Women’s Emancipation and Feminist Counter-Revolution

On International Women’s Day, 1917, two massive insurgencies of women burst onto the world stage. One East, one West. Emancipated women in the East toppled an oppressive regime. Western suffragettes did the opposite; they helped oppressive regimes stay in power.

Note: this is a chapter in my ongoing series The Great War Between Collectivism and Globalism. See the other chapters listed below (updated as I post them). I uploaded this in the “wrong” order, but one doesn’t simply write a post about gender and then miss International Women’s Day.

Introduction and Synopsis
Gender Roles: The First Distribution of Labor, and the Most Important One
Women’s Emancipation and Feminist Counter-Revolution

1917 marked the three-year mark in World War I, and armies on both sides were breaking apart into brazen mutinies. Tens of thousands of soldiers dropped their weapons and left the trenches to go get drunk instead. Entire battalions, regiments, and brigades abandoned their posts, and yet this offered no opportunity for a breakthrough. No doubt an observant general would have liked to conquer the empty trenches on the other side of no man’s land, but he would have had to do it himself because his own soldiers deserted too. Meanwhile on the home front, most people had caught on to the fact that the war was pointless and they were not happy about it.

With everyone so upset and nothing to be gained from continuing to fight, why didn’t the war simply end? That’s because there was a huge benefit from continuing hostilities, and it was an awful one.

Capitalists were getting filthy rich from war production. This was their first taste of perpetual warfare and it was more addictive than cocaine. From their perspective, there was no reason to stop. On the contrary, the Great War was God’s gift from heaven. Trenches overflowed with blood, and these rivers brought an endless stream of gold with them. Millions of dead soldiers was a small price to pay for the lucrative racket to continue.

Like a cocaine addict, powerful industrialists couldn’t quit their habit. They got carried away and dug too greedily into the blood punchbowl. As profitable as the endless slaughter was for capitalists, people could only tolerate so much. Three years into the war, the continent teetered on the brink of a political cataclysm. In every participating regime there was a real risk that public dissatisfaction might boil over into unstoppable communist revolutions. As public outrage escalated, it is anyone’s guess why Europe’s oligarchs didn’t simply quit. The same could be said of a cocaine addict fired from his job and months behind on rent.

In the Russian Empire, fear of regime change became reality. By now, a communist uprising was by no means a random or even unexpected event. Decades of cruel and corrupt mismanagement had taken their toll on Nicholas II’s authority. It also didn’t help that three thousand copies of Marx’s Capital were floating around Russia’s underground communist movement.

Those books hadn’t been smuggled in, the tsar himself allowed Capital to be printed and sold. His censors skimmed the eight-volume word salad about enclosures and proletariats, and decided it was really boring and nobody would like it. Capital sold out within weeks, and government officials realized they might have made a mistake. A little late. “I started a huge communist conspiracy against myself because I’m an idiot.” Nicholas II made mistakes like that a lot.

1917’s dramatic upheaval wasn’t even Russia’s first large-scale insurrection. The Bloody Sunday massacre in 1905 sparked nationwide riots and mutinies, including the famous Potemkin incident; the battleship’s captain’s attempted to mass murder a group of sailors and it backfired. The crew tossed him and all his officers overboard.

Like the earlier Marx incident, Bloody Sunday was self-inflicted. Russians loyal to the tsar assembled and peacefully marched toward the Winter Palace. The demonstrators’ goal was to politely suggest to their monarch that he should at least consider being a little less cruel for no reason. That idea ended with an ugly and yet appropriate irony. Nicholas II skipped town rather than handle the situation. Leaderless, the tsar’s soldiers panicked and mowed down the crowd, including all five people who still liked him. His regime barely survived the ensuing onslaught.

Nicholas II’s policies in peacetime were dangerously stupid, and his wartime policies doomed him. During World War I, Russia suffered more loss of life than any other nation, even France. The tsar’s government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and his subjects suffered intolerable food shortages. By 1917, the whole country was a wobbly house of cards sitting on a kerosene-soaked powder keg. Collapse was all but inevitable, but the spark came from an unusual source.

On March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, escalating civil disorder in Petrograd exploded. Thousands of enraged women went on strike, deserting their workplaces and taking to the streets. The simmering skirt-clad rebels, completely immune to arrest or any other kind of police action, fumed over to the industrial district and mobilized the men. It’s hard to not see a little humor in all this. At least some of these people must have cohabitated. That morning a typical man woke up, had breakfast with his wife, and went to the steel mill. Then a few hours later he happened to look down from the catwalk, and she was there too, shouting at him “Ivan, what are you doing? Why aren’t you overthrowing the government?” as if she shouldn’t have had to tell him. And he thought getting nagged to fix the sink was bad.

By dusk, 50,000 people joined the riots. Within days, that number ballooned to 250,000 people, including most of the city’s police and soldiers. Nicholas II couldn’t do much to stop them, in large part because he wasn’t there. Against the advice of every remotely intelligent person in his administration, Nicholas II was many miles away at the front trying to play general. The tsar was out of a job before he even knew there was a problem. The hated tyrant had finally been removed from power, but at a terrible cost. More than 1,300 of Petrograd’s citizens during a week of heavy fighting.

The fall of the tsar was bound to happen anyway, but it was Russian women who dealt the killing blow. Political intrigue would never again be strictly “men’s business.” As novel as it was for women to take to the streets and topple one of the most powerful men in the world, that wasn’t the most important feature of the February Revolution (Julian Calendar). 1917 saw the rise of the world’s first communist power, and it came about as the result of a cooperative effort between the sexes.

The women’s strike against the tsar had a strong ideological precedent. In the 1871 Paris Commune, women actively participated in the city’s defense, including armed combat. Perhaps the most noteworthy woman from this incident was the fiery anarchist agitator Louise Michel. After the commune’s defeat, most of its leaders were tried and executed. Louise dramatically demanded the death penalty, but to her frustration, she was exiled instead. Undeterred, Louise repeatedly returned to France to cause trouble and was still not executed. After she died of pneumonia in 1905, 100,000 people attended her funeral.

In the USA, entire communities rebelled against their robber baron oppressors. One of the most famous American revolutions was the 1892 steel workers’ uprising against Andrew Carnegie in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Hampton’s population organized themselves into a paramilitary force and defeated Carnegie’s private army of Pinkerton mercenaries. The American revolutionaries wisely decided to disband before 10,000 state militia troops arrived a short time later. It would be a sin to dismiss or downplay the bravery of American women in these acts of armed resistance against tyranny.

In 1901, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who unfortunately has been pushed to the margins of popular history as “Lenin’s wife,” wrote her groundbreaking pamphlet The Woman Worker. Krupskaya’s manifesto explained that the working woman could not be lifted up without lifting up the entire working class. Of course this was a good thing. It would be strange to empower a woman and not her family too.

Krupskaya served as secretary of the Bolshevik party and would go on to build the Soviet Union’s library program almost from scratch. Most importantly of all, she managed the Soviet education system for decades. Krupskaya established the ideological principles an entire generation of young girls grew up to. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that those girls grew up and, in 1941, staged the largest uprising of women in history. So far.

As I stated in my previous post, women have been equally important in human civilization since Day 1, and it would be disingenuous to argue otherwise. But now they collectively expressed their willingness to go above and beyond the work that had ever been asked of them before, and they demonstrated this willingness through action. Repeatedly.

The world’s ruling elites recognized the threat posed by women’s emancipation, and had already taken action against it, even before those angry woman workers flooded the cobblestone streets of Petrograd.

In the late 19th Century, the suffragette movement came together as a serious political force and rapidly gained momentum in the years leading up to World War I. Communist-influenced women’s emancipation movements included women of all classes, with a special emphasis on the plight of working class, blue collar, and rural peasant women. The majority of suffragettes were the polar opposite. Almost all of them were white middle and upper class women. Yes, they were white women, and that’s an important characteristic of suffragettes which I’ll discuss shortly. Suffragette demands reflected their privileged backgrounds. Lower-class women’s needs were of no concern to them.

The suffragette movement must not be confused with peaceful protestors. Even before hostilities broke out in the “war to end all wars,” first wave feminists were waging a war of their own. Suffragettes routinely engaged in terrorism. Any man who opposed the suffragette agenda, or was simply too slow to cave to it, could expect to be the target of arson attacks.

In 1914, horrifying battles of attrition raged in filthy, disease-ridden killing fields stretching across the continent. Meanwhile, suffragette leaders like the well-to-do Englishwoman Emeline Pankhurst saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Pankhurst and her co-conspirators quickly aligned themselves with the western world’s most powerful industrialists.

The women’s insurgency against the tsar would not be repeated in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, or any other place under feminist influence. Instead of providing a helping hand to their less privileged sisters, suffragettes explicitly worked against lower-class women. Industrialists and war hawk politicians were delighted at suffragette offers of an alliance and took them up on it. When blue collar people went on strike for a living wage and less brutal conditions, suffragettes mobilized women as strikebreakers.

One of the most appalling crimes the suffragettes committed was the white feather movement. In the early years of the war, the British army fought as a volunteer force and not all men were enthusiastic about dying horrible deaths for stupid reasons. War profiteering needs warm bodies. Guns don’t carry themselves into battle.

Not missing a beat, suffragettes set to work gathering human sacrifices for the military industrial complex. They riled up young women to go around with white feathers and publicly humiliate every military-age man they came across. Media outlets even spread propaganda appealing to girls’ romantic inclinations. Cheery little songs peddled the dream of a young fanatic accidentally antagonizing a “real” man in uniform, and he immediately falls in love with her. Men are famous for falling in love with women who are nasty to them.

The suffragette war and labor campaigns were troubling for a laundry list of reasons. The overall theme of their agenda was a capitalist one. Rather than liberate women and establish them as undisputed equals of men, suffragettes turned the two sexes against each other. Right from the beginning, the feminist movement was, in every sense of the term, a war against men. If men in white collar and many blue collar workplaces went on strike, bosses could replace them with women.

Needless to say, the wives, sisters, and daughters of striking men also suffered from female scabs breaking up walkouts. Strikes sometimes weren’t entirely male. Many professions were 100% women. Like their brothers in labor, striking women could find themselves fired and replaced by other women. Suffragettes managed to establish feminism as a capitalist weapon against men and women. That was quite an accomplishment, and I’m sure suffragettes’ wealthy owners patted them on the head for it.

Yet another huge benefit; women could be paid less. The wage gap is often mocked by conservatives as a lie. As usual, conservatives are inventing strawmen, then getting mad at arguments they made up themselves. Yes, obviously corporations don’t systematically pay women less for doing the same work as men. Even in the early days of women’s rights, abusing female workers would have been a tough practice to justify. That’s not what the wage gap means.

Communists aimed to encourage women to work while also lowering the unemployment rate to as close to 0% as humanly possible. These two goals might sound contradictory, but they weren’t. The labor theory of value is unworkable in real life and even the most communist economies always had to be at least somewhat market based. However, the principle of paying people for the value of their labor still guided the Soviet system’s moral compass.

At the end of the Civil War between Reds and Whites, the USSR rapidly industrialized, which made any helping hand useful, whether the hand’s owner was a man or a woman. Post-tsarist industrial centers were embarrassingly backwards and 70% of the population was rural, living in poverty conditions with no access to basic medical care, electricity, or running water. Therefore, it didn’t matter if a factory had open positions. There were always ten other factories under construction at any given moment, all of which would soon need their own labor forces.

In capitalist economies lacking sufficient regulatory controls and central direction, employers live by the Darwinian law of supply and demand. Capitalists always strive to create labor surpluses so those workers can be paid less. This is the Reserve Army of Labor and remains true even now. To name just one example, for a long time, American elites like Bill Gates and the late (good) Steve Jobs claimed they wanted to “help” high school students by teaching them all to code. It should be perfectly obvious that Gates doesn’t want to help anyone except himself. He advocates for as many people as possible to learn to code so he doesn’t have to pay them as much. What else would he do? Pay them more?

The long-term effects of feminists normalizing women entering the capitalist workforce was a significant gender-based wage gap. After women saturated a profession, like secretarial work for example, that whole labor force could get an un-ceremonial pay cut. In broader terms, American wages stagnated across the board. Less than two decades after the suffragettes became war hawks, woman workers’ benefit to the bottom line became obvious. During the Great Depression more than nine million families were evicted from their homes, and millions more fell into abject poverty. For obvious reasons, many women of all ages sought out work, and employers absolutely loved that. While men were being laid off in huge numbers, women’s employment rate spiked, with a predictable decline in wages.

Speaking of racism, American suffragettes brought yet another weapon to the capitalist arsenal; malignant racial hatred. Any self-respecting egalitarian society should grant women the right to vote, but many white American suffragettes wanted voting privileges for a poisonous reason.

In 1789, Congress passed the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting men of all races the right to vote. Over the following decades, the American suffragette movement exploded in popularity. These white women were partially motivated by jealousy of black men, but mostly, they didn’t want black people to vote at all.

Possibly the most egregious precedent set by first wave feminists was normalizing violence between the sexes. There might be earlier examples of this, but I can’t think of any. War hawk suffragettes encouraged women to aggressively put their hands on random men in public spaces and loudly insult them. No normal person would encourage young men to go around physically accosting random women, but this is exactly the type of behavior suffragettes conditioned people to accept as normal.

Police couldn’t lay a finger on those women in Petrograd, but that wasn’t a one-way relationship. The women weren’t inflicting violence on anyone either. If women can assault men, by extension, the opposite is also true. This is simple cause and effect; violence begets violence. The white feather movement was, in both a legal and moral definition, violence. Grabbing a man’s clothing and shoving a feather into his coat was a small act of violence that didn’t physically injure him, but it was still violence, the first step down an ugly slippery slope.

I have heard conservatives argue that women shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the military because this teaches women it is acceptable to shoot and hit men, and visa versa. That’s at best a fallacious argument. Everyone understands that battlefields have a different set of rules than polite peacetime society. Harming men and women in an opposing army doesn’t make violence acceptable back home. Woman warriors or not, one could hardly claim that random Englishmen were enemy soldiers, or that London sidewalks were battlefields.

Out of all the ruling elites’ victories against the human race, turning men and women against each other might be the biggest win of them all. Compelling the two halves of the world population to hate each other was an even greater success than perpetuating racism. Unfortunately, feminism and racism are intertwined with one another, and have been since the beginning.

For related reading, I suggest my dual movie review of Wonder Woman and Battalion.

Ian Kummer

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