One female comrade chided some fellow members of the Socialist
Party for holding only male personalities from history as heroes. Of course,
there are many women in the socialist echelons such as Rosa Luxemburg but she
did make her point. Many other deserving women have been forgotten or not offered their proper dues.
One such activist is Elisabeth Dmitrieff.
Élisabeth Dmitrieff, had helped organise cooperatives in
Geneva and then arrived in Paris Commune in late March 1871 as a representative
of the International, stated, "The work of women was the most exploited of
all in the social order of the past….It's immediate reorganisation is
urgent."
Dmitrieff, born Elisavieta Koucheleva in the northwestern
Russian province of Pskov in 1850, was the illegitimate daughter of an
aristocrat and a German nurse twenty years his junior. Élisabeth entered into a
mariage blanc (a marriage of convenience) to get out of Russia, after having
been active in a student group in Saint Petersburg. She carried funds from her sizable
dowry into exile in Geneva in 1868. Dmitrieff went to London, where she met
Karl Marx and his family. Immediately following the proclamation of the
Commune, Marx sent her to Paris, and she sent reports on the situation back to
him.
Dmitrieff cut quite a figure. She wore a black riding
costume, a felt hat with feathers, and a red silk shawl trimmed in gold. A
police description put her at about five feet, three inches tall, with chestnut
hair and gray-blue eyes. Léo Frankel was one of the Communards who
fell in love with her. Dmitrieff combined a precocious feminism with a
socialism influenced by Marx and a firm expectation that revolution would some
day come to Russia.
On April 8, Dmitrieff sought to rally citoyennes in defense
of Paris in the tradition of the women who had marched to Versailles in October
1789. Three days later, mothers, wives, and sisters, including Dmitrieff and
Nathalie Le Mel, published an "Appeal to the Women Citizens of
Paris":
"We must prepare to defend and avenge our brothers."
That evening, the Union des Femmes was constituted, led by a
council of five women, with Dmitrieff as general secretary. The union called on
women to form branches in each arrondissement. Saluting the Commune as
representing "the regeneration of society," the organisation asked
women to build barricades and to "fight to the end" for the Commune. The
Commune gave women in the Union des Femmes, which included perhaps as many as
2,000 women, unprecedented public responsibilities. It set up committees in
most arrondissements as recruiting centers for volunteers for nursing and
canteen work and barricade construction. The Union des Femmes also took the
fight for equal rights to Paris's factories. The manufacture of National Guard
uniforms, the vast majority of which women produced, was one Parisian industry
that kept going full steam. The Commune had first signed contracts with
traditional manufacturers for the production of uniforms, but a report
determined that under this arrangement female workers were earning less than
under the Government of National Defence. The Union des Femmes demanded the
award of all future contracts to workers' producers' cooperatives and that the
Tailors' Union and delegates from the Commission of Labour and Exchange
negotiate piece rates.
After having fought on the barricades during the Bloody
Week, she fled to Russia. Once arrived in her native country, she married a
political prisoner in order to help him avoid death penalty, and decided to
follow him in deportation in Siberia, where she ended her days.
A small square in Paris, between the rue du Temple and the
rue de Turbigo (close-by to the Place de la République) has been named in her
honour.
Details from Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris
Commune, by John Merriman.
No comments:
Post a Comment