Margins
The Soviet Woman book cover
The Soviet Woman
2017
First Published
4.10
Average Rating
174
Number of Pages

The revolutionary legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) has slipped into relative obscurity. This is somewhat surprising, because she was a voluminous writer – on politics, Marxist theory, country-specific economic studies, and the women’s question. She left letters, diaries, memoirs and pamphlets, theoretical tracts, articles, and creative literature. She authored two novels, The Love of Worker Bees and Red Love, which explored issues of love and socialist morality. Kollontai was resolutely opposed to bourgeois feminism, the term used to demarcate a form of feminism that was anti-Marxist and that drove an agenda of free love. She was, however, perhaps the only one amongst a small group of women and men communists in her time who engaged intellectually with issues of sexual morality in the context of women’s liberation. She envisioned the many possibilities for women’s freedom that lay locked in a socialist future, and set out the mechanisms by which women’s subordination – political and economic of course, but equally in terms of ideas and attitudes – could and must be undone under socialism. This volume brings together some of her most important writings on gender, sexuality and women’s liberation.

Avg Rating
4.10
Number of Ratings
42
5 STARS
31%
4 STARS
48%
3 STARS
21%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Aleksandra Kollontai
Aleksandra Kollontai
Author · 26 books
Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (Russian: Алекса́ндра Миха́йловна Коллонта́й — née Domontovich, Домонто́вич; March 31 [O.S. March 19] 1872 – 9 March 1952) was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1923, Kollontai was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Norway, one of the first women to hold such a post (Diana Abgar was earlier).
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved