APPENDIX

Lenin, On The Emancipaticn of Women, Progress Publishers, Moscow (n.d.)

Large scale machine i industry, which ccncentrates masses of workers whe often
come from various parts of the country, absolutely refuses to tolerate survivals of

patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked by a truly "contemptuous atti-
_ tude to the past”. It is this break with obsolete tradition that is one of the sub-

stantial conditions which have created the nossibility and evoked the necessity of
regulating preduction and of public control over it. In particular,...it must be
stated that the drewing of women and juveniles into preduction is, at hottom, pro-
gressive. It is indisputable that the capitalist factory places these categories of
the working poonulation in narticularly hard conditions but endeavors te completely

ban the work of women and juveniles in industry, or tc maintain the patriarchal man-

ner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary and utovian. By destroy-
ing the patriarchal isclation of these categories of the ccoulation who formerly
never emerged from the narrow circle of domestic family relationshivs, by drawing
them into direct participation in social production,...industry stimulates their de-

velopment and increases their indenendence. (v.15)

Notwithstanding all the laws emancinating woman, she continues to he a demestic
slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies, and degrades her,

Chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and. she wastes her lahor on barbarously

unproductive, petty, nerve~racking, stultifying and crushing drudaery. The real
emancipation of women, real commmism, will begin only where and when an all-out
Struggle beains (led by the proletariat wielding the state nover) against this netty
housekeeoing , or rather when its wholesale transformation into. a large-scale social-
ist economy begins.

_- Do we in practise pay sufficient attention tc es questicn, which in theory
every Commmist considers indisputable? Of course not. Do we take proper care of the
shoots of communism which already exist in this sphere? Again, the answer is no.
Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens. ~~. here we have examples of
these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday 1 mans , involving nothing pempous ,
grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancinate WOMEN 5. really lessen and a-
bolish their inequality with man as regards their role -in. social. production and pub-
lic life. These means are not new, they (like all the material nrerequisites for soc~
ialism) were created by large-scale canitalism. Put: under capitalism they remained,
first, a rarity, and secondly ~~ which is narticularly important -- either profit-
making enterprises 7 with all the worst features of sneculation, profiteering, cheat
ing and fraud, or “acrobats of bourgeois charity”, which the best workers ‘rightly
hated and despised. (pn. 61-62).

You all know that even when women have full rights , they still remain downtrod-
den because all housework is left tc them. In most cases, housework is the most un-
productive, the most savage and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is. exception~
ally petty and does not include anything that would in any way See the Gevelon-
ment of the women. (p. 67)

We are setting up mdel institutions ,. Rear rare and nurseries, that will
emancipate women from housework.... |

We say that the emancipation of the. work (ers must he Gfracted by the workers
themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancination of working women is a mat-
ter for the working women themselves. The working wemen must themselves See to Lt
that such institutions are developed, and this activity will bring about a complete
change in their nosition as compared with what it was under the old, capitalistic
seciety. (p.63)