergartens increased 4 times. The enrollment of children in kindergartens increases from 30.2% in 1970 to 70.1 in 1989. However, in modern Belarus there is a progressive decline in the number of kindergartens, as well as in the amount of funding for preschool education. This is due to the state’s lack of resources for the development of social services.

So Alexandra Kollontai was at the forefront of important changes regarding the position of women in society, which we now take for granted. She wrote not only about the importance of fighting for legal equality, but also about eliminating various barriers and everyday practices that are oppressive and discriminatory: “ The most conscious proletarian women know that neither political nor legal equality is able to resolve the women's question in its entirety". That is why she paid great attention to issues of social policy, reorganization of life and everyday life.

The affirmation of the right of election to councils and all other elected bodies for the female working population of Russia, for workers and peasants, as well as the regulation of family and marriage relations by decrees of December 18 and 19, 1917, in the spirit of equality of rights for married couples, established only formal equality women before the law. In practice, in life, in fact, a woman remained subordinate, dependent and unequal, since the remnants of the bourgeois past, the entire way of life, way of life, morals, views and habits continued to weigh heavily on her.

Notes

Kollontai A.M. Social foundations of the women's issue. St. Petersburg, 1909. P.5.

The position of women in the evolution of the economy (Lectures given at the Ya.M. Sverdlov University). Moscow, 1922. P.151.

Zdravomyslova, E.A.; Temkina, A.A. State construction of gender in Soviet society // Journal of Social Policy Research. 2003. Volume 1, No. 3/4. P.312.

Gradskova, Yu.V. Discourse of “social motherhood” and everyday practices of social work 1930-1950s // Journal of Social Policy Research. 2005. Volume 3, No. 2. P.189.

Kollontai A.M. Social foundations of the women's issue. St. Petersburg, 1909. P.7.

Social status and standard of living of the population of the Republic of Belarus. Minsk, 2013.

Labor and employment in the Republic of Belarus. Minsk, 2000.

Women and men of the Republic of Belarus. Minsk, 2013.

Giddens E. Transformation of intimacy. St. Petersburg: Peter, 2004.

Kollontai A. New woman // Kollontai A. New morality and the working class. Moscow, 1919. P.3-35.

Kollontai A. Love and new morality // Kollontai A. New morality and the working class. Moscow, 1919. P.36-47.

Zdravomyslova, E.A.; Temkina, A.A. State construction of gender in Soviet society. Journal of Social Policy Research. 2003. Volume 1, No. 3/4. P.312.

Kohn, I.S. Sexual culture in Russia: strawberry on a birch tree. M.: OGI, 1997. pp. 153-158.

Pushkarev, A.; Pushkareva, N. Early Soviet ideology of 1918-1928 and the “sexual question” (about attempts to regulate social policy in the field of sexuality) // Soviet social policy of the 1920-30s: ideology and everyday life. Ed. P. Romanova, E. Yarskaya-Smirnova. M.: LLC “Variant”, TsSPGI, 2007. P. 207.

The position of women in the evolution of the economy (Lectures given at the Ya.M. Sverdlov University). Moscow, 1922. P.168.

Ibid., p. 170.

Kollontai A. Family and the communist state. Moscow, 1918. P.19-21.

Kollontai A.M. Social foundations of the women's issue. St. Petersburg, 1909. P.225-226.

Labor Code of 1922: Approved at the IV session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets on October 30. 1922 Mn., 1923. 134 p.

Chernyaeva, N. Production of mothers in Soviet Russia: textbooks on child care of the era of industrialization // Polit.ru.

The national economy of the Belarusian SSR in 1985. Mn., 1986. P.162-163.

The national economy of the Belarusian SSR in 1989. Mn., 1990. P. 100.

National Economy of the Republic of Belarus 1994. Mn., 1995. P. 404.

Kollontai A.M. Social foundations of the women's issue. St. Petersburg, 1909. P.31.

The position of women in the evolution of the economy (Lectures given at the Ya.M. Sverdlov University). Moscow, 1922. P.146.

1.5 A. Kollontai’s contribution to the “women’s issue”

The main merit in developing a new view of the social relations between the sexes that should develop in a socialist society belonged to the recognized Bolshevik theorist on this issue, Alexandra Kollontai. Alexandra Kollontai is a significant figure not only in the history of Soviet Marxism, but also in the history of feminism.

During the years of the revolution, A. Kollontai came up with a fantastic plan to completely reshape society. From this point of view, of particular interest is one of A. Kollontai’s latest works on the “women’s issue” - “Women’s Labor in the Evolution of the National Economy,” which is a free course of lectures that she gave in 1921 for advanced women workers at the University. Sverdlov. At that difficult time, she took up lecturing in order to strengthen her ideological influence on the female masses, to enlighten the female activist, setting out the Marxist vision of the prospects for women's liberation and contrasting it with classical feminism, which still retained influence among women.

The evolution of economic relations, the emergence of private property and the division into classes, according to Kollontai, nullify the role of women in production. The loss of the role of “producer” in the economy is the main reason for women’s lack of rights. Kollontai says: “The enslavement of women is associated with the moment of division of labor by gender, when productive labor falls to the share of the man, and auxiliary labor falls to the share of the woman.” This is one of the main theses of the modern concept of “gender” - the thesis about the social nature of the division of labor between the sexes.

Kollontai especially insists that marriage in the new society will be a personal matter, as if unimportant for society, while motherhood “will grow into an independent social duty and an important, essential duty.” Summing up his lectures, Kollontai emphasizes: “Labor is the measure of a woman’s position: labor in a private family household has enslaved her; working for a collective brings with it her liberation... Marriage is undergoing an evolution, family bonds are weakening, motherhood is turning into a social function.”

The new construction of social relations between the sexes receives its final form from Kollontai in her novel “The Love of Working Bees” - a work that is artistically weak, but programmatic. Kollontai wrote it in 1922. The plot of the novel is outwardly primitive: She and He, their love and a new, open marriage, then a love triangle, and the heroine of the novel is left alone, she is expecting a child. He waits not with tears of despair, as was the case in such cases in the past, but with hope and joy. What's the matter? In a fundamentally different social situation: she is a factory worker, a party member, a participant in revolutionary battles and the construction of a socialist society. All her thoughts are about a new way of life, about the housing cooperative that she created, about the factory where she works, about the nursery that she is going to open. Love is just one aspect of her life, which has many other meanings. Therefore, she gives up her beloved to the one for whom love is everything. The heroine is supported by the work collective and the party unit - this is her real family. The hero is unable to appreciate the qualities of the “new” woman in his beloved. He leaves for another, typical representative of the past bourgeois life, a kept woman and a predator.

That's all. But behind the simplicity of the plot, a grandiose plan for social reconstruction emerges. The division of labor between a man and a woman here takes on unprecedented forms: in our couple, the woman is given a leading role - after all, she is not only a “production unit”, a worker working for the good of society, but also a mother - the bearer of the social function of reproduction, i.e. " unit", twice useful to society. In addition, as a “unit” recently drawn into production, she does not have the instincts of a private property past; she easily and joyfully accepts the party’s idea that the labor collective is her family. She has no need for another family, one that presupposes a private life, separate and separated from the party, from the state. The man in this pair is a secondary person, moreover, dubious, his need for a special, private life is much stronger than that of the heroine, he is hesitant about the guidelines of the state, thinks, argues and reflects, instead of accepting them on faith. The main thing is that, in principle, you can do without it, leave it with the shadows of the past or in the past altogether. After all, next to the heroine is the work collective, the party cell. They are the guarantors of a new life, the guarantors of the future both for her and for the child she is expecting.

There is no doubt that for Kollontai these radical changes in everyday life meant, first of all, a completely new alignment of connections in the triangle “man - woman - state”. Kollontai suggested that the state rely on a woman as a privileged partner in creating new forms of community life, a new social order.

Kollontai’s ideas caused a heated discussion in society: some supported them, others refuted them. They even talked about the disfavor of the “tops” towards her. Be that as it may, in a terrible time, when millions of people disappeared without a trace, she lived a long life. And ideological attacks only contributed to the propaganda of her attitudes. The latter were necessary for the state at the stage of its formation. Kollontai seemed to have foreseen his request and helped lay a foundation for it from almost feminist ideological constructs.

1.6 Family and work in a woman’s life

In recent decades, there has been some change in attitudes towards working women, as well as a decrease in the proportion of women who prefer the role of a housewife. Thus, according to a survey in the USA conducted in different years, it was revealed that in 1974, 60% of women wanted to stay at home, and 35% wanted to work, in 1980 - 51% and 46%, respectively, in 1985. - 45% and 51%. The latter ratio remained in the early 1990s.

About half of the urban women surveyed consider work and family to be equally important to them. At the same time, 25% of female executives believe that work is more important to them than family, and only 13% give preference to family. Female heads of organizations are slightly more family-oriented (22.5%). In other groups, the family clearly prevails as a sphere for realizing basic life interests.

Thus, only 32% of women would agree to leave work and devote themselves entirely to their family if they had sufficient material security (among them there are those who work “to relieve boredom”, to have communication with people they like), and another 25% agree to quit work under certain circumstances, but with some regret. Finally, 42% of women would not agree to quit their jobs (among entrepreneurs this figure is higher - 60%, and among low-skilled workers much less - 18%).

Work is preferred mainly by those women who consider their profession prestigious.

In the West, there is a widespread view that a woman’s domestic work and her role as a “hearth keeper” are not prestigious. According to data obtained by Betty Friedan, even those women whose dream has always been the role of wife and mother experience dissatisfaction with their position. Living in others is not the same as living oneself, Friedan declares. The housewife finds herself “thrown overboard”; she stands aside from the most important events in people’s lives and therefore does not feel like a full-fledged person. Love, children and home are good, but they are not the whole world. F. Crosby complains that the idealization of motherhood still continues and argues that there is almost a conspiracy of silence regarding how difficult it really is. For the frustration experienced by many female housewives, K. Tavris and K. Offir even introduced a special term - housewife syndrome.

The rise in the number of working women reinforces the common perception in society that those who stay at home lead an idle and carefree life, and this further increases the dissatisfaction of housewives. It is no coincidence that they have lower self-esteem than working women. It is argued that women who stay at home are more prone to depression than those who work in production. An analysis of studies on the mental health of working women showed that they are healthier than housewives.

Other authors note, however, that the health benefits of work are more obvious when the woman is single and without children, or when her husband helps with housework, and when she works in a supportive environment. Women who feel that their abilities are underestimated by their superiors are less mentally healthy than women who do work “worthy of them.” However, it would be strange if it were the other way around. In addition, some authors believe that less healthy women simply do not go to work. It is believed that a working wife has a number of benefits, not only material, but also psychological. The first of these is the social support a woman receives at work. She can turn to colleagues for advice, receive emotional support from them, and find friends in them. The second is that work is a source of increased self-esteem and even a way to maintain self-control when conflicts arise at home. Third, work is an “outlet” in case of failure in fulfilling one of the many roles that an adult plays in his life. Thus, a successfully working woman may be less upset if there are some troubles in her family. Research shows that working women are more satisfied with their home and family life than stay-at-home wives. There is also evidence that working wives have more weight in the family than those staying at home. Working women believe that their position has many more advantages than disadvantages. However, in the West there are other opinions regarding housewives. Sheehan, for example, writes that although stay-at-home wives find their household duties boring and socially isolating, this does not cause them to suffer psychological discomfort, since the role of a housewife leaves ample time for hobbies and social life in various clubs and organizations. Ferry points out that domestic work rewards with the joy of what is done for loved ones, the satisfaction of a job well done. A direct relationship has been identified between a woman’s degree of satisfaction with her role at home and at work and the importance she attaches to this role. Thus, working women who believed that their income was as important as their husband's had greater satisfaction than working women who were not sure that their work was needed. But working women are often looked at askance in society. Moreover, a negative view of such a woman persists not only among many men, but also among a significant part of women, which is typical for Russia. In a study conducted by L. Yu. Bondarenko, two-thirds of men and half of women agreed with the “natural female destiny,” that is, the role of a housewife. 51% of men and 37% of women believe that their employment at work negatively affects raising children; 40% of men and the same number of women believe that there is a direct relationship between women’s work and the increase in crime in society; 50% of men and 25% of women condemn a woman who works for her own career. T. A. Gurko, who studied the factors of stability of a young family in a large city, came to the conclusion that it is important to agree on the opinions of the spouses about the extent to which the wife should devote herself to professional activities, and to what extent to family responsibilities. The style of relationships in the family - traditional or modern - and the stability of the family depend on this decision. The coincidence of opinions in successful marriages was revealed by T. A. Gurko in 74%, and in unsuccessful ones - only in 19%. Men are more likely than women to defend traditional views, especially in unsuccessful marriages. Among newlyweds entering into their first marriage surveyed in 1991, 53% of brides and 61% of grooms believed that “a woman’s main place is at home.”

Sex is often spontaneous, unregulated, which cannot but affect the general sexual culture of young people. 2. Social regulation and channels for sexual education of young people Puberty (puberty) is the central psychophysiological process of adolescence and youth. These processes have a significant impact on emotions, psyche and social behavior...

For the first time in the history of Russia, the ethnic, psychological aspects of the emancipation (liberation) of women - defenders of their rights and interests - attracted public attention to various manifestations of women's inferiority. One of the most important aspects of the women's issue has become the problem of changing the position of women in the family, achieving their equality in family and property relations, and expanding the possibilities of divorce. ...

The total sample size was 150 people (80 women, 70 men). The work was carried out on the basis of TSU named after. G.R. Derzhavin and in places of leisure. Purpose of the study: to study gender stereotypes of marital behavior of Tambov youth. Research hypothesis: There are differences in ideas about the future family in terms of the degree of their formation, awareness, qualitative composition, rationality and...

Traits of infantility, immaturity of the emotional-volitional sphere, etc., that is, psychologically “not yet becoming adults” at the time of pregnancy. Chapter 3. Research “Comparative analysis of forms of social support for young mothers abroad and in the Russian Federation” 3.1 Problems of teenage pregnancy in the practice of social work abroad Teenage pregnancy: US experience. Since the 60s...

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai is one of the few female revolutionaries whose name has not been lost in the annals of modern Russian history; this was mainly due to her exceptional biography - she was the first Russian female ambassador for more than twenty years. But no less interesting is another, now little-known side of her versatile activities: Kollontai’s scientific studies, which materialized in numerous books and articles devoted to the so-called women's issue. During the pre-revolutionary decade, Kollontai published a number of fundamental works on the situation of women workers in Russia, as well as a considerable number of polemical articles, sharply criticizing Western feminists for the lack of a class approach in their activities.

Kollontai’s extensive party experience (she shared the ideas of the Communist Party since the beginning of the 1910s) and her merits in promoting and scientifically developing the ideas of women’s equality in Russia, attracting the attention of Russian society to the problems of working mothers made her appointment to the post of People’s Commissar of State Charity natural. in the new Bolshevik government in 1917. The Communist Party, which came to power, proclaimed the education of a “new man” as one of its fundamental goals, and therefore the intention of the Bolsheviks to begin this complex process by remaking the family, the main “unit” of any society, including the communist one, seems quite logical and well thought out.

The attack on the bourgeois traditional family began in a completely civilized way: among the very first acts of Soviet power in December 1917 were laws on civil marriage, which took the place of church marriage, and on divorce. The next step was the rapid compilation of codes of laws on family and school, carried out already in 1918.

Following new laws and codes, moreover, even general acquaintance with them, in such a gigantic country as Russia, with a multi-million illiterate population, was possible only with the most active and extensive propaganda work, in which one of the leading places rightfully belonged to A.M. Kollontai, who had many years of experience in disseminating the ideas of women's equality and new family relationships.

Kollontai's early works - "The Social Foundations of the Women's Question" (1909), "Society and Motherhood" (1916) and some others - were of a completely scientific, analytical nature. In them, the author, using sociological and statistical data, tried to analyze the state of the modern bourgeois and proletarian family, the causes of women's inequality, and explain the new features that have emerged in the position of women of various social strata in bourgeois society using the example of many (about fifteen) European countries. But even in these works one can feel the influence of communist ideas: Kollontai, for example, agrees with the opinion of Clara Zetkin that women’s destiny to raise children is a relic of the past, antiquity, which has no place under modern social conditions. “The mother is truly the child’s natural nurturer during the nursing period, but not beyond that. But as soon as the feeding period has passed, it is completely indifferent for the child’s development whether the mother or someone else takes care of him” (A. M. Kollontai, Social foundations of the female issue. St. Petersburg, 1909. P. 35). Kollontai also assumed that in a future collectivist society, children, at the request of their parents, would be raised in child care institutions from a very early age, since mothers would be busy at work.

Already from Kollontai’s first works, two main circles of problems that occupied her most deeply were clearly identified. Firstly, this is the problem of a working family and the position of a woman-mother in it, and secondly, the question of the boundaries of a woman’s freedom in love and marriage. For example, one of the sections of her book “The Social Foundations of the Women’s Question” explores the problem of prostitution in bourgeois society with a peculiar class bias. “To fight prostitution means not only to destroy its modern police regulation, no, it means to fight against the foundations of the capitalist system, it means to strive to destroy the class division of society, it means to clear the way to new forms of human coexistence.<...>Instead of the insulting, painful sale of caresses, the proletariat seeks the free communication of free individuals; instead of the forced form of marital cohabitation - unhindered adherence to immediate, spiritual attraction, free from narrow everyday calculations. There, in the new world of socialized labor, the hypocritical double morality of modernity will disappear, and sexual morality will truly become a matter of personal conscience for everyone” (She. Society and Motherhood. St. Petersburg, 1916. P. 41).

After 1917, Kollontai, in his scientific and journalistic works, creates a utopian model of a future socialist family. The basis of this unique social structure is the complete equality of men and women, husband and wife, which is due, according to Kollontai and her supporters, to the fact that the household will wither away under socialism. “It gives way to public farming. Instead of a working wife cleaning the apartment, there can and will be specialist workers in a communist society who will go around the rooms in the morning and clean. Instead of struggling with cooking, spending your last free hours in the kitchen, cooking lunches and dinners, public canteens and central kitchens will be widely developed in a communist society. Central laundries, where a worker takes the family’s linen every week and receives it washed and ironed, will also take this work off the woman’s shoulders. Special workshops for mending clothes will allow women workers, instead of sitting for hours on patches, to spend an hour reading a good book, or to go to a meeting, concert, rally. All four types of work that still support the household are doomed to die out with the victory of the communist system” (She. New morality and the working class. M., 1919. P. 11).

At the request of their parents, the upbringing of children (another “link of the family”) will also be carried out by the state, which will gradually take on the difficult burden of caring for future members of communist society. “It is not a narrow, closed family with quarrels between parents, with the habit of thinking only about the good of relatives that can raise a new person, but only those educational institutions: playgrounds, children's colonies - centers where the child will spend most of the day and where reasonable educators will make him a conscious communist who recognizes one holy slogan: solidarity, comradeship, mutual assistance, devotion to the team. All this is done in order to enable a woman to combine useful work for the state with the responsibilities of motherhood” (Ibid. p. 26).

Thus, according to Kollontai, the traditional family ceases to be necessary, firstly, for the state, since housekeeping is no longer profitable for it, it unnecessarily distracts workers from more useful, productive work, and secondly, for family members, because one of the main The tasks of the family - raising children - are taken over by society, especially developing a sense of collectivism as the main thing for the “new man”, even despite his individualistic nature.

But how will problems related to love be solved in the new communist society? What role will it play in a woman’s life, what forms will it take? A. M. Kollontai tries to answer these questions in accordance with the views then prevailing in the Komsomol environment. True, these answers often depend primarily on the vicissitudes of her own female fate, refute the author’s judgments on these problems, do not correlate with the so-called “class basis of love,” and diverge from the principles generally accepted in those years.

In works of 1918-1919, for example in “The New Morality and the Working Class” and “The Family and the Communist State,” she declared: “The new labor state needs a new form of communication between the sexes, men and women will become, above all, brothers and comrades” ( AKA: The Family and the Communist State, M., 1918, p. 72). At the same time, Kollontai realized that “the re-education of a woman’s psyche in relation to the new conditions of her economic and social existence is not achieved without a deep, dramatic breakdown. A woman turns from an object of a man’s soul into a subject of independent tragedy” (Ibid. p. 22).

Kollontai's theory about the new family and the role of women in it is inconsistent and contradictory. In the same work, “The Family and the Communist State,” she says that the family is no longer necessary at all, and that marriage is needed in the form of a free companionship of two people who love and trust each other, since women’s desire to create families cannot die out overnight. The reason for such contradictions lies, of course, not in the logical inconsistency of Kollontai (she demonstrated her original and rather deep scientific abilities in the pre-revolutionary years), they lie in the utopianism of the ideas that she promoted, fully supported and developed. As an orthodox communist, she did not try to think about the possibility or impossibility of implementing these concepts; the main thing for her was the creation of a coherent theory, since in a new society everything should be new. At the same time, Kollontai’s discussions about the sexual code of morality of the working class are frankly declarative and banal. The obviousness of the old truth that each new rising class enriches humanity with a new ideology peculiar to this particular class is obvious. At the same time, Kollontai believes, “the sexual code of morality is an integral part of this ideology. Only with the help of new spiritual values ​​that meet the tasks of the rising class can this struggling class strengthen its social position; only through new norms and ideals can it successfully win back power from social groups antagonistic to it.

To find the main criterion of morality, which is generated by the specific interests of the working class, and to bring the emerging sexual norms into line with it - this is a task that requires its solution from the ideologists of the working class" (She. New morality and the working class. M., 1919. P. 18).

Being one of the ideologists of this class, Kollontai tried to develop a new code of sexual morality, which can be called the code of “free love”, but following it is possible, according to its compiler, only with a radical restructuring of socio-economic relations on the principles of communism (Ibid. With 25). One of the bearers of the new moral code can be considered the so-called single woman, a new type of woman that appeared at the end of the 19th century in bourgeois societies. Kollontai, without hiding his sympathy for such women, describes the system of their views on love. A single woman is financially independent, “possesses a valuable inner world, is externally and internally independent, and demands respect for her self.” She cannot stand despotism, even from her beloved man. Love ceases to be the content of her life; love is given a subordinate place, which it plays in most men. Naturally, a single woman can experience intense drama. But love, passion, love are just stripes of life. Its true content is that “sacred” that the new woman serves: a social idea, science, vocation, creativity... And this is its own business, its own goal for her, for the new woman, is often more important, more precious, more sacred than all the joys of the heart, all pleasures of passion..." (Social foundations of the women's question. St. Petersburg, 1909. P. 82) Although Kollontai does not directly state that a single woman from a proletarian environment is the ideal to which women of a socialist society should strive, such a conclusion is obvious .

The views of a prominent public figure on “free love” became widely known and relatively popular in the first years of Soviet power. At the same time, the most conservative class in Russia at that time - the peasantry - literally shuddered from such communist ideas about the future of the family, about the role of women in it, which was widely reflected in fiction, drama, and journalism in subsequent years.

In connection with the dissemination of Kollontai's views, K. Zetkin's memoirs about V. I. Lenin's attitude towards them are interesting. In a conversation with her, he admitted: “Although I am least of all a gloomy ascetic, to me the so-called “new sex life” of young people, and often adults, quite often seems purely bourgeois, seems like a kind of good bourgeois brothel.<...>You, of course, know the famous theory that in a communist society, satisfying sexual desires and love needs is as simple and insignificant as drinking a glass of water. This “glass of water” theory made our youth go crazy...” Lenin argued that all this has nothing to do with freedom of love, “as we communists understand it” (K. Zetkin about Lenin: Memoirs and Meetings. M. , 1925. P. 67).

True, Lenin did not share with Zetkin his thoughts on how communists understand free love, but the leader’s opinion about free love speaks of his traditional views, typical of pre-revolutionary times. Lenin constantly emphasized that the revolution requires all efforts from the masses, sentiments of various kinds only interfere with the construction of a new society, Kollontai believed that the revolution had already finally won, therefore “winged eros” should be used for the benefit of the collective. Lenin did not enter into a discussion on this issue, realizing that “free love” and “winged eros” contribute, on the one hand, to the destruction of the traditional family, and on the other, they form a new person, a person of the masses, a member of the collective. Thus, both V.I. Lenin and A.M. Kollontai, in this matter, were essentially, if not like-minded people, then at least allies.

In 1923, having experienced a personal drama, Kollontai published the story “The Love of Working Bees,” in which the theory of free love received an artistic form (rather mediocre). But the story was popular mainly due to the coincidence of the mood of society with the main motive of the work - the liberation of women and men from the bonds of the bourgeois family and the observance of a class approach in sexual relations. Kollontai in her work sharply condemned the hero of the story - a communist who left the proletariat for a woman from a bourgeois environment. This work culminated the active literary work of A. M. Kollontai, the main communist theorist and propagandist of “free love” and “new morality.” Since 1923, she entered the diplomatic service and never returned to issues of women’s equality, family, and gender relations, but echoes of her views and ideas in one form or another survived their creator and remained in the texts of the new socialist realist culture.

APPLICATION

A. M. Kollontai

Love and new morality

()

Only a radical change in the human psyche—enriching it with “love potency”—can open the forbidden door leading to the free air, to the path of more loving, closer, and therefore happier relationships between the sexes. The latter inevitably requires a radical transformation of socio-economic relations, in other words, a transition to communism.

What are the main imperfections, what are the shadow sides legal marriage? Legal marriage is based on two equally false principles: indissolubility, on the one hand, and the idea of ​​“property,” of undivided belonging to each other, on the other.

...“Indissolubility” becomes even more absurd if we imagine that most legal marriages are concluded “in the dark”, that the parties to the marriage have only the vaguest idea of ​​each other. And not only about the psyche of the other, moreover, they do not know at all whether there is a physiological affinity, or a bodily consonance, without which marital happiness is impossible.

The idea of ​​property, of the rights of “undivided ownership” of one spouse by another is the second point that poisons a legal marriage. In fact, what results is the greatest absurdity: two people who touch only a few facets of the soul are “obliged” to approach each other with all sides of their polysyllabic “I”. Continuous presence with each other, the inevitable “demanding” of the object of “property” turn even ardent love into indifference.

Moments of “indissolubility” and “property” in a legal marriage have a harmful effect on a person’s psyche, forcing him to do smallest mental efforts to maintain the attachment of a life partner chained to him through external means.<...>The modern form of legal marriage impoverishes the soul and in no way contributes to the accumulation of reserves of “great love” in humanity, which the Russian genius Tolstoy so yearned for.

But another form of sexual communication distorts human psychology even more seriously - corrupt prostitution. <...>Prostitution extinguishes love in hearts; Eros flies away from her in fear, afraid to stain his golden wings on the mud-spattered bed.<...>It distorts our concepts, forcing us to see in one of the most serious moments of human life - in the act of love, in this last chord of complex emotional experiences, something shameful, base, rudely animal...

The psychological incompleteness of sensations during purchased affection has a particularly detrimental effect on the psychology of men: a man who uses prostitution, which lacks all the ennobling incoming spiritual moments of truly erotic ecstasy, learns to approach a woman with “lowered” demands, with a simplified and discolored psyche.

Accustomed to submissive, forced caresses, he no longer pays close attention to the complex work going on in the soul of his female partner; he stops “hearing” her experiences and catching their shades.

But even in the third form of marital communication - a free love affair - there are many dark sides. The imperfections of this marriage form are a reflected property. Modern man brings into a free union a psyche already disfigured by incorrect, unhealthy moral ideas, brought up by legal marriage, on the one hand, and the dark abyss of prostitution, on the other. “Free love” encounters two inevitable obstacles: “love impotence,” which is the essence of our dispersed individualistic world, and the lack of necessary leisure for truly emotional experiences. Modern man has no time to “love.” In a society based on the beginning of competition, with the fiercest struggle for existence, with the inevitable pursuit of either a simple piece of bread, or profit and a career, there is no place left for a cult, for a demanding and fragile Eros. ...Our time is distinguished by the absence of the “art of love”; people absolutely do not know how to maintain bright, clear, inspired relationships; they do not know the full value of “erotic friendship.” Love is either a tragedy, tearing apart the soul, or a vulgar vaudeville. We need to lead humanity out of this dead end, we need to teach people beautiful, clear and not burdensome experiences. Only after going through the school of erotic friendship will the human psyche become capable of perceiving “great love”, cleansed of its dark sides. Every love experience (of course, not a crude physiological act) does not impoverish, but enriches the human soul.<...>Only “great love” will give complete satisfaction. The love crisis is more acute the smaller the reserve of love potential inherent in human souls, the more limited the social bonds, the poorer the human psyche in experiences of a solidary nature.

To raise this “love potency”, to educate, to prepare the human psyche for the perception of “great love” - this is the task of “erotic friendship”.

Finally, the scope of “erotic friendship” is very flexible: it is quite possible that people who come together on the basis of easy love, free sympathy, will find each other, that a great enchantress will grow out of the “game” - great love.

Society must learn to recognize all forms of marital communication, no matter what unusual contours they may have, under two conditions: that they do not cause harm race and were not determined by the pressure of the economic factor. As an ideal, a union based on “great love” remains monogamous. But “not permanent” and frozen. The more complex a person’s psyche is, the more inevitable “changes” are. “Concubinage” or “serial monogamy” is the basic form of marriage. But nearby is a whole range of different types of love communication between the sexes within the framework of “erotic friendship.”

The second requirement is recognition not only in words, but also in deeds of the “sanctity of motherhood.” Society is obliged to place “rescue stations” in all forms and forms on a woman’s path in order to support her morally and financially in the most crucial period of her life.

All modern education of a woman is aimed at closing her life in love emotions. Hence these “broken hearts”, these female images drooping from the first stormy wind. We must open the wide gates of a comprehensive life to a woman, we must strengthen her heart, we must armor her will. It's time to teach a woman to take love not as the basis of life, but only as a step, as a way to reveal her true self.

Gender relations and class struggle

(From the book by A. Kollontai “New Morality and the Working Class.” M., 1919)

Modern humanity is experiencing not only an acute crisis, but - which is much more unfavorable and painful - a protracted sexual crisis.

The longer the crisis lasts, the more hopeless the situation of contemporaries seems and the more fiercely humanity attacks all possible ways to resolve the “damned issue.”<...>This time the “sexual crisis” does not even spare the peasantry.

The tragedy of modern humanity lies not only in the fact that before our eyes, the usual forms of communication between the sexes and the principles governing them are being broken down, but also in the fact that from the deep social lowlands, unusual, fresh aromas of new life aspirations are rising, poisoning the soul of modern man longing for the ideals of a future that is not yet realizable. We, people of the capitalist-proprietary age, the century of sharp class contradictions and individualistic morality, still live and think under the heavy sign of inescapable mental loneliness. This “loneliness” among the masses of crowded, garishly riotous, noisy cities, this loneliness in the crowd of even close “friends and associates” makes modern man with painful greed clutch at the illusion of a “close soul” - a soul that, of course, belongs to the being of another gender, since only the “evil Eros” can, with his charms, at least temporarily, disperse this darkness of inescapable loneliness...

If the “sexual crisis” is determined three-quarters by external socio-economic relations, then one-quarter of its severity rests, undoubtedly, on our “refined individualistic psyche,” nurtured by the dominance of bourgeois ideology. Representatives of the two sexes seek each other in an effort to receive through the other, through the other, the greatest possible share of spiritual and physical pleasures for yourself. A love or marriage partner thinks least of all about the experiences of another person, about the psychological work that is going on in the soul of another.

We always lay claim to our love “counterparty” entirely and “without division,” but we ourselves do not know how to observe the simplest formula of love: to treat the soul of another with the greatest thrift. The new relationships that are already emerging between the sexes, based on two principles unusual for us, will gradually accustom us to this formula: complete freedom, equality and true comradely solidarity.<...>The sexual crisis cannot be resolved without a radical reform in the field of the human psyche, without an increase in “love potency” in humanity. But this mental reform depends entirely on a radical reorganization of our socio-economic relations on the principles of communism.

History has never known such diversity of marriage relationships: an unbreakable marriage with a “stable family” and next to it a transient free relationship, secret adultery in marriage and open cohabitation of a girl with her lover - a “wild marriage”, a couple’s marriage and a “threesome” marriage, and even a complex the foursome form of marriage, not to mention the varieties of venal prostitution. And right there, side by side with an admixture of the corrupting principles of the bourgeois-individualistic family, the shame of adultery and daughter-in-law, freedom in girlhood and the same “double morality”...

In addition to the indicated main drawback of our modern psychology - extreme individualism, self-centeredness, brought to the point of a cult, the “sexual crisis” is also aggravated by two other typical moments that characterize the psyche of our contemporary: 1) the idea of ​​​​ownership of the marital parties that is ingrained in us, 2) educated centuries of assumptions about the inequality and unequal value of the sexes in all areas and spheres of life, including sexuality... The idea of ​​“property” goes far beyond the boundaries of “legal marriages”; it is an inevitable moment interspersed in the most “free” love affair. A modern lover and mistress, with all the “theoretical” respect for freedom, would be absolutely not satisfied with the consciousness of the physiological fidelity of their love partner. In order to drive away the sign of loneliness that is always guarding us, we, with cruelty and indelicacy incomprehensible to the future of humanity, break into the soul of our “beloved” being and lay claim to all the secret places of his spiritual self.

The idea of ​​“inequality” of the sexes, instilled in humanity over centuries, has organically entered our psyche. We are accustomed to regard a woman not as an individual, with individual qualities and shortcomings, regardless of her psycho-physiological experiences, but only as an appendage of a man. The personality of a man, when a public sentence is pronounced on him, is abstracted in advance from actions related to the sexual sphere. A woman's personality is regarded as closely related to her sex life. Such an assessment follows from the role that woman has played for centuries, and is only slowly, only gradually accomplished, or rather, outliningyes revaluation of values ​​in this essential area as well. Only a change in the economic role of women and her entry into independent labor can and will help weaken these erroneous and hypocritical ideas.

For the working class, greater “fluidity” and less fixed communication between the sexes completely coincide and even directly follow from the main tasks of this class. Denying the moment of “subordination” of one member in a marriage also violates the last artificial bonds of the bourgeois family.<...>Frequent conflicts between family interests and

class, at least during strikes, when participating in the struggle, and the moral standard that the proletariat applies in such cases, with a sufficient degree of clarity characterize the basis of the new proletarian ideology.

The sexual code of morality is an integral part of the new ideology. However, it is worth talking about “proletarian ethics” and “proletarian sexual morality” to come across a stereotyped objection: proletarian sexual morality is nothing more than a “superstructure”; before the entire economic base changes, there can be no place for it... As if the ideology of any class is formed when a turning point has already taken place in socio-economic relations, ensuring the dominance of this class! The entire experience of history teaches us that the development of the ideology of a social group, and therefore sexual morality, occurs in the very process of the difficult struggle of this group with hostile social forces.

N.N. KOZLOVA

End of introductory fragment.

Figurines for Muhammad Ali

Cinema, books and boxing

Literature and cinema are another “trick” of the Klitschko brothers at the beginning of the new century. Vitali Klitschko, for example, proved himself to be an actor-reciter. On March 7, 2001, a literary evening dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov took place in Hamburg. Fragments of the writer’s most famous novel, “The Master and Margarita,” were performed by the famous German actress Iris Berben and Vitaliy Klitschko. Literary readings were held in German. “To prepare for this evening, I did not use the services of a director or professional actor. “I read the novel “The Master and Margarita” when I was still a teenager, and since then I have often re-read it, discovering something new in Mikhail Bulgakov’s work every time,” Vitaly later said. “When Iris proposed to me the idea of ​​these literary readings, and one of my favorite books, I agreed without hesitation. I am glad that so many of my friends, admirers of Mikhail Bulgakov’s work, have gathered in the hall.” In addition to being creative, the event was also of a charitable nature. All funds received from the sale of tickets for this evening were donated to the restoration of the Convent of the Archangel Michael, which is located in Odessa.

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“The majestic and sorrowful problem of motherhood invariably walks with a tired gait, heavy under the burden of its own burden”).

(A. Kollontai “Society and Motherhood”)

Kollontai’s creative heritage attracts modern researchers by posing a number of issues that are important for the functioning of society. As a rule, scientists who have studied the works of this famous revolutionary compare her ideas with the views of contemporary feminists, ideologists and politicians, doctors and hygienists, and identify the relevance of her ideas at the present time. It seems to me important to analyze the basic principles of her works devoted to motherhood.

The topic of motherhood was regularly touched upon by A. Kollontai in speeches and articles, but the main factor that prompted her to carefully study this issue was the development of a draft law in the field of maternity protection entrusted to her by the Social Democratic faction of the Russian State Duma. While working on the project, she summarized the existing experience of England, France and the Scandinavian countries in the 600-page book “Society and Motherhood”. Later, in 1917, the conclusions made by Kollontai at the end of the book, and the primary legislative norms proposed there in this area, were implemented by the Soviet government in the first law on social protection.

The uniqueness of A. Kollontai’s projects is seen in the combination of theoretical work and practical activities. Occupying the post of commissar of state charity in the Soviet government, she had the opportunity to implement her ideas in real life. V. Bryson lists the following merits of A. Kollontai in this post: “She sought to provide women with full legal independence and equality in marriage, legalize abortion, eliminate the concept of “illegitimate birth” as a legal category and establish the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value. She also laid the legal foundation for state provision of maternal and child health care and ensured that the leadership began to focus on the principles of collective housekeeping, raising children and creating nutritional institutions (the party abandoned these promises in the early 20s). Although a lack of resources often meant that such decrees could only be statements of intent, they were quite extraordinary achievements given the existing chaos and other demands placed on the new government.”[i] As we can see, in V. Bryson’s assessment, motherhood is one of the fundamental concepts of A. Kollontai’s theoretical capital and the priority policy areas of the ministry she heads. A full-scale project of women's emancipation would be incomplete if the problem of motherhood were not addressed by it. She considered the motherhood of the “new woman” in Soviet Russia in many aspects: economic (a working mother, creating both material and demographic resources), political (equal civil rights, equal family rights and responsibilities), sociocultural (the concept of a “new woman”, emancipated citizen of the new society, a new ethic of motherhood - the mother becomes such for all children of the proletarian republic).

Showing the relationship between motherhood and all spheres of society, A. Kollontai thereby substantiates its social significance. The relevance of the problem of motherhood stated by Kollontai could not be questioned by the politicians of her time, since the argumentation of theses, built on an understanding of the national interests of the country, was literally “murderous”. Infant mortality in most cultural countries of Europe at that time exceeded the losses of these states in the most unsuccessful wars. She directly linked the decline in demographic resources with the thinning of the ranks of national producers, the reduction of tax payers, and the reduction in the number of consumers on the domestic market. All these consequences together delayed the further development of the economy, and posed a direct threat to the current government and a weakening of its military power.

How does Alexandra Kollontai articulate the problem of motherhood? Adhering to the class interpretation of social processes, A. Kollontai limits the problematic area of ​​​​motherhood to the interests working women with children. In her work “Society and Motherhood,” she formulates this problem as follows: “The insecurity of millions of women-mothers and the lack of care for babies on the part of society creates the severity of the modern conflict about the incompatibility of a woman’s professional work and motherhood, a conflict that lies at the heart of the entire maternal problem. The worker groans under the family yoke, she languishes under the weight of triple responsibilities: professional worker, housewife and mother.” However, A. Kollontai cannot be blamed for the narrowing of the social base of motherhood. If in 1917 the “working mother” contract applied mainly to proletarian women, then in subsequent years of Soviet history it became dominant. The universal involvement of women in labor involved all women in socialist society in this conflict. The problematic nature of combining professional work and maternal duty as a legacy of the Soviet era is still being discussed in public and scientific circles. Modern Russian sociologist A.I. Kravchenko writes: “To the traditional economic status of a woman being a housewife, the industrial era added another one - to be a worker. However, the old and new status came into conflict with each other. After all, it is impossible to perform both roles equally effectively and almost simultaneously. Each required a lot of time and considerable qualifications. And yet they managed to combine. It is much more difficult to combine the status roles of a good mother and an effective worker, as well as a good wife and an effective worker. A tired woman is far from the best sexual partner. And the time needed for production is taken away by raising children. Thus, the new status of “worker” came into conflict with the three old ones: housewife, mother, wife” (P.97-98). Unfortunately, A.I. Kravchenko only articulates a well-known contradiction, but does not offer any recipes for its removal. Whereas, according to A. Kollontai, there are two ways to resolve this conflict: either return the woman to the house, prohibiting her from any participation in national economic life; or achieve the implementation of such social events that would enable a woman, without abandoning her professional duties, to still fulfill her natural purpose. Such a solution to the problem of motherhood was proposed for the first time. T. Osipovich emphasizes the significance of A. Kollontai’s idea: “Her predecessors, as a rule, declared the incompatibility of women’s work and motherhood. Kollontai believes that such a combination is possible and necessary”[v]. It is necessary, since labor is the economic basis for women's emancipation, perhaps due to a change in two social institutions, which, as A. Kollontai points out, determine the past and future of motherhood - the economic system and the institution of marriage and family.

Kollontai considers a radical transformation of the economy, complemented by the so-called “revolution of everyday life” - the most important condition for overcoming the economic and political alienation of women - to be a necessary prerequisite for eliminating the contemporary problem of motherhood. In his work of the same name, A. Kollontai states that the transformation of everyday life is associated with a radical restructuring of all production on the new principles of a communist economy. Women's emancipation becomes possible thanks to catering establishments and dairy kitchens, a system of preschool and school institutions, and a developed network of bathhouse and laundry enterprises. Looking ahead, we note here that the implementation of these measures was directly related to the economic resources of the state, so their large-scale implementation could not be discussed in the 20-30s. W. Reich, who visited Soviet Russia at this time, welcomed the system of preschool education with sincere delight, noting its clear organization on collective principles. However, as local archives testify, the establishment of dairy kitchens, children's homes and shelters gave rise to many problems (theft by cooks and caretakers, violence by teachers, etc.) and required careful control by the women's departments.

The problem of motherhood has direct access to marriage and family ties and is largely determined by them. As Kollontai believed, the family must also transform in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have already given a brief summary of Kollontai’s views on the family in our works. However, to understand the concept of motherhood, it is necessary to revisit it. The external bonds of the family, which go beyond the boundaries of its economic tasks, are the economic dependence of a woman on a man and care for the younger generation, according to the ideologist of socialist egalitarianism, weaken and die out as the principles of communism are established in a labor republic. Women's labor, with the introduction of universal labor service, inevitably acquired an independent value in the national economy, independent of its family and marital status. The family evolved into a free union between a woman and a man, based on love. The state gradually took over the upbringing of children. “No less of a burden, chaining her to the house, enslaving her in the family, was caring for children and their upbringing. The Soviet government, with its communist policy in the field of ensuring motherhood and social education, decisively removes this burden from women, shifting it to the social collective, to the labor state.” This was the highlight of A. Kollontai’s solution to the problem of motherhood. Plato's views on the benefits of collective public education of children were used by her for the benefit of women and mothers. In my opinion, the key to understanding the problem of motherhood by the famous revolutionary lies precisely in the social plane, the protection of motherhood and childhood by the state. It seemed that what new could be added to the reproductive scheme and the traditional gender system based on it? Society and motherhood, or rather the state and motherhood - such new ideas are put forward and begun to be implemented by the Minister of Social Charity.

“The main tendency of all this work was the actual implementation of the equality of women as a unit of the national economy and as a citizen in the political sphere, in addition, with a special condition: motherhood as a social function had to be valued and therefore protected and supported by the state,” “Society must “remove mothers the cross of motherhood and leave only a smile of joy that the communication of a woman with her child gives rise to - this is the principle of Soviet power in resolving the problem of motherhood”, “Society is obliged in all forms and types to place “rescue stations” on a woman’s path in order to support her morally and financially in the most crucial period of her life,” Kollontai writes in his works “A Soviet Woman is a Full Citizen of her Country,” “Revolution of Everyday Life,” “Love and Morality.” However, the conclusions that A. Kollontai draws from this unexpectedly cancel out the views on the social functions of motherhood accepted at that time. If, as A. Kollontai states, the problem of motherhood is a socially significant problem on which the state of the state’s labor and military resources depends, then motherhood should be the responsibility of women. Here we are talking, in essence, about the creation of a system of “state patriarchy”. The state obliges a woman to give birth in the interests of the labor republic to ensure a continuous influx of fresh workers in the future. “Soviet Russia approached the issue of ensuring motherhood from the point of view of the main task of the labor republic: the development of the country’s productive forces, the rise and restoration of production. ... free the greatest possible number of labor forces from unproductive labor, skillfully use all available labor for the purposes of economic reproduction; secondly, to provide the labor republic with a continuous influx of fresh workers in the future... The labor republic approaches a woman, first of all, as a labor force, a unit of living labor; She views the function of motherhood as a very important, but additional task, and, moreover, not a private family task, but also a social one.” Kollontai very closely links the interests of the state with the interests of women, giving the latter secondary importance. Motherhood must be protected and ensured not only in the interests of the woman herself, but also even more based on the tasks of the national economy during the transition to the labor system, she believes.

It is difficult to imagine that these lines were written by the freedom-loving, emancipated Kollontai. Moreover, the discursive features of Kollontai’s works, her constant references to the “interests of the state” are consonant with similar guidelines in the policy statements of the ideologists of Nazi Germany. The totalitarian doctrine involves the use of the female body, the reproductive capabilities of women to create labor and military units. Moreover, the emphasis in both concepts was on the reproduction of healthy and viable offspring. To do this, according to Kollontai, labor society must place a pregnant woman in the most favorable conditions.

For her part, a woman also “must comply with all hygiene requirements during pregnancy, remembering that during these months she ceases to belong to herself - she is in the service of the collective - she “produces” from her own flesh and blood a new unit of labor, a new member of the labor republic” . We find the same reasoning in “Kain Kampf”: “Our state will declare the child the most valuable asset of the people. It will ensure that only healthy people produce offspring. ... The state will ensure that healthy women give birth to children, without limiting themselves in this regard - under the influence of the miserable economic situation. ... The state will convince citizens that it will be much more noble if adults who are innocent of their illness refuse to have their own children and give their love and care to the healthy but poor children of their country, who will then grow up and form the pillars of society ... Our ideal man is the personification masculine strength, our ideal of a woman is that she should be able to give birth to a new generation of healthy men. So now we need to work on raising our sisters and mothers so that they give birth to healthy children.” Common points for the two concepts are also the fulfillment of the functions of motherhood not only in relation to their children. A. Kollontai writes: “The slogan thrown into the broad masses of women by the labor republic: “Be a mother and not only for your child, but for all children of workers and peasants” should teach working women in a new way approach motherhood. Is it acceptable, for example, for a mother, often even a communist, to deny her breast to someone else’s baby, who is wasting away from lack of milk just because it is not her child?”

In his analysis of Kollontai’s works, V. Bryson somewhat softens the moment of etatization of motherhood. She writes: “Kollontai, however, did not argue that such duties should be imposed on women in an unequal, totalitarian or selfish society. She believed that they would arise naturally from the noble social relations that would characterize a mature communist society. In this context, the idea that having children is not only a right, but also a responsibility, takes on a completely different meaning. In the conditions prevailing in Russia at that time, women could not be expected to consider motherhood not a personal burden, but a social responsibility, and therefore in 1917 Kollontai supported the legalization of abortion”[x]. In turn, I can assume that the responsibility of women to give birth to healthy children to the state is part of its large-scale project of emancipation of women, freeing them from the oppression of men. In conditions of sexual freedom and the absence of a family, the state, not men, helps women raise children. A. Kollontai tried to combine two points in her concept: a woman’s freedom, embodied in the right to choose a partner, the desire and decision to have children on the one hand, and material and cultural-symbolic (heroine mother...) assistance from the state, ensuring women’s freedom , but under the conditions of compulsory birth of children for the state.

For the practical implementation of the developed concept of reforms, A. Kollontai outlines the state’s step-by-step steps in the field of maternity protection. The first step meant that every worker was guaranteed the opportunity to give birth to a child in a healthy environment, feed and care for him in the first weeks of his life. The second step can conditionally be called institutional, since we are talking about the organization of nurseries, dairy kitchens, and medical consultations for mothers and babies. The third step involved changing the legal basis of social legislation for current and future mothers: short working hours, a ban on harmful and hard work. And finally, the fourth and final step ensures economic independence for mothers while caring for a child by paying cash benefits.

As a result of the gender policy planned by Kollontai, the state takes on the functions of a man, thereby concluding a quasi-family union between a woman and the state. Marriage law, first of all, regulates the state’s attitude to motherhood and the mother’s attitude to both the child and the workforce (protection of women’s labor), provision for pregnant and lactating women, provision for children and their social education, establishment of relationships between the mother and the socially educated child. The right of paternity, as Kollontai intended, should be established not through marriage, but directly by regulating the relationship between the father and the child (not of a material nature) with voluntary recognition of paternity (the right of the father, on an equal basis with the mother, to choose a social system of education for the child, the right of spiritual communication with the child and influence on him, since this does not come to the detriment of the team, etc.).

What kind of father the Soviet state turned out to be is for Soviet women to judge. To me, who grew up at the end of the socialist era, it seems that it is not very good. The entire sphere of social reproduction fell on women's shoulders. The feminization of industries related to birth, care, ensuring a healthy lifestyle, upbringing, education, and creative development of children was evident in the USSR. The same can be said about domestic services that supposedly free women from domestic work. The state did not appreciate the work of reproducing human life (just as it did not/appreciates human life itself). If in the 20s. In the conditions of economic recovery in the USSR, it was difficult to demand from the state full-fledged material support for motherhood, but in the 60s. – naturally. Here we were talking primarily about the priorities of state policy. The fact that at this time society was experiencing problems with preschool, school institutions and household enterprises, having a solid economic base, does not speak in favor of the strategy of social security of motherhood. Deprivation of fatherhood and weak assistance from the state gave rise to the “institution of grandmothers”, and also formed a circle of people who help take care of children (neighbors, acquaintances, janitors...).

To summarize the abstract review of the problem of motherhood by A. Kollontai, we can say that the concept of motherhood she developed was holistic, thoughtful, phased, avant-garde and partly utopian. The utopianism of her views was expressed, first of all, in giving moral factors greater importance than legal ones and underestimating the conservatism of ordinary mass consciousness. Her merit lies in the fact that she substantiated the social significance of motherhood and showed the relationship with other spheres of society and with social institutions. Kollontai proposed her solution to an extremely complex reproductive policy. We cannot ignore the fact that A. Kollontai’s ideas of public/state regulation of the private-family sphere and the social content of the concept of “motherhood” anticipated the discussion between the social movements “for life” and “for choice.”

Undoubtedly, Kollontai’s ideas were used by Soviet ideologists. Her thesis about the responsibilities of women to give birth was taken as the basis for demographic policy in the USSR, and in particular, served as the basis for the Law on the Prohibition of Abortion in 1936. Neither Kollontai’s sexual nor family concepts were implemented in the Soviet era, but the compulsory nature of social roles, and in this case, the slogan “women-workers, housewives-mothers” covered the entire sphere of women’s existence in a totalitarian system. The rigid niche of motherhood turned out to be a unilateral assignment of all family concerns to women, which could not in any way indicate their emancipation. I would also dare to express a hypothesis that requires special analysis, that thanks to Kollontai, the articulation of the problem of motherhood at the state level replaced sexual discourse, and also created the image of an exaggerated, phallic, archetypal mother - the Motherland, who raised her children and therefore has the right to dispose of their lives, and belittled the status of a real woman-mother who received, at best, pitiful monetary compensation for the loss of her children.

The concept of motherhood by A. Kollontai existed as a state policy during the Soviet period of our history and underlies modern Russian mass views on the role of the mother in society. The working mother's gender contract still defines women's social roles and lifestyles. The Labor Code of the Russian Federation is the main document that regulates the rights and responsibilities of the mother. In it, as in A. Kollontai’s work “Society and Motherhood”, “maternity protection, the establishment of compulsory rest for pregnant women before and after childbirth with the receipt of state insurance benefits; free medical and obstetric care during childbirth; liberation of breastfeeding children.” However, the modern Russian father state has inherited all the shortcomings of its predecessor.

The most important consequence of Kollontai’s work in this direction, in my opinion, was the rise of this problem of motherhood to unprecedented heights, but at the same time, the actual implementation of Kollontai’s concept of motherhood turned into a “verbal rattle.” Modern society is also far from “removing the cross of motherhood from mothers and leaving only the smile of joy that a woman’s communication with her child gives rise to.”

NOTES

[i] Bryson V. Political theory of feminism. Translation: T. Lipovskoy. Under the general editorship of T. Gurko. M.: Idea-Press, pp. 139-151.

Kollontai A. Society and motherhood. Selected articles and speeches. M., 1972. P.160-175.

Kravchenko A.I. Sociology. Textbook for higher school students. Ekaterinburg, 1998. pp. 97-98.

[v] Osipovich T. Communism, feminism, women's liberation and Alexandra Kollontai Social sciences and modernity. 1993. No. 1. P.174-186.

Reich V. Sexual revolution. St. Petersburg; M., 1997. P.258-259.

Uspenskaya V.I., Kozlova N.N. Family in the concept of Marxist feminism //Family in Russia: theory and reality. Tver, 1999. pp. 87-88.

Kollontai A. Revolution of everyday life. Women's work in the evolution of the economy: Lectures given at the University named after Ya.M. Sverdlov. M.; Pg., 1923. Published in: Cinema Art. 1991. No. 6. P.105-109.

Hitler A. Mein Kampf. M., 1993. P.338. P.343. p.342..

[x] Bryson V. Political theory of feminism. Translation: T. Lipovskoy. Under the general editorship of T. Gurko. M.: Idea-Press, pp. 139-151.

[x] Kollontai A. Society and motherhood. Selected articles and speeches. M., 1972. P.160-175.

[x] Kravchenko A.I. Sociology. Textbook for higher school students. Ekaterinburg, 1998. pp. 97-98.

[x] Osipovich T. Communism, feminism, women's liberation and Alexandra Kollontai Social sciences and modernity. 1993. No. 1. P.174-186.

[x] Reich V. Sexual revolution. St. Petersburg; M., 1997. P.258-259.

[x] Uspenskaya V.I., Kozlova N.N. Family in the concept of Marxist feminism //Family in Russia: theory and reality. Tver, 1999. pp. 87-88.

[x] Kollontai A. Revolution of everyday life. Women's work in the evolution of the economy: Lectures given at the University named after Ya.M. Sverdlov. M.; Pg., 1923. Published in: Cinema Art. 1991. No. 6. P.105-109.

[x] Hitler A. Mein Kampf. M., 1993. P.338. P.343. p.342..

[x] Bryson V. Political theory of feminism. Translation: T. Lipovskoy. Under the general editorship of T. Gurko. M.: Idea-Press, pp. 139-151.