In The Second Sex, the Russian Revolution is a test case for the possibility of collective liberation. Beauvoir invokes the proletariat’s revolution to show what women have been denied: the means to organize as a group, speak as a political subject, and transform subordination rather than wait for concessions. The Soviet claim that socialism had already secured women’s equality offers a promise, but her analysis treats that promise as incomplete unless women’s freedom is realized in concrete social conditions.

Revolution and Collective Agency

Beauvoir compares women with groups that have acted collectively against domination. The proletarians, she writes, made the revolution in Russia; Black people made a revolution in Haiti; and the people of Indochina were fighting in Indochina. These examples mark a distinction between enduring oppression and the capacity to oppose it through organized action. Women, by contrast, had not formed a unit able to set itself against male authority. They lacked a common space and solidarity of labor or interests, and were dispersed among men through family, work, and economic ties.

The comparison is not simply a claim that women’s situation is identical to that of other oppressed groups. Beauvoir notes that women are not a numerical minority and have no single historical event that explains their subordination. Unlike groups with a distinct past, tradition, or culture, women have always lived within a society divided by sex, as part of a couple whose two sides remain bound to one another. This intimacy with their oppressors makes women’s collective opposition unusually difficult: the sex division cannot be separated from society in the way a class or a colonized population might be imagined as a distinct political unit.

The Limits of Historical Parallels

The revolution’s significance lies partly in the contrast between political agency and symbolic agitation. Beauvoir argues that women’s actions had won only what men were willing to concede; they had not taken power through a transformation of their own. Whereas the proletariat could say “we” and make its former rulers the “others,” women generally did not constitute themselves as subjects in the same way. Men named women as a category, and women adopted that designation without thereby overturning the perspective that made them inessential.

This account also emphasizes how class and race can divide potential allies. Women are dispersed across social groups: bourgeois women may share interests with bourgeois men rather than with proletarian women, while white women may align themselves with white men rather than with Black women. Beauvoir compares this problem to the conflict between women workers and male workers. Employers welcomed women’s labor partly because women accepted lower wages, which made male workers see them as threatening competition. Integration into unions offered women a way to defend their interests and to reduce that opposition, but solidarity required a recognition of common conditions rather than an assumption that shared class position automatically united them.

Socialism and the Promise of Equality

In her discussion of Engels and August Bebel, Beauvoir presents a materialist account in which women’s subordination is bound to private property, inheritance, and the division of labor. The shift to paternal inheritance and the patriarchal family made women dependent within a social order organized around men’s ownership and productive work. On this account, women’s emancipation requires participation in production on a large scale and freedom from confinement to domestic labor.

Bebel’s argument links women’s liberation to the same economic development expected to free the proletariat. Machines and modern industry, it suggests, can make women economically equal to men; once capitalist paternalism is overcome, a socialist society would consist of workers equal among themselves. Soviet propaganda claimed that this equality had already been achieved in the U.S.S.R. Beauvoir presents that claim as a political assertion, not as proof that the problem is settled. She criticizes historical materialism for leaving important questions unanswered, including how private property arose and why it necessarily entailed women’s enslavement. Economic explanation reveals part of women’s history, but does not by itself account for the full structure of their subordination.

Freedom Beyond a Political Promise

Beauvoir’s standard for judging social arrangements is not a presumed public good or a claim that women are happy within their assigned roles. She evaluates institutions by the concrete opportunities they make available to individuals. From the standpoint of existentialist morality, a subject realizes freedom through projects and movement toward an open future; when a person is confined to immanence, the result is oppression if that confinement is imposed. Women’s central conflict is that they are autonomous freedoms yet are compelled to assume the position of the Other, with their possibilities limited by another consciousness that claims sovereignty.

The Russian Revolution therefore functions both as an example of collective action and as a measure of what remains unresolved. A revolution can demonstrate that subordinated people may act as subjects, while the Soviet promise of equality still has to be assessed by women’s actual possibilities. Beauvoir’s emphasis falls not on a label of liberation but on whether women can organize, work, and pursue projects without being returned to dependence and repetitive domestic labor. The decisive question is whether social transformation opens a future in which women participate as free and equal subjects.