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Essay on Alexandra Kollontai Her Life and her Contribution to Sexual Equality in Communist Russia
Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontovich was born in 1872 into a family of liberal aristocrats. A rebel early on, she gave up a life of leisure to marry a poor engineer named Vladimir Kollontai. But, after touring the huge Krengolm weaving factory in 1896, she made the wrenching decision to leave her husband and young child in order to devote herself to Marxist politics. The barbaric living and labor conditions of the mostly female textile workers later led her to state, "Women, their fate, occupied me all my life; women's lot pushed me to socialism" (Cathy, 1980).
Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Russian socialist movement from the turn of the century through the revolution and civil war. During periods of exile she was also active as a speaker and writer in Germany, Belgium, France, Britain, Scandinavia and the United States (Cathy, 1980). Born into a wealthy family of Ukrainian, Russian and Finnish background, Kollontai was raised in both Russia and Finland, and acquired an early fluency in languages which not only served the revolutionary movement well, but later led to a career in the Soviet diplomatic service.
he played a major role in forcing the Russian socialist movement to organize special work among women and in organizing mass movements of working-class women and peasants, and was the author of much of the social legislation of the early Soviet republic.
Kollontai began political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching evening classes for workers in St. Petersburg. Through that activity she was drawn into both public and clandestine work with the Political Red Cross, an organization set up to help political prisoners. In 1895, she read August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, which had a major influence on her future ideas and activity.
In 1896, Kollontai saw the open face of capitalist industry for the first time when she visited....
