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“The Scourge Of The Bourgeois Feminist”: Alexandra Kollontai’S Strategic Repudiation And Espousing Of Female Essentialism In The Social Basis Of The Woman Question, Hannah Pugh

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

In The Social Basis of the Woman Question, Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai responds to bourgeois feminists’ essentialist calls for female solidarity to resolve the “woman’s question”—the question of women’s status in society— by presenting the woman question as a struggle defined not by gender but by the intersection of class and gender. Kollontai appropriates and extends their essentialist rhetoric, engaging in the classed and gendered essentialism of the particular socioeconomic position of the female worker. I argue that, by placing the essentialized woman worker at the heart of the woman question, Kollontai suggests that the woman question is an economic …