Kristen Ghodsee: How to Organize Social Reproduction? Feminist Lessons from Alexandra Kollontai

How to Organize Social Reproduction? Feminist Lessons from Alexandra Kollontai
Lecture with Kristen R. Ghodsee (in English)

10.06.2022 | 19:00
Café KoZ

Moderation: Christina Engelmann & Sarah Speck

Alexandra Kollontai (1872 – 1952) was a socialist women’s activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women’s emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Russian Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 October 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 Communist 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).

This Lecture reviews the life and work of Alexandra Kollontai, providing an introduction for her unique theories to decouple romantic attachment from social reproduction by radically expanding the role of the state and encouraging the development of “comradely-love.”

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