Authors

Discussion

This paper will explore the early years of the international Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) and discuss its transnational character. This research is anchored in the movement’s archives and its international magazine Die Kommunistische Fraueninternazionale.

I will specifically focus on the complex relationship of Communist Women with the Communist International’s (or Comintern) leadership. The paper will argue that despite the official egalitarian discourse, the relations between the Comintern’s Executive and Communist Women; between the communist parties’ male leaderships and the women’s structures within these parties; and in general between men and women within the international and national Communist movements were tense and often characterized by prejudice against women. The paper will demonstrate the opposition of the male leadership to Communist Women’s activities at different levels within the Soviet Union and a number of Western European countries. I will further discuss how such prejudices affected Communist Women’s campaigns designed to tackle the grievances of the “Women of the East” in Soviet Central Asia, the Near East and beyond.

I will argue that the opposition to women’s work was present within the communist movement years before Stalin’s Great Retreat and the deradicalization of the CWM usually attributed to the latter. That said, I demonstrate that in the early 1920s, Communist women actively and effectively fought against sexist att