|
|
International Working Women's Day
Lenin, V.L.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/mar/04.htmDate Written: 1921-03-04 Publisher: www.marxists.org Year Published: 1921 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX22871 First published on March 8, 1921 in a Supplement to Pravda No. 51. Abstract: -- Excerpt: The essence of Bolshevism and the Soviet power is to expose the falsehood and mummery of bourgeois democracy, to abolish the private ownership of land and the factories and concentrate all state power in the hands of the working and exploited masses. They, these masses, get hold of politics, that is, of the business of building the new society. This is no easy task: the masses are downtrodden and oppressed by capitalism, but there is no other way - and there can be no other way - out of the wage-slavery and bondage of capitalism. But you cannot draw the masses into politics without drawing in the women as well. For under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly - and this is the main thing - they remain in household bondage, they continue to be "household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family household. Subject Headings |