Comrades, the elections to the Moscow Soviet show that the Communist Party is gaining ground among the working class.
Working women must take a bigger part in the elections. The Soviet government is the first and only government in the world to have completely abolished all the old, despicable bourgeois laws which placed women in a position of inferiority to men, which placed men in a privileged position, for example, in respect of marital rights and of children. The Soviet government, the government of the working people, is the first and only government in the world to have abolished all the privileges of men in property questions, privileges which the marriage laws of all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic, still preserve.
Wherever there are landowners, capitalists and merchants, women cannot be the equal of men even before the law.
Where there are no landowners, capitalists or merchants, and where the government of the working people is building a new life without these exploiters, men and women are equal before the law.
But that is not enough.
Equality before the law is not necessarily equality in fact.
We want the working woman to be the equal of the working man not only before the law but in actual fact. For this working women must take an increasing part in the administration of socialised enterprises and in the administration of the state.
By taking part in administration, women will learn quickly and will catch up with the men.
Elect more working women to the Soviet, both Communist women and non-party women. As long as they are honest working women capable of performing their work sensibly and conscientiously, even if they are not members of the Party--elect them to the Moscow Soviet!
Send more working women to the Moscow Soviet! Let the Moscow proletariat show that it is prepared to do every thing, and is doing everything, to fight for victory, to fight the old inequality, the old bourgeois humiliation of women!
The proletariat cannot achieve complete liberty until it has won complete
liberty for women.
N. Lenin
February 21, 1920
Pravda No. 40
February 22, 1920
Published according to the Pravda text