Excerpt from "The New Woman" 1919
by Russian Revolutionary Leader Alexandra Kollontai
Russian revolutionary leader. During
the 1917 Russian Revolution, she was
a member of the Central Committee
of the Bolshevik party. She was the
first woman to be appointed as a
Soviet diplomat, as the Ambassador to
Norway in 1923. She is renowned for
her feminist writings.
There had to be an important
revolution in the inner attitude of
the women; her internal life had to
be intensely complicated; in her soul
there had to be stored a rich capital of
self-reliant values to prevent her from
becoming bankrupt the moment her
man took from her the values he had
contributed.
But precisely because the
life of the new woman is not exhausted
in love, because she has in her soul a
store of curiosity and interests that
make her a “man,” we will become
accustomed to employ new criteria
in measuring the moral personality
of a woman.
For many centuries the
merits of women were measured,
not by their human qualities, not by
their mental capabilities, not by their
inner characteristics, but exclusively
by the stock of womanly virtues that
bourgeois property morality demanded
of them. “Sexual purity,” sexual virtue
measured her worth.
For the woman
who transgressed the code of sexual
rectitude there was no mercy... But
only in so far as woman stands on her
own feet, ceases being dependent on
father or husband, and participates side
by side with men in the social struggle,
will the old criteria become useless...
