A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Ukrainian-Finnish Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world).In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.
A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai
119 - A.K. 47 - Bonus Episode - Clara Zetkin on the Establishment of 8 March as International Communist Women's Day
To celebrate International Women's Day in 2023, Kristen Ghodsee reads an abridged version of Clara Zetkin's article on the official establishment of March 8 as International Communist Women's Day. The article is from International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 18, published on 8 March 1922.
Clara Zetkin was the leader of the women's section of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany, and a close friend and mentor to Alexandra Kollontai when the latter was in exile in Western Europe. Both Kollontai and Zetkin were in attendance in 1910 at the 2nd International Conference of Socialist Women where the assembled delegates voted to establish an international women's day once a year. The date of 8 March, however, was only firmly established internationally after the 1922 congress in Moscow, in honor of the women's demonstration that kicked off the February revolution in Russia (which occurred on 8 March by the Western calendar). Zetkin's passionate article clearly shows that IWD was meant to do more than merely celebrate women. It was supposed to be a mass recruitment event to bring new men and women into the struggle against the continued ravages of capitalism.
Mentioned in this episode is the starred review in Publishers Weekly of Ghodsee's forthcoming book, Everyday Utopia.
From the archives: my pre-pandemic ode to International Women's Day in the New York Times (paywall)
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