Russia

Russia functions in the argument not as a described setting but as a test case for collective action. The revolution there demonstrates how a subordinated class can become a political subject, a contrast that clarifies why women’s numerical strength has not by itself undone their subordination.

Russia as an Example of Revolution

The book invokes the proletariat’s revolution in Russia alongside the Haitian Revolution and the struggles of the people of Indochina. These examples show oppressed groups acting collectively and asserting themselves as subjects against those who had treated them as subordinate. Russia therefore anchors a comparison about political agency rather than a narrative of particular events there.

The Contrast with Women’s Political Agency

Women, the argument stresses, are not a numerical minority: they are as numerous as men. Yet, unlike a class that can form a distinct political group, women have lacked the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit capable of opposition. The book contrasts the proletarians’ collective action in Russia with women’s history of symbolic agitation and gains that men were willing to concede; women, in this account, had received rather than seized political advances.

Why the Comparison Is Limited

Women’s situation differs from that of the proletariat because their subordination is not attributed to a single historical event that could be dated and remembered as a beginning. Women have always been present within society, dispersed among men and bound to fathers and husbands through homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions. Their ties across gender are further divided by class and race: bourgeois women may align with bourgeois men, and white women with white men, rather than with working-class or Black women. Russia’s revolutionary example thus highlights both the possibility of collective transformation and the organizational conditions that the book argues women have been denied.

Significance in the Argument

The comparison supports the book’s wider claim that a condition that appears natural and permanent can nevertheless change: nature, like historical reality, is not immutable. Russia’s revolution represents the political force of a group that can speak and act collectively, while women’s continuing subordination is linked to their failure, under existing conditions, to establish themselves as a unified subject. The example ultimately directs attention away from women’s numbers or presumed nature and toward the material and social means required for collective agency.