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
65 - A.K. 47 - Bonus Episode - Care Work and Coronavirus
In this bonus episode, Kristen Ghodsee speaks with her daughter about care work in the time of coronavirus lockdowns. As the school year begins in the United States, many children are learning remotely, creating an incredible burden on working parents. How can you socialize childcare and other forms of care work during a pandemic when institutional options are few and far between, and when state and local budgets are shrinking? How do we value emotional labor and care work without commodifying it?
Mentioned in this episode are Paul Krugman's New York Times column on Gross Domestic Misery, a German idleness fellowship for doing nothing, and OnlyFans.
Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization.
If you would like to support the work being done here, please spread the word, share with your friends and networks, and consider exploring the following links.
Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books:
Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com
Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work at: www.kristenghodsee.com
Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
