Did The Bolshevik Revolution Improve Women's Lives In Russia

This essay will discuss whether or not the Bolshevik revolution did indeed improve women’s lives in Soviet Russia. Richard Stites, Author of, Women and the Revolutionary Process in Russia says yes. He explains the struggles and mishaps of women pre-1917 and after. He argues that sexual tensions seized to exist in the new “machine run non-bias classless society”. On the other hand, Francoise Navailh, author of, The Soviet Model, says that it did not improve the lives of women in Soviet Russia He argues, that even though women gained the right to vote, they lacked in any other improvements. Before nineteen-seventeen Imperial Russia was a patriarchal society with separate social classes like the rest of the world at the time. Russia was under absolute authoritarianism.

In the early twentieth century women made up fifteen to twenty percent the socialist movement. Their main goal was to gain the right to vote. In Russia eighty percent of the population consisted of peasants. At the outbreak of World War I most were pressed into service. Leaving all the women behind to take the man’s place in the workforce. “The war, always unpopular seemed hopeless, with no end in sight. For more than a year the country had been afflicted with bread riots and hunger strikes in which women played leading roles…The honor of initiating the revolution fell to women” (Navailh 174). It seemed that women were protesting because the men were out of the picture and they had to carry the burden of working a real job and also taking care of their children. When the czar abdicated and a new provisional government was formed, women were granted the right to vote. After that it seemed that the majority of the feminist movement disappeared. When the storming of the winter palace occurred women from the middle class up to the bourgeoisie defended it. Not all women wanted