Written in November 1919 on the second anniversary of the October Revolution, and paired with Lenin’s 1921 address for International Working Women’s Day, this concise but powerful pamphlet cuts to the heart of women’s emancipation: that genuine liberation is inseparable from the abolition of capitalist property relations. Lenin contrasts the promises of bourgeois democracy of liberty and equality and the concrete measures of the Soviet Union, which swept away the legal privileges of men over women that over a century of reformist agitation in Western Europe had failed to dislodge. For Lenin, the pompous phrases of bourgeois democracy of freedom and equality mask the non-freedom and inferiority of women and the non-freedom and inferiority of the toilers and exploited.
Lenin insisted that “There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be ‘equality’ between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the exploited and the exploiters. There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be real ‘freedom’ as long as there is no freedom for women from the privileges which the law grants to men, as long as there is no freedom for the workers from the yoke of capital, and no freedom for the toiling peasants from the yoke of the capitalists, landlords and merchants.”
Read alongside Trotsky’s later analysis in “The Revolution Betrayed”, these texts also illuminate what was lost when the Stalinist bureaucracy reversed Bolshevik policy and drove women back into the household.
Lenin’s demolition of the claim that formal equality under capitalism can constitute genuine liberation, his insistence that there can be no real freedom while the yoke of capital remains, applies with full force to the identity-politics framework that dominates bourgeois and pseudo-left politics today. This pamphlet provides essential theoretical grounding for workers and young people seeking to understand why the fight for women’s liberation has always been, and remains, a question of socialist revolution.
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