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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN March 9, 2003 Issue 
Red Love by Alexandra Kollontai "I wish I had brought those poor green wax paper carnations you girls gave me for March 8th," said our mother with her favorite expression on - the face of melancholy. It was Mother's Day in the mid-1960s. We had been living in the U.S. for about three to four years and in an effort to assimilate fully, we celebrated all American holidays with zeal and precision. We, that is my younger sister Lilly and I, had saved for an entire year to buy our mother a bottle of Joy perfume for Mother's Day. Joy was made with Bulgarian rose attar - our mother's signature fragrance. Lilly and I thought that our mother would be overJOYed at this extravagant gift and were not prepared for her lamenting some hideous communist-made flowers we had given her in Bulgaria for some March 8th - the International Women's Day. For in Bulgaria, as in all communist countries as well as in some Western capitalist countries, we did not have a Mother's Day holiday. Instead all women were celebrated on March 8th. Only now, more than three decades later, I am beginning to understand our mother's unarticulated Slavic lamentations. She was trying to tell us that in many ways Mother's Day is a superficial holiday. By being on Sunday, it only pays lip service to the work mothers do, for it is not a day off. Frequently mothers start the workweek after Mother's Day already exhausted from getting gifts and planning or preparing brunch or whatever for their own mothers and mothers-in-law. And there was something else about Mother's Day that bothered our mother - it left out the rest of womankind. Our mother wanted to be recognized for more than being a mother which is what March 8th did. In addition it was a real holiday - a day off work. It was in 1969 that American feminists in Berkeley resurrected International Women's Day, celebrated on March 8th for the first time in 1909 by American workingwomen fighting for a ten-hour working day. The nature of labor inextricably links labor movements with socialism and communism. March 8th was destined to sink into oblivion in America where it actually came into being, when in 1922 Russian revolutionary Clara Zetkin forced Lenin to declare it International Women's Day. A curious thing happened after the 1969 Berkeley celebration of March 8th - International Women's Day gathered momentum and by 1970, 30 cities in the U.S. had declared March 8th a holiday albeit, still not a day off. More than 25 years ago, for whatever it may be worth, the United Nations also declared March 8th International Women's Day. In 1981 the U.S. Congress declared the week including March 8th National Women's History Week and in 1987 Congress expanded that to the entire month of March as National Women's History Month. And so theoretically we women are supposed to be honored and celebrated during the month of March. But in reality, this is still an abstraction. And although almost every university offers Women Studies programs and majors and there are a myriad of books about the women's movement, there is not one comprehensive book on the history of March 8th. This intriguing little story is still buried in journals and newspapers and websites and we still have to dig almost as much as those 1969 Berkeley women did to discover it. But there are a plethora of books about women and their achievements in every field, women that can serve as role models for all of us. And until we get March 8th as a day off, we could be honored and celebrated by reading about the achievements of women.Since March 8th and National Women's History Month are the result of women fomenting rebellions, it is fitting to mention the enormous and frequently unacknowledged contributions to the welfare of humankind of women revolutionaries. As I am a descendant of generations of women fighting in doomed rebellions against Turkish domination as well as the recipient of improved social conditions for women complements of all those women revolutionaries before me, I have particularly tender feelings for women revolutionaries. Every woman of achievement, infamous, famous or simply bypassed by history - be it George Sand or Catherine the Great or Margaret Sanger or Susan B. Anthony -is in someway a revolutionary, breaking through the mold encasing women. I came to know about Alexandra Kollontai's personal sacrifices and work on behalf of women purely by accident, for she has been successfully omitted from the history of the Russian Revolution. She gave up a comfortable aristocratic life to fight for improving the lot of the poor working women of Russia. While Stalin was scheming to oust Trotsky and grab the dictatorship, Kollontai was actually doing something for the workingwomen of the newly formed Soviet Union. She fought for a shorter workweek for them, adjustments for the work they did from Home Unavailable and in the factory, for health care, prenatal care and quality childcare. She was an indefatigable and prolific writer, agitator and speaker always advocating the best interests of working women not only in Russia but also in other countries as well. Her most famous work is the novel "Red Love" which she describes in the book's Foreword as "a purely psychological study of sex-relations." Although today the book's ideas appear quite logical, back then they were scandalous even to Lenin. Kollontai advocated that women's characters should be judged on the basis of the same criteria as men's characters are judged. "The character of a man is evaluated not by his conduct in family morals," she writes in the Foreword, "but by his efficiency in work, by his intellect, his will, his usefulness to the State and Society." If a woman is judged according to "bourgeois standard of family morals, she may neither receive the real appreciation of society nor the respect of the State," Kollontai wrote. In 1922 Kollontai took a stand opposing the abolition of political factions in the Soviet Union. Neither Lenin nor Stalin could abide her. But she could not be liquidated because she was enormously popular. But they could, and did, delete her from the history books and remove her from the seat of power by sending her off into diplomatic exile. "Her views on the status of women were marginalized and trivialized in the USSR itself," writes her biographer Tom Condit. We, women, have come a long way since 1909 when American workingwomen first celebrated March 8th. Nevertheless Kollontai and all other known and unknown women revolutionaries should inspire us to continue the fight for the improvement of the social condition of women and naturally, for March 8th as a day off. Imagine a time when March 8th would be a day off enjoyed by all women! What would all those CEOs do without their secretaries? Who would get their coffee? Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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