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Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923 Author(S): Barbara Evans Clements Source: Signs, Vol

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Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923 Author(S): Barbara Evans Clements Source: Signs, Vol Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923 Author(s): Barbara Evans Clements Source: Signs, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Winter, 1982), pp. 215-235 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173897 . Accessed: 30/09/2013 12:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.197.27.9 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:42:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923 Barbara Evans Clements Scholars studying the historyof women in revolutions,especially in twentieth-centuryMarxist revolutions, have usuallybegun by examining the ideology of the revolutionary leaders and the programs they established to accomplish women's emancipation.' This is a logical and easilyjustifiable approach. But crucial also is an analysisof the attitudes and behavior of women themselves.The female masses play an often overlooked part in shaping a revolution's course and results; and, equally important,women's responses to revolutionreveal much about theirbeliefs, loyalties, and fearsand about theirposition and roles in the social system. The study of the female masses in the Russian Revolution is only beginning. Published materials and archives that hold the record of women's experience in the years 1917-21 have yet to be explored in depth. This articletherefore offers a preliminaryexamination of some of these documents,suggesting interpretations that may prove useful as guides to deeper analysis. The period of the Russian Revolutionwas forwomen, as for men, a time of paradox, in which the lavish promises of the new government were accompanied by enormous deprivationand frighteningsocial dis- integration.However, the chaos of revolutionheld a particulardanger 1. See, e.g., Richard Stites,The IWomen's Liberation Movement in Russia (Princeton,N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1978), pp. 317-421; Gail WarshofskyLapidus, Womenin Soviet Society(Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1978); Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal,"The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union: 1917 to the Present," WomenCross- culturally,Change and Challenge (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 429-55; Sheila Row- botham, l'Women,Resistance and Revolution(New York: Vintage, 1974); Elisabeth Croll, Feminismand Socialismin China (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Studiesin Com- parativeCommunism 14, nos. 2 and 3 (Summer/Autumn1981): 106-218. [Signs:Journal of l'omen in Culttreand Societyt1982, vol. 8, no. 2] ?1982 by The Universityof Chicago. All rightsreserved. 0097-9740/83/0802-0007$01.00 215 This content downloaded from 128.197.27.9 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:42:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 216 Clements Russian Women for working-classand peasant women, because it threatened to strip away all their traditional defenses, leaving them-often illiterateand burdened with children-to cope with a world at war. Whether these women chose to preservetraditional institutions as a defense against the chaos or to accept the Bolshevikvision of emancipated womanhood was of consequence to the finaloutcome of the revolutionitself. Only a small minorityof women, motivatedby convictionor by the lack of defenses in traditionalsociety, followed the Bolsheviks. Most women preferred to cling to the time-honoredpatriarchal forms of the familyand village. Their ostensiblyself-defeating response to revolutionwas seen by the Bolsheviksas proof of theirbackwardness. In fact,these Russian women were behaving in their own interests,but their motives can be ap- preciated only by examining the revolutionas they themselvesexperi- enced it.2 The revolutionbegan in February 1917 withdemonstrations in St. Petersburgthat led to the abdicationof Nicholas II. Afterthe tsar'sfall, a thoroughgoingassault on the old regime spread outward fromthe cities to the countryside.Attacks on the ruling class took a varietyof forms, fromthe symbolicdestruction of statuesof the tsars,to more substantive acts of propertyconfiscation. The peasants, who constituted85 percent of the population, began the revolution in rural areas by seizing the aristocrats'land, land which they believed God had created for the people's use but which,according to the same mythology,the idle nobles had usurped. For centuries,rumors had circulatedamong the peasants thatthe tsarwas planning to correctthis ancient injustice by givingall the land to the people. But these rumorshad alwaysproved false. Suddenly in 1917 the tsarwas gone, and the peasants began to rectifythe situation themselves.There are indicationsthat some peasant womenjoined men in looting houses, butcheringlivestock, and drinkingthe liquor thathad been locked up since Nicholas declared prohibitionin 1914. Women did not play a role in the peasant committeesthat led the land confiscation, however, for those committeeswere composed of the leaders of the village communes. The commune, or assemblyof village men, had for centuries periodically redivided the land into strips,which they then assigned to individualhouseholds forcultivation. Thus in 1917 the peas- ants naturallyused this assembly to distributethe nobles' land and to govern the villages.3Having seized the landlords' property,most peas- 2. This articleconcentrates on Great Russianiwomen, those wvholived in the central provincesof the Russian Empire and who belonged to the nation'sdominant ethnic group. The other nationalitiesof the empire, whose experiences differedin many respectsfrom those of the Great Russians,deserve detailed studyfar beyond the scope of an article.For the only such stud) in English to date see GregoryJ. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat (Priinceton,NJ.: PrincetonUniversity Priess, 1974). 3. Graeme J.Gill, Peasants and Goernmnentin theRussian Revolution (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), pp. 30, 36, 151; Teodor Shanin, The AwkwardClass: PoliticalSociology of Peasantryin a DevelopingSociety, Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 160-61. This content downloaded from 128.197.27.9 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 12:42:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Signs Winter1982 217 ants were then satisfiedto see the revolutiongo no further.They had littleinterest in changing the customs and organizationof village life. The village, with its communal, patriarchal values, was the only world the majorityof peasants knew. Indeed the Russian word for village-mir-also means "world." And it had alwaysbeen a harsh world. Until 1861 the peasants were serfsbound in lifetimeservice to the nobil- ity,or to the governmentif they lived on land belonging to the crown. Afteremancipation they continued to labor under crushingburdens, for theywere required to pay forthe land theyhad receivedwhen theywere freed. Furthermore,they were unproductivefarmers, ignorant of mod- ern agriculturalmethods and lackingthe means to buy the livestockand tools necessary to improve their output. To cope with povertyand an oppressive ruling class, the peasants had developed strong communal values. Submissivenessto the group supported the collectivelabor sys- tem considered essential to village survivaland produced the solidarity needed to deal withthe landlord and the tax collector. Faced withcon- stant insecurityand hardship, the peasants had built a society which, oftendefensively, clung to itscollective identity and to all itsother tradi- tions. Central to these traditionswas the division of power between the sexes. The peasant woman worked with the men, doing all but the heaviest chores, such as plowing the fields. She also tended the house- hold vegetable garden, made milk into butter and cheese, cooked, cleaned, made and washed the clothes, manufactured small articles for sale in town,bore and reared children.Her endless labor,essential to familysurvival, was valued by the peasants, but the labor of men was valued more. A woman was taught from childhood to submit to the power of men, to accept their rightto command obedience as heads of the familyand leaders of the village commune. It was God's willthat she do so, she was told,just as it was God's willthat she endure the privations of her life. If she accepted her lot, if she was hardworkingand married to a hardworkingman, a peasant woman had the most she could expect from her society:food, family,and a respectable place in the village. The revolutionremoved the landlords who oppressed her people, and for thatthe peasant woman was grateful.She soon found, however, that the revolutionwould not leave her familyin peace to farmits newly enlarged lands. In 1917 a vast movementof people was underway: sol- diers coming home fromthe front,factory workers circulating between the cities and villages where they had relatives,revolutionaries fanning out to rouse the peasants. All these driftersbrought with them drunken- ness, random violence, continuing attacks on the aristocracy,speeches about revolution,even occasional looting of churches. This new-found
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