How was the Communist Women’s International founded? What was its role in the wider context of women’s emancipatory struggles of the early 20th century?
The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), also known as the Communist Women’s International, was formally established at the first International Communist Women’s Conference, held in Moscow, Russia in the summer of 1920. However, its origins stretch much further, rooted in the Socialist Women’s Movement (SWM), 1907-1917. The Socialist Women’s Movement brought together women across the left-wing political spectrum in the struggle for women’s emancipation, advocating, among other things, for women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity and child benefits, and reproductive issues. Crucially, the Socialist Women’s Movement was a transnational movement. Its transnationality was constituted through international women’s conferences, which gathered women to exchange ideas and strategies, as well as build networks of contacts and collaboration that would allow the transfer of ideas from the international level to national and local levels.
The Communist Women’s Movement, thus, emerged from the pre-existing network set by the Socialist Women’s Movement, and was shaped by activists’ lived experiences and shared ideas on women’s liberation and the importance of internationalism. Moreover, it was forged in the crucible of the early 20th century political upheavals: the First World War, the Russian Revolution(s), the collapse of empires, the emergence of nation-states, and the strengthening of the anti-colonial struggles. Such seismic shifts in the political landscape of the 20th century reshaped both the global political order and forms of women’s activism. Within this landscape, the Communist Women’s Movement emerged from communist women’s belief in the revolutionary projects of socialism and communism as a vehicle for women’s liberation and equality.
The history of the two movements and their activists is a rich and complex one, yet it was sidelined for a long time. Historiographies of socialism and communism, shaped by dominant androcentric perspectives, marginalised their contributions. Meanwhile, scholarship on women’s organising has disproportionately focused on larger, liberal women’s organisations. Therefore, recognising and emphasising the continuity between the Socialist Women’s Movement and the Communist Women’s Movement is more than a historical reconstruction – it is a historiographical intervention. It challenges the conventional narratives that see women’s international activism as the domain of liberal, and primarily Western, feminism, restoring the history of socialist and communist women’s activism to their rightful place in the broader history of 20th century struggles. The persistence of networks, ideas, and goals underscores the importance of continuity in left-wing women’s activism. So, the emergence of the Communist Women’s Movement serves as a testament to how movements persist and evolve through the endurance of ideas and the people that carry them forward.
Looking at the present times, what do you think are the main transnational issues related to women’s empowerment? How do these relate to the issues brought forward by the activists you are researching?
The issues women and other traditionally marginalised groups – queer communities, people of colour, migrants, and the working-class – face today go far beyond the question of empowerment. We are witnessing a global resurgence of right-wing politics, the normalisation of fascist rhetoric and practices, and increasingly violent attacks on hard-won rights – take, for example, reproductive freedom. The assault on these rights is not confined to one or a few countries – it is a systematic, international occurrence pointing to a broader global shift.
In this context, the struggles of communist and socialist women from the early 20th century remain strikingly relevant. Revisiting their ideas and strategies – particularly their insistence on collective resistance, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism, becomes essential. These women argued that women’s oppression cannot be reduced to one axis of identity but must be understood through the lens of broader systematic oppression that operates along the lines of gender, class, religion, age, and ethnicity. This perspective is especially urgent today, as right-wing movements actively attempt to fragment different struggles, aiming to obstruct mass collective organising.
It was precisely this understanding that made the activists of the Communist Women’s Movement among the first to recognise the dangers of increased militarisation and violence in the world, followed by the rise of fascism. For communist women, fascism was not merely a political ideology, but a social and economic formation rooted in the capitalist weaponisation of patriarchy, racism, and class exploitation. Accordingly, they approached the struggle against fascism as a broader, international fight against capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. To engage in this struggle, they developed strategies of mass mobilisation. They were involved in transnational knowledge production, aligning struggles across national contexts and reinforcing the necessity of establishing international solidarity networks.
Their perpetual effort to forge networks of resistance remains one of the most enduring legacies of the Communist Women’s Movement. The networks set by the Socialist and Communist Women’s Movements were later extended through the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism (CMF) and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Although these organisations took different forms, their core principle remained the same: the fight for women’s rights and liberation was inseparable from the broader struggle against fascism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism. This history teaches us a crucial lesson today that is increasingly urgent to understand in the face of contemporary political developments: women’s liberation is not a standalone issue; it is bound to the fate of all oppressed groups, and it depends not on individual empowerment, but on the power of collective, international resistance.
Minja Bujaković is a researcher in the Department of History of the European University Institute (EUI). Her PhD thesis is titled ‘Revolutionary Women Transcending Borders: The Communist Women’s International and the Struggle for Women’s Emancipation’. At the EUI, she is also a coordinator of the Interwar Histories Working Group.