Communist International

The Communist International appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account as an advocate of women’s legal and economic equality, and as a voice for reorganizing family life around social responsibility for maternity and child care. Its program offers a forceful challenge to women’s subordination, yet the surrounding discussion tests the distance between declared equality and women’s actual circumstances: participation in production may widen possibilities without ending the unequal division of domestic labor or the constraints of state policy.

A program of social transformation

The Communist International’s principles are presented as extending beyond equal treatment before the law. They call for changes to conjugal rights and the family code, recognition of maternity as a social function, and social responsibility for the care and education of children and adolescents. The program also targets the ideologies and traditions that make women subordinate. Taken together, these demands treat women’s position not as a private matter alone but as something shaped by social institutions, family arrangements, and the allocation of care.

This position belongs to a broader argument connecting women’s emancipation to economic change. De Beauvoir describes a socialist perspective in which women’s participation in production on a large scale is essential to their release from confinement to domestic work. Modern industry can reduce the importance of differences in muscular strength, while technical and social provision can lessen the burdens associated with pregnancy and child-rearing. In this framework, access to paid work is not merely an individual opportunity: it changes the material basis of women’s dependence.

Revolution, work, and political rights

The discussion of the Communist International follows an account of women’s involvement in revolutionary politics in Russia. Women took part in strikes and demonstrations, joined the October insurrection, and contributed economically and militarily during the fighting between 1918 and 1920. De Beauvoir describes the revolutionary program as connecting women’s liberation with workers’ liberation and extending women political and economic equality. Women’s public participation therefore appears both as a claim to rights and as a practical contribution to collective political and productive life.

The constitutional guarantee of equality and the International’s demands make that ambition explicit. De Beauvoir cites Article 122 of the Soviet constitution, which states that women enjoy the same rights as men in economic, official, cultural, public, and political life. She also reports that women received equal wages with male workers and became active in production, gaining political and social importance. The figures she gives for 1939 convey the scale of women’s public representation: 457,000 women served in regional, district, town, and village soviets; 1,480 sat in the higher soviets of the socialist republics; and 227 held seats in the Supreme Soviet. These gains support the claim that formal equality and economic participation can alter women’s public standing.

The unresolved division between work and family

The International’s call for social care responds to a conflict that de Beauvoir identifies as central: women’s productive labor remains entangled with their reproductive and domestic responsibilities. Maternity leave, child-care centers, and kindergartens can lighten those responsibilities, while free unions, more liberal divorce, and legal abortion can widen women’s freedom in relation to men. These measures address the conditions under which paid work and family life can coexist; they do not make the burdens disappear merely by recognizing equality in principle.

De Beauvoir emphasizes that policy changed when population growth became a priority. The family was again treated as the elementary social unit, leaving women both workers and housekeepers. Abortion was banned under the law of June 1936, reinforced on June 7, 1941, while divorce was almost suppressed and adultery condemned by moral standards. The resulting condition is contradictory: women have access to political life and the social dignity associated with productive work, yet are also strictly bound to the home and subordinated to the state. The contrast complicates any simple account of emancipation as a completed victory.

Limits of an economic explanation

De Beauvoir’s broader critique cautions against treating women’s subordination as a problem that economic reorganization alone can solve. She rejects the reduction of relations between the sexes to class conflict: women’s ties and shared interests with men can inhibit solidarity, and women cannot be understood only as workers because reproduction has consequences in both social life and individual existence. Nor does attaching women directly to the state necessarily free them; Sparta and the Nazi regime serve as examples in which women could remain oppressed under state-directed arrangements.

Her existentialist account gives this qualification its philosophical force. Every person is an autonomous freedom whose existence is realized through projects, but women are made to assume the position of the Other and confined to immanence when their possibilities are subordinated to another’s authority. In that light, the Communist International’s program matters because it addresses the institutions that distribute work, care, and rights. Its proposals are not, however, proof that equality has been achieved: the continuing conflict between public participation and domestic obligation shows why women’s freedom depends on concrete conditions as well as political declarations.