Disclaimer: this is just my opinion based on posts we make on lemmygrad.
As the title suggests, it is of my opinion that we do not make a good enough effort at highlighting the accomplishments and contributions of women in revolutions besides Luxembourg and Kolontai. I myself am relatively ignorant on the subject, and it wasn’t until recently in history that we have started to take note of the vast contributions women made, oftentimes in the background, to revolutions or progress in general. I think that it’s a task that shouldn’t just be handed over for the socialist-feminists to deal with either. It should be a conscious effort to make women be seen in revolution and communist societies. It would help us become more approachable and make places like the ussr a real place that wasn’t just the place of great men like Stalin, Lenin or Marx. These happen to be the biggest names in communism but the revolution was not made by them but by the men and women that contributed their lives and careers in upholding communist nations. It is a positive thing to find the ones whose names we’ve forgotten, and give them new life in our minds.
For example: Nadezhda Krupskaya was the secretary of the Central committee and held important positions as a newspaper editor and helped create the Soviet education system. There is also an asteroid named after her.
Anyone got any favorite, underrated socialist women they know?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khertek_Anchimaa-TokaThe first non-hereditary female head of state was Tuvan communist Khertek Anchimaa-Toka, who was instrumental in eradicating illiteracy and promoting equal rights for women in the Tuvan People’s Republic and in Soviet society generally. Inspiring stuff.
Wow, that’s awesome! I had never heard of her.
o7 I totally agree!
One of my favorites is Gerda Lerner. She grew up fighting Nazis in Austria in the 1930s. At one point they came for her dad. Gerda refused to snitch so the Nazis threw her in prison. After she got out, she fled to the US and tried to have a normal life, got married, founded a communist group, had a couple kids. Then she went back to school and became one of the founders of the academic field of women’s history. She wrote The Creation of Patriarchy, a materialist history of the patriarchy that goes back over 5000 years.
That’s a very good book, read it recently.
Assata Shakur, Tupac’s Aunt. She was in the BLA and the Panthers. Hijacked a plane and escaped to Cuba. She’s still living there.
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Olga Benário Prestes was a German-Brazillian communist revolutionary. Her story is very tragic but one of the most important in Brazillian communism militancy.
Yes! While admittedly I don’t know for sure if she ever identified herself as socialist (it seems more likely than not), I have a great deal of respect for Dorothy W. Douglas, an economic anthropologist who closely studied life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Polish People’s Republic. This is one of my favorite books and it helped me develop a more mature understanding of the people’s republics. (It seems that she also studied child labor in Imperial America, but I haven’t read that one yet.)
There are various other women that I could mention, but I can’t say with absolute certainty if they were socialists either. Others that I could mention are people that I can’t identify.
Hannie Schaft. Dutch resistance fighter that had ties with the communist party. Killed some Nazi’s before she sadly got executed.
Kollontai is very underrated IMO, I’m still going through a lot of her works.
Ursula Kuczynski is one of my favourites. Spied for the Soviet Union and defended the GDR to the last moment.
Shoutout to 李贞, then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zhen_(female_general)
Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, General Secretary of the PCE (until the 1960s). Also a fighter in the Spanish Civil War
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I don’t know if you could say they were socialist thinkers but Lyudmilla Pavlichenko and the 588th Night bomber regiment were based.
