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

On the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927, Alexandra Kollontai published an essay titled, "What Has the October Revolution Done for Women in the West?" In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee reads selections of this essay and reflects on the claim that the Soviet attention to women's emancipation acted as a catalyst for Western countries to grant their own women greater rights and privileges. Mentioned in this episode is Ghodsee's new book, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War, 1968-1990, which is just out with Duke University Press.

More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

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Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion.  In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee reads a few paragraphs from Alexandra Kollontai's 1921 essay: "The Labour of Women in the Evolution of the Economy," and then has a discussion with the feminist poet, Annie Finch (www.anniefinch.com), who is working on a literary anthology of writing about abortion, tentatively titled: A Womb of One's Own.

More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

In this episode, Kristen R. Ghodsee reads selections from Alexandra Kollontai's 1921 essay, "Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle." Here, Kollontai describes the loneliness people feel when they think of sexual and romantic partners as forms of property to be owned and jealously protected.

More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

In this episode, Kristen Ghodsee discusses the contemporary relevance of Alexandra Kollontai with her 17-year-old daughter. What does a socialist theorist writing over a century ago have to tell young people today?

More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

In this second episode, Kristen Ghodsee takes a moment to introduce herself and to give some background on Alexandra Kollontai. Ghodsee then reads the first section of Kollontai's report from the First International Socialist Women's Conference held in Stuttgart, Germany in 1907. This was an historic meeting of socialist women from across Europe. It was attended by 58 delegates from 14 countries, and Kollontai represented Russia.  The congress of socialist women convened to discuss the issue of universal suffrage for the working class, including women, and the need for a special international movement to agitate among women. Kollontai argued that as long as the working class was divided by sex, the bourgeois owners of the means of production would rest easy because any strike by male workers could easily be broken by calling up the "army" of "submissive" female workers to replace them. But once women workers joined with their male comrades, the bourgeois would have no choice but to listen to proletarian demands.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

In this first episode, Kristen Ghodsee provides and introduction and reads an abridged version of Alexandra Kollontai's 1913 article in Pravda. Published on March 8 (February 23 in Russia), this essay addresses concerns that celebrating an international women's day could be seen as a concession to the "bourgeois feminists."

Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. More information about Kristen R. Ghodsee can be found at www.kristenghodsee.com

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen 

This is a little introduction to the A.K. 47 podcast recorded on May 2, 2019, about four months after the first episode was recorded and published. Basically, Kristen Ghodsee is apologizing for the very amateur quality of the early episodes as she figured out the finer intricacies of Garage Band, audio editing, and how to speak into a microphone.

In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee reads and discusses 47 selections from the works of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a socialist women's activist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation. Born into aristocratic privilege, the Russian Kollontai was initially a member of the Mensheviks before she joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks and became an important revolutionary figure during the 1917 Russian Revolution. Kollontai was a socialist theorist of women’s emancipation and a strident proponent of sexual relations freed from all economic considerations. After the October Revolution, Kollontai became the Commissar of Social Welfare and helped to found the Zhenotdel (the women's section of the Party). She oversaw a wide variety of legal reforms and public policies to help liberate working women and to create the basis of a new socialist sexual morality. But Russians were not ready for her vision of emancipation, and she was sent away to Norway to serve as the first Russian female ambassador (and only the third female ambassador in the world). In this podcast, Kristen R. Ghodsee – a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books 2018) – selects excerpts from the essays, speeches, and fiction of Alexandra Kollontai and puts them in context. Each episode provides an introduction to the abridged reading with some relevant background on Kollontai and the historical moment in which she was writing.

Send us Fan Mail

Thanks so much for listening. This podcast has no Patreon-type account and receives no funding. There are no ads and there is no monetization. If you'd like to support the work being done here, please spread the word with your networks.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve critically acclaimed books published in over 20 languages, and a University of Pennsylvania Professor of Russian and East European Studies. Check out Kristen Ghodsee's recent books: 

• Everyday Utopia
• Red Valkyries
• Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
• Second World, Second Sex

Subscribe to Kristen Ghodsee’s free, episodic newsletter at: https://kristenghodsee.substack.com

Learn more about Kristen Ghodsee's work: www.kristenghodsee.com or request to follow her on Instagram @prof_kristen