One development—but not the only one—that made some Marxists suspicious of what they called “feminist”
concerns was the emergence of the Russian women’s suffrage movement around 1905 outside the context of
socialism and large-scale revolution. The feminist movement of 1905 was very complex. In one sense it was a
continuation of “classical” feminism of the 1860s—a movement of women for women and emphatically not
simply the female component of one of the opposition movements, and consequently, not ready to bury its
separate causes under some larger cause as defined by men. This focus on women as a constituency that cut
across class lines and the willingness of some feminist groups to accept a limited (property) suffrage was quite
enough to besmirch it in the eyes of most Marxists as bourgeois. The charge was not wholly accurate (quite
aside from the utter meaninglessness of the work “bourgeois” in any Russian context).
In the first place, almost all feminists—conservative, liberal, or “social”—saw women’s emancipation as part of a
larger cause also: the liberation of all oppressed peoples, but not via a simple formula of……..