ABSTRACT
The Russian Revolution was the first political project to overtly put gender equality on its agenda. This chapter reflects on its legacy while focusing on the impact of labor feminism and socialism on the ideas, meanings, and practices of the “woman question.” It addresses three issues: the vision of gender equality that was shaped by the revolutionary imagination; the strategy that the Soviet gender contract, which had its roots in labor feminism, sought to enact; and the general significance of socialist experience for feminism, as it meets the challenges of the post-industrial era today. At some point, the idea of “redistribution,” from which the socialist system drew its enthusiasm on behalf of working women, found itself “opposed” to the conceptual framework of “recognition” that resulted from new feminist theorizing of the woman condition. While socialism never developed a modern framework for conceptualizing male domination in a range of social and cultural domains—from sexuality (heteronormativity) to language—its legacy remains meaningful. A long feminist tradition requires a better understanding of the politics of reproductive justice, for which the socialist emancipatory project provides important evidence.
