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ABSTRACT
The function and meaning of voting can vary across political systems. Despite its diffusion as a norm alongside the global spread of political liberalism in the post-colonial period, women's franchise continues to expose key fault lines in the foundations of democratic theory. Recalling the Third Comintern's debates and activities in the aftermath of World War I, this paper explores how gender organized the left's critiques of bourgeois parliamentarism and its imperial tendencies in the early twentieth century. It draws particular attention to how, in the context of global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles, the woman suffrage issue juxtaposed the promises and premises of bourgeois and proletarian internationalism, the democratic potential and limits of electoral systems and their political alternative, the soviet. From these experiences, this paper highlights the radical challenge that gender poses to the development of alternative democratic imaginations.
Notes on contributor
Zornitsa D. Keremidchieva, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. The author would like to thank the editor and the editorial assistants for their careful work with the manuscript as well as the participants at the 2020 ORWAC conference on woman suffrage for their engagement with an earlier draft of this paper. For correspondence, please email [email protected].
Notes
1 For a global history of voting, the diffusion of ideas matters. Furthermore, as Markoff points out, “the history of democracy is profoundly polycentric and an exclusive or even disproportionate focus on the world's centers of wealth and power will miss much.” John Markoff, “Where and When was Democracy Invented?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (1999): 23–45, https://www.jstor.org/stable/179425.
2 Francisco Ramirez, Yasemin Soysal and Suzanne Shanahan, “The Changing Logics of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women's Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (1997): 735–45, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2657357.
3 Melanie Nolan and Caroline Daley, Suffrage & Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1994): 14.
4 Anne Orford, “Feminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law,” Nordic Journal of International Law 71, no. 2 (2002): 275–96, https://doi.org/10.1163/157181002761931387; Allison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
5 See, for example, Christine Keating, “Framing the Postcolonial Sexual Contract: Democracy, Fraternalism, and State Authority in India,” Hypatia 22, no. 4 (2007): 130–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01324.x; Yukiko Matsukawa and Kaoru Tachi, “Women's Suffrage and Gender Politics in Japan,” in Suffrage & Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, eds. Melanie Nolan and Caroline Daley (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1994), 171–83; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Joyce A. Green, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd ed. (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2017).
6 Concerns about the character of rhetoric and communication underwrite many of these critiques. For example, there's Habermas's argument that enlarged democracies’ reliance on mass media would lead to the re-feudalization of politics. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Boston, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). The function and quality of political discussion, the primary tool of parliamentary process, is also the focus of critical attention in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Boston: The MIT Press, 1988).
7 Schmitt makes this point too. But also see Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. II: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Hannah Pitkin's classic definition of representation (“to make present again”) and her formulation of four versions of representation—formalistic, symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation—are also relevant. Hannah F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1967). For an effort to reconcile the conceptual fault lines of electoral representation with its pragmatic impetuses, see Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). For an overview of how different modalities of the concept of representation have been deployed on behalf of women in legislative discourse, see Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “Legislative Reform, the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, and the Crisis of Women's Political Representation,” Women & Language 35, no. 1 (2012): 13–38.
8 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971): 276.
9 Drude Dahlerup, Has Democracy Failed Women? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2018).
10 Albena Azmanova, “Empowerment as Surrender: How Women Lost the Battle for Emancipation as They Won Equality and Inclusion,” Social Research 83, no. 3 (2016): 749, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/639864.
11 Even if I recognize the pitfalls of some strands of cosmopolitan thought, I am moved by Homi Bhabha's inquiry into the proleptic formulation of a “memory of the future” as an expression of anticipation rooted in anxious recognition of one's own alterity. Homi Bhabha, “Cosmopolitanism: Reflections on the Commemoration of Ulrich Beck, 30 October 2015,” Theory, Culture, and Society 35, no. 7–8 (2018): 131–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418812941.
12 David Gilmartin, “Toward a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual,” Religions 3, no. 2 (2012): 407–23, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3020407.
13 Teri L. Caraway, “Inclusion and Democratization: Class, Gender, Race, and the Extension of Suffrage,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 4 (2004): 456, https://doi.org/10.2307/4150170.
14 Rune Møller Stahl, “Ruling the Interregnum: Politics and Ideology in Nonhegemonic Times,” Politics & Society 47, no. 3 (2019): 339, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219851896.
15 Stahl, 345.
16 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2017); June Hannam, Katherine Holden and Mitzi Auchterlonie, eds., International Encyclopedia of Woman Suffrage (ABC-CLIO, 2000). Recent scholarship that has emphasized the mobility of women's voting rights rhetoric includes Tiffany Lewis, “Mapping Social Movements and Mapping the U.S. West: The Rhetoric of the Woman Suffrage Map,” Women's Studies in Communication 42, no. 4 (2019): 490–510, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2019.1676349; Meridith Styer, “Susan B. Anthony's Extemporaneous Speaking for Woman Suffrage,” Women's Studies in Communication 40, no. 4 (2017): 401–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2017.1368762; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185; Zornitsa Keremidchieva, “The Congressional Debates on the 19th Amendment: Jurisdictional Rhetoric and the Assemblage of the U.S. Body Politic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 1 (2013): 51–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2012.749418; Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Militant Citizenship: Rhetorical Strategies of the National Woman's Party, 1913–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Leslie J. Harris and Mike Allen, “The Paradox of Authentic Identity: Mormon Women and the Nineteenth Century Polygamy Controversy,” Proceedings of the National Communication Association/American Forensic Association Alta Conference on Argumentation (2011): 340–7.
17 See special issues of Revolutionary Russia 31, no. 2 (2018); Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 4 (2017); Slavic Review 76, no. 3 (2017); Slavic and East European Journal 61, no. 3 (2017); Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 17, no. 3 (2017); South Atlantic Journal 61, no. 3 (2017). See also Catherine Samary and Fred Leplat, Decolonial Communism, Democracy & the Commons (Dagenham, UK: The Merlin Press, 2019).
18 Theses and Statutes of the Third (Communist) International, Adopted by the Second Congress, July 17-August 7th, 1920 (Moscow: Publishing Office of the Communist International, 1920/Reprinted by United Communist Party of America): 4.
19 Theses and Statutes of the Third (Communist) International, 67.
20 Oleksa Drachewych, The Communist International, Anti-Imperialism and Racial Equality in British Dominions (New York: Routledge, 2019). See also George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
21 “Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919, ed. John Riddell (1987; repr. New York: Pathfinder, 2019), 213–25.
22 The democratic character of the soviet was the subject of vigorous internal argument. Early in the debates leading to the creation of the Third Communist International, Lenin critiqued characterizations of the soviet as a “pure” or “direct” democracy, emphasizing instead its class foundations: the soviet was a “proletarian democracy.” V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegate Kautsky,” in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents: 1918–1919 Preparing the Founding Congress, ed. John Riddell (New York: Pathfinder, 1986).
23 “Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” 223. It should be noted that the dates provided in Riddell's transcripts use the Gregorian calendar which was commonly used in Western countries. The Bolsheviks switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1918, bringing Soviet Russia into temporal alignment with the colonies and territories under European control.
24 V. I. Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder (Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), 49.
25 The terms “civilized” and “backward” were subsequently challenged by Giacinto Serrati, the representative of the Italian Socialist Party, who argued that “the definition of the term ‘backward countries’ is too vague and too indefinite not to be confused with the chauvinistic interpretation of the term.” “Statement of Giacinto Menotti Serratti,” in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. I, ed. John Riddell (1991; repr. New York: Pathfinder, 2018), 352. M.N. Roy, who represented the Mexican Communist Party (although he also spoke on behalf of his homeland of India) at the 2nd Congress, was also uncomfortable with the terminology of “backwardness.” When Lenin enlisted Roy's aid in drafting the theses on the colonial and national questions, he scratched out such passages as “the supposition that, owing to the economic and industrial backwardness, the peoples in the colonies are bound to go through the stage of bourgeois democracy is wrong.” For a reproduction of M.N. Roy's editing drafts and notes, see Appendix 2 in Riddell (1991/2018): 1077–89. The vocabulary did not become central to the theses and statutes adopted by the congress; nevertheless, it was commonly in use during the debates of the 2nd and later congresses.
26 Stephen White, “Colonial Revolution and the Communist International, 1919–1924,” Science & Society 40, no. 2 (1976): 187, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40401942.
27 Ben Fowkes and Bülent Gökay, “Unholy Alliance: Muslims and Communists—An Introduction,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 25, no. 1 (2009): 1–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/13523270802655597. The authors point to the enduring legacies of the subsequent developments of this relationship, especially the impact of the Soviet war in Afghanistan which stimulated the rise of political Islam. See also Igor Lipovsky, “The Awakening of Central Asian Islam,” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 3 (1996): 1–21, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4283805.
28 “Theses on the Role and Structure of the Communist Party before and after the Taking of Power by the Proletariat,” in Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. I, ed. John Riddell (1991; repr. New York: Pathfinder, 2018), 248.
29 “Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses,” in Theses, Resolutions, and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, eds. Alix Holt and Barbara Holland (Ink Links, 1980), 215–16.
30 For the rhetorical development of the term “bourgeois feminism,” see Marilyn J. Boxer, “Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept ‘Bourgeois Feminism,’” American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 131–58, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.1.131.
31 “Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses,” 216–7.
32 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “What's Left? 1917 and World History,” Journal of World History 30, no. 3 (2019): 452–9, https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2019.0055.
33 Clara Zetkin, “My Recollections of Lenin: An Interview on the Woman Question,” in The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V. I. Lenin, by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 116.
34 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 60.
35 To Perry's point, feminism's liberatory potential might be predicated on the notion that “the diachrochic poesis of living in politics” is “ever changing, uncertain, and vexed.” Imany Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 253.
36 John Riddell, ed., The Communist International in Lenin's Time, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (1991; repr. New York: Pathfinder, 2018), 427. Kollontai's thought and activities, especially in connection to feminism, have been the subject of much debate in the scholarly literature. See, for example, Christine Sypnowich, “Alexandra Kollontai and the Fate of Bolshevik Feminism,” Labour/Le Travail 32 (1993): 287–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/25143737; Brigitte Studer, “Communism and Feminism,” Clio: Women, Gender, History 41, no. 1 (2015): 139–52
37 “Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses,” 212–17.
38 John Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920, First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 27, n. 12.
39 White, “Colonial Revolution,” 181–82.
40 Communist International, Fourth Congress of the Communist International: Abridged Report of Meetings Held in Petrograd and Moscow, Nov. 7-Dec. 3, 1922 (London: Communist Party of Great Britain), 239–42.
41 White, “Colonial Revolution,” 193.
42 Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 8. See also “Forum: Is ‘Communist Feminism’ a Contradictio in Terminus?,” Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe 1, no. 1 (2007): 197–246; Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).
43 Kirschenbaum, 453.
44 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 181.