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CHAPTER 1

State Feminism and the Woman Question

In August 2010, I drove to the remote village of Gabarevo. I had scheduled an interview with a ninety-year-old Bulgarian woman named Krastina Tchomakova. She had worked for many years with the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement (CBWM) and attended the first United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 as part of her country's official delegation. The problem with interviewing nonagenarians, however, is that time does not operate consistently across the generations. When I arrived at Tchomakova's cottage, she was sitting outside in her garden waiting for me in front of a huge pile of tomatoes, cucumbers, and green onions. After a friendly greeting, I understood that her nephew was preparing some fresh chicken in the kitchen.

"Please don't go to any trouble. I'm not hungry. It's too hot to eat," I explained in Bulgarian. "I would just like to ask you some questions about International Women's Year and your work with the Committee."

"It's not too hot to eat," she said. "I'm hungry. I want to eat salad." She slid a knife across the table toward me and pointed to a bowl.

Tchomakova was small and a bit hunched over. She wore a loose, light pink cotton smock and squinted her eyes at me. The heat blurred the air, and the nephew brought me a glass of water. Perhaps she would talk while I cut the vegetables, I thought, but I had no way of taking notes. I did not bring my digital recorder because I knew from previous experience that older Bulgarians spoke less freely when I recorded them. I sat down, pulled the cutting board toward me, and began chopping.

"Can you tell me about how you became interested in women's issues?" I said. I sliced an onion, and my eyes watered.

"The onions are fresh from my garden. Very tasty," she said.

"How did you come to work for the Committee?" I rubbed my eye with the back of my wrist.

She waved a hand. "After lunch. I'm hungry."

I had hoped to meet her for two hours, but she clearly wanted to make a day of it. I inquired again about her work for the women's committee. She discussed an aphid that attacked her tomatoes and the challenges of beekeeping. I asked about Mexico City. She told me about the medicinal uses of stinging nettles.

I considered aborting my mission, but I had come all this way. Tchomakova had memories of life in Bulgaria before World War II, and she was twenty-four years old when the Bulgarian communists came into power in 1944. Her mind seemed sharp, and she could tell me firsthand about the radical changes in women's lives during the forty-five-year communist era. She had lived through it all, and because of her work with theCBWM, she had played a part in realizing those changes. I understood the perils of oral history interviews with someone of her vintage; she might embellish accounts to make herself look good. Of course, Tchomakova would tell me things the way she remembered them, and I would be dealing with her specific take on historical events. Like Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, the same tale could be told from many different points of view, and I would be getting only Tchomakova's version. But with two decades lived before communism, and two decades after, no one could have as rich a perspective as she. I was desperate to hear it. There were not too many Tchomakovas left in 2010.

I asked her another direct question about the International Women's Year, but she wanted to gossip about the other women I had interviewed. She chatted for another hour as we ate lunch, ignoring me. She complained about the state of Bulgaria and the corruption of contemporary politicians.

Almost two hours into our meeting, I finally got frustrated. "I would love to hear about your time in Mexico. Was 1975 the first time you visited that country?"

She stared at me, her eyes blank. I was about to pack my things when she sighed. "I was born in 1920, just three years after the Russian Revolution. And I hated that my brothers worked less than my sisters because we stayed at home while they went to school. I wanted to learn to read, too."

I took out my notebook.

"In Mexico, we showed the world what socialism could do for women," she continued and proceeded to speak uninterrupted for the next ninety minutes. She made my trip to Gabarevo well worth the effort.

After that first encounter, I met Tchomakova once more, in March 2012, and our two interviews helped me understand the behind-the-scene details of how the state socialist program for women's emancipation had worked on the level of individual lives. The vast majority of the scholarship I had read about women in the Eastern Bloc focused on the level of policy and implementation. It concentrated on the nonindependence of the women's committees and the ways in which the socialist project for solving the "woman question" differed from the efforts of first and second wave feminists in the Western democracies. But at ninety-two, Tchomakova told me a story about women's emancipation in Bulgaria from an eyewitness point of view. In her mind, one of the most important achievements of state socialism in her country was the progressive support given to women and families, support that was a fundamental component of her own socialist beliefs.

Krastina Tchomakova joined the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) in 1938. She read the works of Marx and Engels in secret, dreaming of a different world than that of interwar Bulgaria. A tsar with fascist sympathies ruled her country, and in 1941 the Bulgarian prime minister signed the Tripartite Pact and joined the Axis powers in World War II. In 1944, the local communists (supported by Moscow) overthrew their government — in a revolution or a coup d'état, depending on whom you asked. Tchomakova rose quickly through the Party ranks. Her early efforts focused on expanding educational opportunities for girls and teaching illiterate women to read. After a decade of working in the cities and villages surrounding Gabarevo, Tchomakova moved to Sofia to help organize women workers in the trade unions. Her passion for women's issues and her fierce loyalty to the BCP landed her a job at the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement. For twenty-seven years she worked in the CBWM, trying to put her socialist beliefs into practice. I had found letters written by Tchomakova in the Central State Archives and knew she was a fierce advocate for women's right to education and to join male-dominated professions. Tchomakova penned many impassioned missives to hold male political elites accountable to their own core principles regarding the woman question.

Tchomakova took her inspiration from a long line of socialist thinkers who proposed state-centric solutions to women's issues. Although women had been arguing for their rights since the days of the French Revolution, it was the German socialist August Bebel who published the impassioned tome Woman and Socialism in 1879. In his exhaustive account of the history of women's subjugation, Bebel argued that private property and bourgeois monogamous marriage perpetuated women's oppression. Only with the overthrow of bourgeois property relations could women break the chains that bound them to men in a patriarchal system of domination. Written in the late 19th century, Bebel's vision of women living in socialist societies might have read like science fiction given the prevailing conditions of women's lives at the time:

In the new society woman will be entirely independent, both socially and economically. She will not be subjected to even a trace of domination and exploitation, but will be free and man's equal, and mistress of her own lot. Her education will be the same as man's. ... She chooses an occupation suited to her wishes, inclinations and abilities, and works under the same conditions as man. ... She studies, works, enjoys pleasures and recreation with other women or with men, as she may choose or as occasions may present themselves. In the choice of love she is as free and unhampered as man. She woos or is wooed, and enters into a union prompted by no other considerations but her own feelings. This union is a private agreement, without the interference of a functionary, just as marriage has been a private agreement until far into the middle ages. Here Socialism will create nothing new, it will merely reinstate, on a higher level of civilization and under a different social form, what generally prevailed before private property dominated society [emphasis in original].

The collective ownership of the means of production and the full incorporation of women into the labor force provided the first steps toward this egalitarian future. Bebel believed that women were the equals of men, but (long before the notion of social constructivism or gender performativity) he asserted that the conventions necessary to support the institution of private property proscribed women's roles in society. As a Bulgarian peasant growing up in interwar Bulgaria, Tchomakova (and women like her) understood firsthand how agrarian poverty limited opportunities for all Bulgarians, but especially girls.

Bebel's work inspired that of Friedrich Engels, and his book later excited the minds of countless young women who stumbled upon The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). For instance, Maria Dinkova was a journalist who served with Tchomakova as a member of the official delegation to Mexico City in 1975. Born in 1928, Dinkova was in her late teens when she first discovered socialist literature on the woman question. In the year after Bulgaria became a communist country, the new government mass-produced works of classic socialist theory and made them available to the population. Writing retrospectively in 2003, Dinkova described her first encounter with a work of nonfiction as something almost supernatural:

I have spent a significant part of my life searching for statistical correlations among the particles, cells, and the elements of human society. Because of this, I have long held the conviction that the magical is intrinsic to the universe, to what we call a society, as well as to the life path of the individual. ... Some of the most important things in my life have happened in a magical way. The first serious book (i.e., not a novel or a poetry collection) I bought, and that opened my eyes to scholarly literature, was The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Engels. I saw it inadvertently on a bookstand on a corner on a main street in Plovdiv in 1945, and I picked it up, solely because of the intriguing title. I was only seventeen — a student dressed in her black apron — a little girl, but with a very famous work by a great pioneering teacher in her hands.

Engels kindled in me a permanent interest in the problematic issues of women and the family. After reading Engels, I started studying Ancient Society by Lewis Morgan ... [and] surveyed Lily Braun's The Woman Question and August Bebel's Woman and Socialism. The fact that several years later I would have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the great women's revolution that was powerfully unraveling throughout the twentieth century was really magic: a coincidence of numerous fortuitous circumstances.

Dinkova's autodidactic education on the woman question relied on these classic socialist texts. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels postulated that humankind once lived in a primitive communal matriarchy where all property was shared in common by large group families with women in charge. The key to sexual equality among the hunters and collectors lay in women's economic contributions. Even if there existed a gendered division of labor, women's work was valued equally to men's in sustaining the extended family or clan. Engels proposed that the establishment of private property led to the final overthrow of the "mother right," precipitating the subjugation of woman. Where there is promiscuity in group marriage (or serial monogamy where parties are free to leave at any time), only maternity can be assured. To ensure that accumulated land and property passed to legitimate sons, Engels suggested that women's bodies became a form of private property. To protect their accumulated assets, wealthy men constructed the state, which in turn created laws and the means by which to enforce those laws: the police. Using the power of their new state, men ensured the fidelity of their wives with legal marriage contracts and penal codes criminalizing adultery (for women). Since women constituted the first class of people to be oppressed by private property, Engels argued, they had everything to gain from its overthrow, thus rendering women the natural allies of the communist cause.

The German socialist Clara Zetkin built on the ideas of Bebel and Engels and believed that socialism was morally superior to capitalism because only the former could guarantee the full realization of women's talents and capabilities. The Russian Alexandra Kollontai also became a strident advocate for women's rights, including a new sexual morality that would free women from their economic dependence on men. Kollontai believed that love and sexuality should be completely untethered from economic considerations, comparing the "winged eros" of romantic relations between equals to the "wingless eros" of relationships between men and women determined by the laws of supply and demand. But in a world without birth control, and steeped in thousands of years of patriarchal culture relegating women to the private sphere under the control of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, how could women's emancipation be realized in practice? How could a poor peasant girl such as Krastina Tchomakova, born in rural Bulgaria to illiterate parents, ever rise up to become a member of an official diplomatic delegation to a United Nations conference halfway across the world?

Socialists argued that women needed to work together with men to overthrow bourgeois elites and that they should do this without creating separate, women-only organizations or movements. This penchant for working within the larger party structures derives from the initial debates during the First International Conference of Socialist Women in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907. The congress occurred immediately beforethe International Socialist Congress, and women delegates from fourteen countries attended the meeting. Fifty-eight women — in their long belle époque dresses, hats, and gloves — met to determine the future direction of the socialist movement's policy toward their working sisters. The agenda focused on uniting the socialist parties of Europe around the common cause of winning universal suffrage for women as part of the general campaign to gain voting rights for all workers. In her book on prerevolutionary women's activism, Rochelle Ruthchild argues that early twentieth-century Russian feminists were all socialists, and all socialists were feminists (in the sense that the two projects were indistinguishable from each other), but elsewhere in Europe a deep chasm often separated the "bourgeois feminists" from the socialist women. In 1907, the German Social Democrats (led by Zetkin) demanded full suffrage for all women, but socialist representatives from Austria, Belgium, England, and France advocated for "qualified" women's suffrage, meaning that only wealthier, educated women would earn the right to vote.

According to Kollontai (at the time an exile from tsarist Russia), the English socialist delegates had fallen under the sway of "bourgeois feminists," and the French and Belgian socialists feared that universal women's suffrage would increase the power of the Catholic Church in democratically elected parliaments. The German Social Democrats countered that equality between men and women was a fundamental principle of socialist doctrine, and therefore universal suffrage for men must be accompanied by universal suffrage for women. This would instantly double the political power of the working class. Zetkin's opponents from Britain and France believed that demanding universal suffrage for women would impede the possibility of winning limited suffrage for educated women. The German delegates argued that universal suffrage for women would be supported by increased efforts to educate them. Expanding literacy would give women access to socialist literature, and they could learn to vote in their own economic interests. On this matter, Zetkin and the German Social Democrats won the day, and the label "feminist" became associated with the position of the British and French women who had argued for limited suffrage.

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Excerpted from "Second World, Second Sex"
by .
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