94
Sofia Perovskaya
1853–1881
Listen up, girls! There will be times in your life when MEN tell you that you can’t achieve your dreams. I know, right? You will be UNDERESTIMATED in your abilities and it will be TOTALLY UNFAIR because you are STRONG and GORGEOUS and you can succeed in WHATEVER you want to do, whether it’s raising a family, or painting beautiful art, or running a MARATHON, or thriving in BUSINESS, or ASSASSINATING THE TSAR OF RUSSIA.
This is exactly what happened to Sofia Perovskaya in the 1870s and 80s. SOME people – who were men – thought that just because she was a woman, she couldn’t follow her socialist revolutionary dreams and become a terrorist and organise a successful plot to kill the hated Alexander II and be the first woman in Russia to be executed for a political crime. Men are always underestimating women – but Sofia sure proved them wrong!
Before the 1860s, Russian socialist radicalism was a bit of an old boy’s club. As things got more radical in the 60s, though, the women took revolutionary matters into their own hands. They started gathering with their gal pals to talk about girly things, like securing housing and employment, having a bit of a moan about the fact that women couldn’t work or move about without the permission of their husbands and fathers, and assassinating the tsar. You know, just girly stuff. In fact, some of what they talked about was so girly that they occasionally banned men from attending their gatherings. Sometimes men just don’t get assassinating the tsar.
These radicals were still ladies, though, weren’t they? So naturally, they also loved a bit of fashion! To get the 1860s #feminist #look, you had to trade in your fancy gentlewoman clothes for a plain dark wool dress, ditch your male chaperone, flee your oppressive family, wear blue glasses, smoke publicly, talk too loudly, and sacrifice your very life in the name of revolution. Men just HATE it when women talk too loudly and assassinate the tsar!
In the 1870s, Sofia joined the Tchaikovsky Circle of medical student revolutionaries, who spread socialist propaganda among their classmates, in factories and in villages. They also held night classes for workers to learn about why they were being screwed, and began to build up a workers’ organisation for the first time ever in Russia. The Circle was made up of seven women and 23 men, men who understood that chicks dig revolutions.
Sofia’s Tchaikovsky group wasn’t the only revolutionary circle – another one, the Fritsche group, was made up of 13 young Russian women attending university in Zurich, just hanging out, studying hard, and plotting for the coming socialist revolution. They were having a great time until in 1873 the Russian government decreed that they all had to stop studying abroad and come home, accusing them of fomenting political unrest, sleeping around, and giving each other abortions. You know how college girls are with their abortions! So they came back to Russia and, much to the consternation of the Russian government, became labourers and carried on their fomenting.
Anyway, the 70s went on in a frenzy of revolutionary fervour, with feminists focusing on the ways in which women were exploited by the economic fuckery of their country. It was the tsarist rule that made things terrible, so it would be the tsar who had to go. A split in the circle ended up producing a new group keen on a bit of violence and terror, the Narodnaia Volia, or ‘People’s Will’. Their plan was to assassinate the tsar, which, as we know, was kinda Sofia’s thing. Here she was, the daughter of a family of the wealthy landed gentry, ready to fuck shit up and suffer the consequences.
Sofia wasn’t to be the first plucky female to succeed in the Russian assassination game. Every guerilla warfare fightin’ girl needs a good role model, right? Hers was Vera Zasulich, from south Russia, who shot the governor of St Petersburg in January 1878, a man who had once beaten up a political prisoner for not removing his hat in his presence. Men, right? Anyway she tried but failed to kill him and got away with it.
By the time it was Sofia’s turn to have a go, there had already been FIVE failed attempts to assassinate Alexander II. Sometimes it takes a woman’s touch to get it right, in life, in business and in murderous plots. She watched his movements, organised her agents, and gave the signal for the exact moment that the bombs should be lobbed at the tsar’s passing horse and carriage. These are the kind of leadership skills every girl needs to learn!
Sofia rejected the leniency that she might have received for being a woman, instead choosing to lean in and be hanged along with four other men in on the plot, proving that women really can have it all.
So don’t forget, girls – you gotta live, laugh, love, and never, EVER listen to anyone who tells you that just because you’re a woman, you can’t assassinate the tsar.
95
Alexandra Kollontai
1872–1952
You probably know of International Women’s Day as the day that brands mark each year by selling women clothing, pharmaceuticals and financial services via the medium of empowering ads. But did you know that you can trace the origins of this important annual marketing tradition to long before Nike wanted us to buy their trainers and chase our dreams? It’s hard to imagine, but it’s true: the original International Women’s Day was nothing less than a communist plot. And nobody does a communist plot like the Russians.
In 1913, the Duma, the Russian parliament, reluctantly designated International Woman’s Day to be the official girl version of Labor Day: socialism, but pinker and frillier. The idea had originated at the 1910 International Socialist Conference in Copenhagen, the culmination of several years of Russian feminism on the march. Women of different political bents and social classes (though mostly posh ladies, as these things often started out) gathered to discuss women’s suffrage and create the League for Women’s Equality. The first Women’s Day march took place in 1913, and included a contingent of Bolsheviks, whom we’ll hear more about shortly.
Alexandra Kollontai was born in St Petersburg in 1872 to a wealthy family, but would grow up to be the most important Bolshevik feminist, and one of the first female ambassadors anywhere in the world. For Alexandra, the only way to improve the status of women was to grant them economic independence and power. Russia before the revolution was a largely peasant society. It was shit to be a peasant, and even shittier to be a peasant woman, and so Alexandra worked to organise poor working women and develop a feminist iteration of Marxism. (If you don’t know much about Marxism, just go to your nearest university, find a house party, and ask the first man you see with glasses and a beard to tell you more. He’ll explain it.)
Russian feminist women wanted a change to repressive divorce laws. They wanted equality in education and work and the law, and access to birth control. These were radical ideas at the time, but thankfully, 100 years later, nobody denies that women should have access to whatever birth control they need! Glad we sorted that one out. But the Bolshevik platform for women wasn’t just ‘everybody gets divorces and birth control!’ They wanted to radically overhaul the family unit itself. Only by destroying the family would women be free to work and be educated and thus empowered. Social childcare and communal kitchens would free working women from the unpaid labour of home.
For Alexandra Kollontai, the struggle for women’s rights was a ‘struggle for bread’, as she said. Many, but not all male Bolsheviks (#NotAllMaleBolsheviks for those following along on Twitter) thought that women were too politically backward and too uneducated to be able to really understand Marxism, socialism, and the revolutionary ideal. (If you did make it to that house party and found the guy with the glasses and the beard, you may find yourself running into the same trouble.)
Russian women would prove those bearded glasses-wearers wrong, however, and how else, but by starting the Russian Revolution itself in 1917. On International Woman’s Day in 1917, masses of women textile workers called a general strike. It was March 12th, or February 7th by the Russian calendar, and so is known as the February Revolution. The tsar abdicated in the wake of the mass protests, and a provisional government took charge and granted women
the right to vote – the first major power in the world to do so. (Sorry, New Zealand, I know you gave women this right in 1893, but you’re just so little and far away.)
When the provisional government dragged its feet about pursuing women’s issues, still convinced women were too ignorant to do socialist politics, Alexandra Kollontai told them off: ‘But wasn’t it we women, with our grumbling about hunger, about the disorganisation in Russian life, about our poverty and the sufferings born of the war, who awakened a popular wrath?’ she asked them. ‘Didn’t we women go first out to the streets in order to struggle with our brothers for freedom, and even if necessary to die for it?’ Yes, Alexandra, but don’t be so naggy, God.
Alexandra Kollontai also advocated for a sexual revolution. She saw romance itself as a trap set by men to assert their ownership of women, but understood that women still wanted and needed to have sex and so they may as well have it. She said that having sex should be no more shocking or significant than ‘drinking a glass of water’. To be promiscuous was to be revolutionary; to be prudish was to be bourgeois. But ‘if love begins to enslave’ women, Alexandra wrote, ‘she must make herself free; she must step over all love tragedies and go on her own way.’ Jealousy between women must be overcome to achieve true sisterhood, and she wrote novels which explored these radical ideas. Some of her books were so sexually explicit that they were banned or censored, including one which may or may not have been about an affair that Lenin may or may not have had.27
Alexandra also would have written great Valentine’s Day cards: ‘Monogamy is a bourgeois construct,’ the outside would say, and on the inside it would just say, ‘I slept with your friend Pavel.’
Anyway, after another revolution – the October Revolution by the Russian calendar – the Bolsheviks came to power, and Alexandra became the first commissar of social welfare. Between the two revolutions, the more radical socialists had struggled with the quite bourgeois provisional government. But by December 1917, the Bolsheviks had repealed existing marriage and divorce laws, and decreed that the clergy no longer had the power to carry out marriages, and that only civil marriages were valid. Women could no longer be fired for getting pregnant, and would receive paid maternity leave and breaks to breastfeed. New laws mandated that men and women should be paid the same for equal work, another radical concept that thankfully 100 years later has been totally sorted out all over the world.
In October 1918, a new Family Code declared that children born in or out of wedlock were equal before the law. To divorce, either party simply had to say that they didn’t want to be married any more. Adoption was abolished. Why? I don’t know, it was a crazy time, maybe a man with glasses and a beard can explain the hindrance of adoption to an equal society. Alexandra and other more ~extremist feminist socialists~ went so far as to say that all children should be nationalised. As I said, crazy times. But after the shocking destruction of a tsarist society in which women were the property of men, there were no bad ideas.
Well, until there were. In the summer of 1918, a devastating civil war broke out between the Bolsheviks and a strange alliance of liberals and monarchists and peasant rebels and foreign interventionists and proto fascists – a war that would claim 13 million lives out of a population of 136 million. Things got bad for Russians, and worse for Russian women, living under a state of practical anarchy in which soldiers on all sides raped women of both sides and justified it with whichever ideology they happened to support. Instead of fighting for reforms, women were fighting to stay alive.
After the civil war ended in a Bolshevik victory, the new Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin tried to revive the cause of women and equality between the sexes. Lenin said that women should run for election, and that ‘every cook must learn to rule the state’. The head of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky – whose official title was the ‘Commissar of Enlightenment’ – said that, ‘A true Communist stays home and rocks the cradle,’ while his wife goes out to evening classes or party meetings, a line that all modern wives ought to employ. As for Alexandra Kollontai, she headed up the new Zhenotdel, the Women’s Department, which was tasked with the cause of educating children, and organising women workers and peasants, often representing them against shitty male managers in workplace disputes. By the middle of the 1920s, half a million women activists were travelling the country to indoctrinate, educate, and support women. When Alexandra eventually opposed Lenin, he made her ambassador to Norway to get rid of her. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin rose to power, and in 1930 he dissolved the Zhenotdel. Alexandra became a supporter of Stalin, but you kind of had to in order to stay alive.
The lesson we can learn from all of this, in any case, is that in order to properly mark International Women’s Day, instead of staring slack-jawed at an emotionally stirring ad for shoes, we must nationalise Nike and redistribute its trainers among the masses. We must nationalise Forever 21. We must nationalise all the brands, and then nationalise them some more, and then we must ban love. It’s what the original Women’s Day marchers would have wanted.
96
Juana Azurduy
1781–1862
Juana Azurduy de Padilla was born in what is now Bolivia in 1781, and would become famous as a fighter in the struggle for independence from Spain that began in 1809. Juana was orphaned early on, the daughter of an indigenous mother and a Spanish father, and went to live in a convent. She began her training as a nun at age 12, but was expelled at 17 for being too rebellious, which would later literally be her job, so the joke’s on those boring nuns. Juana then met a dreamy soldier, Manuel Padilla, and so Jesus lost another bride to an IRL man. Sorry, Jesus! You can’t have all the girls.
Juana and her boo fought together against Spain from 1809, and joined an army sent from Buenos Aires in 1811. When they lost and Spain regained control of the region, the family’s lands were confiscated, and Juana and her children were captured by the royalists. Dreamy Manuel rescued them, however, and they all went into hiding from where they recruited 10,000 soldiers to fight a guerilla war. They enjoyed a few victories against the royalists, but also suffered the deaths of their four children from malnourishment while in hiding. Juana later became pregnant again, though, and even carried on fighting the Spanish while carrying her fifth child.
Juana was made a lieutenant colonel by the rebel government after she led a number of successful battles. Manuel died in 1816 (RIP), and she gave birth to their daughter in the middle of fighting a military campaign, which has long been considered among the worst ways to give birth. But hey, she was in charge of 6,000 men who weren’t going to command themselves.
Bolivia became independent in 1825, and Juana retired from her fightin’ days to live in her home city with her daughter. But the newly independent Bolivia would not return the lands that the Spanish had taken from her and her husband and so she lived in poverty, probably pretty fucking pissed off. The famous liberator of South America Simón Bolívar once paid her a visit, felt guilty, and arranged for her to start receiving a pension. He also told a fellow independence leader that, ‘This country should not be named Bolivia in my honour, but Padilla or Azurduy, because it was they who made it free.’ In the end, however, he must have been like, ‘Just kidding definitely call it Bolivia lol,’ as that’s what it’s called today.
97
Rosa Luxemburg
1871–1919
This book is very innocent. It contains no secret political agenda. If this book DID contain a secret political agenda, it most certainly wouldn’t be for all the girls of the world to grow up to be radical leftist revolutionaries who, inspired by the tales of heroic women who came before them, take it upon themselves to overthrow capitalism. That would be absurd!
If you happen to know somebody who MIGHT want to overthrow capitalism, however – perhaps your friend who goes to another school – you should refer them to the life and works of Rosa Luxemburg for tips.
Rosa was born in 1871 in Poland, which was then part of th
e Russian Empire, and moved with her family to Warsaw when she was little. She became politicised from a very young age, devoting her free time to mastering the works of Marx, as all little girls love to do. Rosa and her family were Jewish, and lived through anti-Jewish pogroms that swept Russia in the 1880s. At age 14, she saw four socialists hanged from the Warsaw citadel. Instead of thinking, ‘better not be a socialist, then’, Rosa launched herself into left-wing politics. She was denied an award at school for being a good student because she had such ~rebellious tendencies~. By 19, she had to leave Poland out of fear of arrest for her underground revolutionary activities.
Women weren’t allowed to attend university in Tsarist Russia, because of course, girls are known to be icky and have cooties, so instead she went to Zurich in Switzerland to continue her studies. Rosa ended up in Germany working with the left-wing branch (naturally) of the Social Democratic Party. She was a brilliant commentator and a gifted public speaker who could command great crowds despite being about three inches tall.28 And above all else, she wrote and wrote and wrote, both for the public in pamphlets and articles, and in long letters to her gal pals to swap ideas about revolution.
One of Rosa’s most important intellectual feats was to come up with a theory about something called the accumulation of capital. How can an ever-increasing amount of commodities be sold in the same market in order to sustain the growth of capitalism? Can we just buy more and more and more shit we don’t need forever? My bedroom says yes.
Of course we buy shit all the time. For instance, you had to buy this book, instead of being issued a copy by the state, which is a shame. Well, unless you’re in a library. Or you’re a thief. Or borrowed it from your pal Roz. Or maybe you live many years from now in the Utopian Socialist Republic of Larkmenia on the faraway planet of Ogg, where money has been replaced with the free exchange of warm, tender hugs. In which case, welcome, and thank you to whoever thought to bring this humble book along with them on the Thousand Years’ Journey, when all Earth’s surviving beings fled the planet to seek refuge from the Great Dronesmog of 2051.
100 Nasty Women of History Page 28