Encyclopedia of Russian History

The Central Committee now sanctioned the formal creation of women’s commissions at the local and central levels. In September 1919 the Central Committee passed a decree upgrading the commissions to the status of sections (otdely) within the party committees, thus creating the zhenotdel, or women’s section.

Several factors played into the creation of the women’s sections. The top leadership of the party, including Vladimir Ilich Lenin, were well aware of the German Women’s Bureau and International Women’s Secretariat created by Clara Zetkin and the German Social Democratic Party. Many of the

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top women Bolsheviks (especially Kollontai and Armand) had begun their social activism by working among women, while others (including Krupskaya, Samoilova, Nikolayeva, and Lilina) had worked on the party’s journal The Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa) in 1913 and 1914.

One reason motivating Kollontai in particular as early as the spring of 1917 was a fear that if the Bolshevik Party did not organize an effective women’s movement, Russian women living under conditions of war and privation might well be drawn into the remnants of the prerevolutionary feminist or Menshevik movements. Related to that was a persistent anxiety among Bolsheviks of all outlooks that if they did not recruit women into the official party, their (i.e., women’s) backwardness would make them easy targets for all manner of counterrevolutionary forces. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the early party-state desperately needed to mobilize every woman and man to support the Red Army in the Civil War.

Nonetheless, the ambivalence of the 1918 Congress dogged the women’s section for the whole of its existence. The leaders themselves expressed ambivalence about the project on which they were embarking. Were they creating special sections and special conferences so that, in the long run, they could eliminate the need for such sections and conferences? Many female activists, moreover, had personally chosen socialist organizing and activism because they sought an escape from gender stereotyping; they did not want to be thought of as women, let alone as professionally responsible for women’s advancement.

From the outset the top leadership of the zhenotdel faced a wide range of organizational problems. These included constant turnover of their personnel as their best members were siphoned off for other projects; communication difficulties between Moscow and the regions; resistance of rural and urban women to outside organizers; and resistance of male party members who thought this work completely unnecessary.

Despite all these difficulties the zhenotdel made significant gains in the area of organization-building during the period from 1919 to 1923. Often working in special interdepartmental commissions, they established relations with the Maternity and Infant Section (OMM) of the Commissariat of Health, as well as with the Commissariats of Education, Labor, Social Welfare, and Internal Affairs. They addressed issues of abortion and motherhood, prostitution, child care, labor conscription, female unemployENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ZHENOTDEL

ment, labor regulation, and famine relief. They argued vehemently with the trade unions that there should be special attention to female workers. They published special “women’s pages” (stranichki rabotnitsy) in the major newspapers, two popular journals (Rabotnitsa and Krestyanka), and Kommu-nistka, which was geared toward organizers and instructors working among women.

With the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, zhenotdel activists faced a whole host of new problems: rising and disproportionately female unemployment; cutbacks in budgeting for local party committees which prompted them to try to liquidate their women’s sections altogether; cutbacks in the social services (child care, communal kitchens, etc.) that zhenotdel activists had hoped would assist in the emancipation of women from the drudgery of private child care and food preparation. Kollontai and her colleagues now began insisting, in Kollontai’s words, on not eliminating but strengthening the women’s sections. They wanted the women’s sections to have more representatives on the factory committees and Labor Exchanges (which handled job placements for unemployed workers), in trade unions, and in the Commissariats.