Colleagues may be interested in the following articles:
John
McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Comintern, Communist women leaders and the
struggle for women’s liberation in Britain between the wars: a political and
prosopographical investigation, Part 1’, Critique: Journal of Socialist
Theory, 50 (1), pp. 51–105.
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FJTTS325GNNXGRRASJCD/full?target=10.1080/03017605.2022.2050532
John
McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Comintern, Communist women leaders and the
struggle for women’s liberation in Britain between the wars: a political and
prosopographical investigation, Part 2’, Critique: Journal of Socialist
Theory, 50 (1), pp. 107–153.
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YXJJWRYDXGAMUDQEHQXH/full?target=10.1080/03017605.2022.2050533
These
articles examine a small group of women active in the labour movement who
participated in the leadership of British Communism between the foundation of
the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920/21 and the outbreak of the
Second World War. We were able to assemble reasonably fully data on 15 of the
18 women who sat on the Central Committee (CC) of the CPGB during its first
twenty years. They range from well-documented figures such as Helen Crawfurd
and Dora Montefiore to hitherto largely unknown women such as Annie Cree,
Esther Henrotte and Nellie Usher. The sample included women who feature in the
historiography but largely as names, such as Kath Duncan and Beth Turner.
The
two essays provide miniature life histories of our protagonists which focus on
factors such as their social origins; ethnicity; religion; education;
occupation; previous affiliations; political attitudes; and career in the
Communist Party.
In
accordance with prosopographical method, collective biography is complemented
by a statistical survey of this cohort of unusual women who made up no more
than 13% of the total CC membership between the wars. This figure is small,
even when compared with the percentage of women in the party as a whole and is
suggestive of the subordination of women not only in society but in a self-proclaimed
revolutionary party. The group was substantially proletarian but they were more
middle-class than their male CC counterparts or in the party at large. A
majority of women leaders – 60% – had Communist partners; however, it is
perhaps surprising that in 70% of such cases it was the woman who was more
prominent politically. We found high turnover among the female CC
representatives – a factor which hindered construction of a strong cadre – 83%
of our sample served only a single term on the committee. If children and the
calls of family life intruded, in these cases it did not preclude high levels
of activism. Moreover, measured by longevity of CPGB membership, these women
exhibited greater loyalty to the party than comparable male CC representatives.
Leading women exercised the right to be active in a revolutionary organisation and
participate in the general activity of the party as well as specialist work
amongst women. On the whole – and on what we know – they respected conventional
gender roles and sexual mores and with some exceptions offered little explicit
critique of the bourgeois family or the subordinate, secondary role women
usually played in the CPGB. These and other findings are further explored in
the two essays.
The
study contextualises the lives and practice of Communist women in the theory of
women’s liberation adopted by the early Comintern and the CPGB. This derived
from the innovative work of Friedrich Engels and its development and
application by Marxists such as August Bebel and Clara Zetkin in Germany;
Alexandra Kollontai and Konkordiya Samoilova in Russia; and in Britain Dora
Montefiore of the British Socialist Party and Lily Gair Wilkinson in the
Socialist Labour Party. Their approach was blessed by the Second International
but received a fillip from the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was carried over
from the Second to the Third International, approved by Lenin and spearheaded
by Zetkin. Any successful struggle for the meaningful liberation of women, the
Comintern asserted, could not pivot on the struggle of women of all classes to
achieve equal rights and overcome male oppression within the economic and
social status quo. What was necessary was a struggle of women workers in
partnership with their male, working-class comrades to overcome capitalism –
the root cause of women’s oppression and exploitation. The feminists, the
‘equal rightsters’, who pursued equality between the sexes, sometimes within
the bourgeoisie, invariably within the limits set by capitalism, would never
liberate women in any complete human sense. That required that women transcend
their role under capitalism in the reproduction of labour power. They would only
experience full parity and full humanity as equal partners controlling a
socialised productive process and managing the means of production.
The
CPGB never really implemented this approach which demanded the participation of
male Communists working beside their female comrades in the organisation and
execution of agitation among women. The party never adequately educated itself
in the Marxist theory and practice of women’s liberation – or critically
examined the failure of Marxist theory to come to terms with patriarchy and
chauvinism within the working class. Inability to explore the material and
social factors underpinning socially structured prejudice contributed to the
party’s failure in practice. Thwarted by the antagonistic context of interwar
Britain, a weak, overburdened, economistic party and leadership permeated by
conventional consciousness, the degeneration of the Comintern and encroachment
of Stalinism, women’s liberation was shunted into a siding signposted ‘women’s
work’.
Recuperating
revolutionary women frequently hidden from history and representing suppressed
traditions is its own reward. At a time when the socialist left is entering a
fifth decade of sequential decline and feminism has been substantially co-opted
by capitalism, revisiting this past may provide insight into how we reached the
present impasse and provoke rethinking as to how we transcend it.
John
McIlroy and Alan Campbell
