ARMAND, INESSA

(1874–1920), née Elisabeth Stefan, revolutionary and feminist, first head of the zhenotdel, the women's section of the Communist Party.

Born in France, Inessa Armand came to Russia as a child when her parents died and her aunt took a job as governess in the wealthy Armand merchant family. At age nineteen she married Alexander Armand, who was to support her and her numerous Bolshevik undertakings throughout his life. In 1899 she became involved in the Moscow Society for Improving the Lot of Women, a philanthropic organization devoted to assisting prostitutes and other poor women. By 1900 she was president of the society and working hard to create a Sunday school for working women.

In 1903, disillusioned with philanthropic work, she joined the Social Democratic Party and became active in revolutionary propaganda work. In exile in Europe from 1909 to 1917, with a brief illegal return to Russia, she helped Vladimir Lenin establish a party school at Longjumeau, France, in 1911; she taught there herself. When Russian women workers gained the right to vote and be elected to factory committees in 1912, Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and others persuaded Lenin to create a special journal Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker ). Although Armand and other editors insisted that women workers were not making special demands separate from those of men, they did recognize the importance of writing about women's health and safety issues in the factories.

During World War I Armand was one of Lenin's and the party's principal delegates to international socialist conferences, especially those of women protesting the war. In April 1917 Armand returned to Petrograd with Lenin and Krupskaya. Soon she was made a member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Provincial Soviet and of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VtsIK), as well as chair of the Moscow Provincial economic council. Her crowning achievement, however, was her role in founding the women's section of the Communist Party, the zhenotdel.

In that role she worked on problems as diverse as supporting legislation legalizing abortion, combating prostitution, creating special sections for the protection of mothers and infants in the Health Commissariat, working with the trade unions, and developing agitation methods for peasant women. In all of these, Armand advocated the creation of special methods for work among women, given women's historical backwardness and the prejudices of many men towards women's increased participation in the workforce and in society.

However, Armand's tenure as director of the zhenotdel was short-lived. On September 24, 1920, while on leave in the Caucasus, she succumbed to cholera and died.

See also: feminism; krupskaya, nadezhda konstantinovna; lenin, vladimir ilich; zhenotdel

bibliography

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Elwood, Ralph C. (1992). Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McNeal, Robert H. (1972). Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Stites, Richard. (1975). "Kollontai, Inessa, and Krupskaia: A Review of Recent Literature." Canadian-American Slavic Studies 9(1):84–92.

Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Elizabeth A. Wood