18 - A.K. 47 - Decree on Child Welfare

A.K. 47 - Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai

English - May 25, 2019 00:00 - 16 minutes - 7.35 MB - ★★★★★ - 95 ratings
Arts Education education socialist feminism alexandra kollontai socialism feminism women's rights kristen r. ghodsee history communism sexuality Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: 17 - A.K. 47 - The Statue of Liberty

Next Episode: 19 - A.K. 47 - Marriage and Everyday Life - Part I

In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee reads the “Decree on Social Welfare” from January 31, 1918, written by Alexandra Kollontai when she was the Commissar for Social Welfare in the first Bolshevik government. There are quite a few external sources mentioned in this episode and they are detailed below.

Biographies of Kollontai in English (please note the alternative spellings of her name, which are an artifact of different traditions of the transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet into Latin letters.)

Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai, Indiana University Press, 1979Isabel de Palencia, Alexandra Kollontaj: Ambassadress of Russia, 1947Beatrice Farnsworth, Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford University Press, 1980Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (Updated Edition) Haymarket Books, (1980) 2014

Other books about early Soviet policies about women and the family:

Wendy Goldman: Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936, Cambridge University Press, 1993Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana University Press, 1997Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Bold Type Books, 2018

Drafts of the Communist Manifesto:

Friedrich Engels: Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith (first draft)Friedrich Engels: The Principles of Communism (second draft)Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto (final version)

The intro music is a Russian version of The Internationale.
More info about the host can be found at: www.kristenghodsee.com

Also see: AlexandraKollontai.com – A Website for All Things Kollontai

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