"Communist Women's International Fight for Women's Economic and Labour Integration, 1920-36"

The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) was established in 1920 as part of the Communist International (Comintern). Its overall program advocated for gender equality in law and practice in all spheres, universal suffrage, equal education, and transformation of housework and domestic economy into social industry. Communist women were particularly active within the labour movements and politics as they fought in the first place for women workers’ rights and interests. Since 1921, they were active within the Red International of Labour Unions (or the Profintern), another Comintern auxiliary organization established to coordinate Communist activities in trade union field worldwide. Guided by the overall objective of involving women in all political and economic struggles of the proletariat, Communist women advanced since the early 1920s such immediate demands as equal pay for equal work and abolition of take-home work for fully employed women workers; the abolition of afternoon Saturday work and overtime for women; reduction of working time in harmful and hazardous industries; yearly 14 days fully paid holidays; health and accident insurance and allowances; paid 16 weeks maternity leave and many more.
This paper employs social transnational and gender history frameworks to analyze the Communist Women’s Movement’s policies on women’s work, trade union participation, and economic struggles, alongside the roles of employers and the state in workplace protection. It draws on internal documents from the CWM and the Profintern, whose women’s committee initially brought together delegates from Britain, the USA, China, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Italy, Poland, Norway, the USSR, and several Balkan nations, later expanding to include more countries worldwide.