Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin is presented as a revolutionary leader who connected women’s liberation with the emancipation of workers and extended political and economic equality to women after the Russian Revolution. His role marks a major change in law and public participation, while the book’s broader analysis cautions that equality proclaimed by a state does not by itself abolish the social relations that keep women in a subordinate position.

Revolutionary Context

The account places women’s political activity in Russia within a growing movement that began among women students of the intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century. Many of these women devoted themselves less to a separate personal cause than to revolutionary action. Women also joined mass political strikes in 1905 and took part in the barricades, so their participation in revolutionary politics preceded Lenin’s leadership.

On March 8, 1917, a few days before the revolution, women demonstrated in the streets of St. Petersburg, demanding bread, peace, and the return of their husbands. They subsequently took part in the October insurrection. Lenin’s policies followed this history of women’s political engagement rather than introducing it: between 1918 and 1920, women also played important economic and military roles in the Soviet Union’s struggle against invaders.

Equality as Policy

Following Marxist tradition, Lenin linked women’s liberation to workers’ liberation and gave women political and economic equality. The text presents this as a significant state commitment, not merely an abstract argument: women entered production in large numbers and gained political and social importance through their work.

The 1936 Soviet constitution stated that women enjoyed the same rights as men in economic, official, cultural, public, and political life. The Communist International’s program further called for equal treatment in law and daily life, changes to marriage rights and family law, recognition of maternity as a social function, and social responsibility for children’s care and education. These measures framed women’s equality as requiring changes both in employment and in the organization of family life.

Achievements and Limits

The account records striking evidence of women’s public participation in the Soviet Union. In the 1939 elections, 457,000 women were elected to regional, district, town, and village soviets; 1,480 served in the higher soviets of the socialist republics, and 227 sat in the Supreme Soviet. Close to ten million women belonged to unions, and women made up 40 percent of Soviet workers and employees. They also worked in occupations identified as traditionally masculine, including metallurgy, mining, timber rafting, and railways, and served as pilots, parachutists, and members of partisan armies.

These gains form part of the book’s wider argument about women’s historical position. Its existentialist framework holds that every subject must be able to pursue projects and surpass present limits; oppression occurs when a person’s freedom is confined to immanence. The book also rejects the idea that women’s condition can be explained by biology or economic structure alone. Women’s entry into production and their formal rights therefore matter, but they do not automatically unsettle every social relation that assigns women domestic and reproductive responsibilities.

Historical Significance

Lenin’s place in the account is consequently double-edged: he represents a revolutionary government’s explicit effort to connect women’s equality with workers’ emancipation, while the book examines whether state policy can secure freedom in everyday life. Its analysis of women’s work and domestic obligations stresses that formal equality must be matched by concrete conditions that allow women to participate in public life without carrying an unequal burden at home. The Soviet example demonstrates the scale of change possible through political action, but it does not reduce women’s liberation to employment, legal rights, or a change in state policy alone.