We must find our way to them, we must study and try to find that way. It has all the right ingredients: simple but vivid characterization, an exciting and appealing story, a nice pace, and an extremely cinematic way the author chooses to plot his narrative. I told Lenin that his words encouraged me greatly. No, according to the prevailing circumstances, we must fight now for this, now for that. The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production, must be strongly brought out. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution. That is not a minimum, a reform programme in the sense of the Social Democrats, of the Second International.
That we hate, yes, hate everything, and will abolish everything which tortures and oppresses the woman worker, the housewife, the peasant woman, the wife of the petty trader, yes, and in many cases the women of the possessing classes. You will draw up proposals for communist work among women. They allow you to work out more efficiently. I am thinking not only of proletarian women, whether they work in the factory or at home. We must train those whom we arouse and win, and equip them for the proletarian class struggle under the leadership of the Communist Party. Unless millions of women are with us we cannot exercise the proletarian dictatorship, cannot construct on communist lines. Despite Edipsos being renown as a haven for geriatrics, there are people of all ages, shapes and sizes, with children running around or playing in the small amusement park. Why is the number of women workers organised in trade unions so small? Not of course, as the reformists do, lulling them to inaction and keeping them in leading strings. Of course, we are concerned not only with the contents of our demands, but with the manner in which we present them. The unpolitical, unsocial, backward psychology of these women, their isolated sphere of activity, the entire manner of their life – these are facts.
That is a trend we are seeing across public and private operators. I assured Lenin that I shared his views, but that they would certainly meet with resistance. As Mick LaSalle describes in his book The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from French Actresses, Huppert theatrically engages in “studies in perversity, . . . playing women of monumental strangeness, coldness, and selfishness.” Each Anne of In Another Country is indeed strange. There can be no real mass movement without women. Don’t move, don’t move, we can contemplate our principles from a high pillar! We imagine an app that provides a key-word search of e-posters, mini-orals or podium presentations, and from the hits you text or email the lead author directly via the conference wifi. Many comrades, and good comrades at that, strongly combated the idea that the Party should have special bodies for systematic work among women. Why have we never had as many women as men in the Party – not at any time in Soviet Russia? Nevertheless, we must not close our eyes to the fact that the Party must have bodies, working groups, commissions, committees, bureaus or whatever you like, whose particular duty it is to arouse the masses of women workers, to bring them into contact with the Party, and to keep them under Its influence.