The Soviet Woman

This is a dynamic introduction to the revolutionary legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), bringing together some of her most important writings on gender, sexuality and women's liberation.

Alexandra Kollontai was a voluminous writer – on politics, Marxism, economics and feminism. She left letters, diaries, memoirs and pamphlets, theoretical tracts, articles, and two novels which explored issues of love and socialist morality.

Resolutely opposed to bourgeois feminism, Kollontai used the term used to demarcate a form of feminism that was anti-Marxist and that drove an agenda of free love. She envisioned the many possibilities for women's freedom that lay locked in a socialist future, and set out the mechanisms by which women's subordination – political and economic of course, but equally in terms of ideas and attitudes – could and must be undone under socialism.

Unique for her time, this collection shines a light on a fascinating writer who still has much to teach us today.