Hello all,
Today’s post sees us wrap up Zetkin’s discussion of the Women’s Club in Tbilisi and proceeds to a report of a Women’s Conference organised by the Zhenotdel in the Terek region of Georgia. I estimate that there will be one or two other posts to conclude the special series.
The other sections of this series can be read here, here and here. There will probably be another two or three further posts, and Patrons of this page will then be able to access everything in one document as part of preparations for an online meeting and discussion in November.
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Have a great weekend!
Ben
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The Women’s Club in Tbilisi is already a hub that draws many Muslim women from the city and the surrounding areas. Its moral and social impact extends well beyond its 200 members. It is no exaggeration to assume that at least ten times more women stand behind the club’s members, ensuring that on the decisive issues, and at the decisive moments, the club leads the whole of this layer of society. Each member spreads word of the club’s work and brings news of its life and activity to their circle of friends and acquaintances. And they do so with a burning zeal, with the fanaticism of religious belief.
When the club’s female teachers and leaders take me into a side room to show me the teaching and learning materials and open the draws and boxes where the textiles and handicrafts are kept, the women crowd around behind me. All feel the need to join in, to admire the club’s work and to celebrate their effort and ability. ‘That is our textbook with images showing us how people lived in the past’; ‘On this board, the teacher shows us how many people remain illiterate in the Soviet Union’; ‘Here there is a painting showing how we must look after our children’; ‘I wrote that’; ‘I helped to stitch that blanket, and I also made that blouse there’. ‘I can sew shirts like that one’. These exclamations from all around me are an expression of how the individuals are bound up with the work and learning of the community. In another adjacent room, the legal experts have been virtually overrun by women with questions for them.
I am to be shown how the club is also a place of entertainment and joy. The piano sounds and there is dancing. The first to dance is a comrade’s little five-year-old daughter, whose form, countenance and garb most vividly remind me of how I imagined the Queen of Sheba and Semiramis when I was a young girl. The little girl is a delightful creature with dark curls and large, blazing eyes. Her delicate movements and facial expression quite astoundingly align with the character of the music. She is obviously the club’s pampered favourite. Young girls then join her, mainly on their own, but sometimes in pairs. How far removed their movements are from the Oriental dances that we usually see in the West: passionate and yet chastely restrained at the same time, this is no exposition of the body or a beckoning with it, but an expressive outburst of the joy of life and movement.
The dancing is but a short episode in the evening. The revolution, the ‘new life’ that has awoken and that people are aspiring to create asserts itself again and dominates the feelings and thoughts of those present. The extent to which these thoughts and feelings have expanded beyond the previous narrow horizons of the Muslim women finds palpable expression in the questions, speeches and assertions of the comrades, all of which breathe the spirit of revolutionary solidarity. This sense of solidarity came over the rising women of the Orient like a revelation of salvation, it is a force that fires them on. They know it and believe it: this is the sign under which they will emerge victorious. As I leave the club, ‘The Internationale’ rings out again on the streets and in the club itself.
The Women’s Conference in Terek
The delegate-based women’s conference in the Terek region was an unforgettable experience – not only for me, but for also for many a Russian female comrade. A year ago, the call for such a conference was answered by 600 women peasants rallying. In part, they were armed with spades and picks and marched up to the district town together with their children in order to demand the release of imprisoned peasants and an end to all taxes. This year, 1200 delegates of women workers, wives of workers and peasants attended the conference in Pyatigorsk. The event kicked off on Sunday with an impressive street demonstration of unprecedented enthusiasm in favour of the Soviet Union, communism and the Third International.
The first session was dedicated to political speeches and discussions regarding the global situation, as well as the situation in the Soviet republics and in the Terek Oblast. The delegates then spent five days discussing questions relating to social welfare for mothers and children in the countryside, marriage and family law, measures to overcome illiteracy, general and political education for women, the election of, and activity in, women workers and peasants in the Soviets and Soviet institutions, relations with the party and youth organisations, questions of peasant cooperatives and so forth. But, by themselves, these facts alone are no indication of the transformation in the feeling and thinking of the masses of women who had freely chosen their representatives for this conference. No, this transformation found expression in the stirring words and enchanting scenes at this conference.
It was as if a gate had been opened, through which the life of the evening lands in the West and that of the morning lands in the East converged. Alongside Cossack, Ukrainian and other Slav women, there were Tatar, Bashkir and Armenian women, and particularly Caucasian women of various nationalities. What a colourful mosaic of characters and costumes.
Women peasants had walked 40 kilometres and more in the heat and dust in order to carry out their mandates. Older women from the mountains who had never left their worldly innocent auls took part in the conference too. They had never seen a city, let alone a railway. A white-haired old lady proudly carried a red banner for the female peasant delegates from Germany, which was to be given to the women peasants there. ‘So that it may light the way for your revolutionary uprising and remind you that the sun of freedom and right rose in the East’. ‘We have come to you without our veils’, called out one woman from the mountains, ‘because the truth has unveiled itself to our souls. That truth is the revolution, which brought us women freedom. We are sisters with you all’. On behalf of those who elected her, an older Georgian woman, dressed in dark black, declared: ‘Woe to the bourgeoisie if it should attempt to impose its old rule on us in the liberated Caucuses! We women too will resist this to the last, and not with sighs and tears, but with deadly weapons. That is something you had better know’.
Russian was the intermediary language of the conference, but around a dozen different languages could be heard. But regardless of the language that was being spoken, the very same tremendous, historic spirit could be heard: the spirit that was understood by all, the spirit of the revolution, of the most impassioned international solidarity.
The conference was, of course, an unrivalled testament to the huge amount of patient, clever and devoted detail work being done in order to awaken and enlighten the masses of working women. But it was anything but a show put on to boast of such accomplishments. The conference revealed the ‘soul of the people’ that had really awoken and was now asserting itself. Yes, it’s true. The tribes of the Northern Caucasus are in revolt and are rising up – not against the Soviet Union and the social revolution, but in favour of it. That the proletarian revolution is the path to freedom, to a higher culture that these women anticipate, to the fraternity of humanity, is something they have an overpowering feeling of, and something they think with increasing clarity.