“Through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in All Countries, Onward to the Complete Emancipation of Women!”: The Transnational Networks of the Communist Women’s Movement in the Early 1920s

Abstract

The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) emerged in 1920. Its goal was to bring women into Communist parties and train them as cadres and leaders so they could work to bring about Socialist transformation and women’s emancipation as an integral component of this transformation. Although a rich body of literature has studied women, gender, and Communism, the works on the CWM’s institutions and networks that use a transnational perspective to study them remain limited. This article seeks to contribute to studies on Communist women in a transnational perspective. It makes use of the CWM’s institutional documents from the early 1920s to shed light on the movement’s inauguration and delineate its ideas on women’s emancipation. This article researches such aspects of Communist women’s activities as gender division of labor, reproduction, and childcare; relationship with non-Communist feminists; and gender relations within the Communist movement.