What happens when a revolutionary movement driven by dreams of women’s liberation suddenly finds itself compromising some of its radical demands in the name of a greater cause? This is the story of the Communist Women’s Movement and its relationship with anti-fascism in the 1930s. Communist women plunged themselves into the fight against Hitler and Mussolini. But the alliances they built to fight fascism also forced them to tone down some of their most progressive ideas, especially when it came to reproductive rights.
Communist women embraced the strategy of the Popular Front, which involved forming a coalition with a diversity of groups in order to achieve a common goal: oppose fascism. Yet, this strategy posed serious issues when women were forced to make compromises within the coalition. Their story raises important questions: how do we build broad coalitions without losing our radical message? What are we willing to compromise in the face of a rising far right? These are the questions I explore in my research on the international network that brought together communist women around the world, drawing on the movement’s rich internal archives. These sources shed light on the discussions, policies, campaigns and challenges communist women faced in the polarised political landscape of the 1930s. Their experience remains deeply relevant today, as many of the policies they formulated and fought for a century ago now face renewed attacks, and as the far right in Europe and beyond poses an ongoing risk to the work of feminists and women’s rights activists.
In 1920, when the Russian Revolution was still fresh, a new international movement, the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM), emerged as an auxiliary of the Communist International (or Comintern). It was born from the conviction that neither socialism nor communism are achievable without emancipating women.
For its time, the CWM had a remarkably bold agenda formulated in its 1921 programmatic document, ‘Guidelines for the Communist Women’s Movement‘. It demanded full legal, political and social equality between men and women. It called for full economic integration of women with equal pay, socialised childcare and housework, and generous maternity support. It fought against oppression of women under colonialism and imperialism. And it championed something especially controversial: the right to abortion.
Within a few years, communist women’s sections emerged in Communist Parties across Europe, North America and parts of Asia. The movement had a central body, the International Women’s Secretariat (IWS), based for most of the interwar period in Moscow with an auxiliary Secretariat in Berlin. There, women from different countries exchanged ideas, coordinated campaigns and planned strategy. They were, in many ways, ahead of their time. But the 1930s would test their radical agenda in ways they did not expect.
As the Great Depression devastated economies across the globe, something darker began to rise. In Germany, the Nazi Party grew from a marginal group into the country’s largest political force. Hitler seized power in 1933, banned the Communist Party, crushed the Social Democrats and established a brutal dictatorship. In Italy, Mussolini had already been ruling for over a decade. Fascist movements popped up across Europe and beyond.
For communist women, fascism was not just a political threat. They saw it as a major enemy to women’s rights. Italian fascism built its policy toward women on a simple but intrusive idea: women existed first and foremost to serve the nation through motherhood. The regime turned childbearing into a patriotic duty, discouraging women from working and flooding them with propaganda about traditional family values. Likewise, the Nazis glorified motherhood while restricting women’s access to jobs, higher education and birth control. They also promoted racist eugenic policies, sterilising women deemed ‘unfit’ based on their ethnicity or health. Abortion, then officially illegal in Germany, was in reality used as a tool of state control: encouraged for some, forbidden for others, always in the service of a racist ideology.
Italian communist women had warned about fascism as early as 1921. Clara Zetkin, a legendary German revolutionary, wrote in 1923 that fascism was not just about violence and militarism. For women, it meant control over their bodies and lives. Thus, for communist women, anti-fascism was central to everything they believed in.
By the early 1930s, the Comintern was in a difficult position. Its previous official policy, that prohibited cooperation with Social Democrats, had put Communists in isolation. But the rise of Hitler changed everything. In a few European Communist Parties, women and men began pushing for an anti-fascist alliance. By January 1935, the Comintern officially adopted the new Popular Front strategy that called for a broad anti-fascist coalition bringing together communists and the reformist left, centre-left and even centrist groups. The message was clear: put aside ideological differences and unite with anyone willing to fight fascism. For communist women, this presented both an opportunity and a dilemma.
The Popular Front opened doors that had previously been locked. Suddenly, communist women could work alongside feminists, pacifists, socialists and religious activists many of whom had previously been dismissed as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘reformist’. The most spectacular example came in August 1934, when the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism gathered in Paris. Over 1,000 delegates from 26 countries attended. Remarkably, only about 100 were communists. The rest came from a vast array of organisations: the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Catholic women’s groups and socialist feminist groups, to name a few. The Congress established the Women’s World Committee against War and Fascism which would coordinate international women’s campaigns throughout the 1930s.
Klavdia Kirsanova, a veteran Russian Bolshevik who had taken over leadership of the CWM after Zetkin’s death, was thrilled. Kirsanova was a remarkable woman. In 1934, at the age of forty-seven, she was a mother of five – two of whom were adopted children of fallen Bulgarian revolutionaries – with a rich revolutionary and party career behind her. She had been imprisoned and exiled several times between 1906 and 1917; fought on the front lines during the Civil War; served in the Women’s Departments of the Soviet Communist Party; and later became the first rector of the regional Omsk Workers’ and Peasants’ Communist University, as well as rector of the Sverdlov Communist University. Speaking to fellow communists from the USSR, Europe and the US at the meeting of the IWS, she gave blunt advice: ‘We must put an end to communist arrogance. Women from non-proletarian strata have money, the press, and they will help us’. This was pragmatic politics, and it worked. Communist women began building alliances with teachers, nurses, writers, students, pacifists, Christian charities and temperance societies. They adapted their message to local conditions of countries or regions where anti-fascist campaigns took place, while remaining focused on the broader goal of building a wide-ranging anti-fascist front.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, communist women swung into action. Franco’s military rebellion, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, against the democratically elected Popular Front Republican government was a direct assault on democracy. Communist women participated in the conflict on the side of Republicans on the battlefield and as medical personnel. Using the established anti-fascist network, they launched massive solidarity campaigns across Europe, drawing on their own history. In the early 1920s, the CWM had organised international relief for post-war famine-stricken Soviet Russia. The CWM’s aid to Spain campaign followed the same playbook: collect money, send supplies and build a global sense of solidarity. This experience allowed communist women to become more visible not only among non-communist women but also within the male-dominated world of politics.
Yet the alliances communist women built came at a cost, and nowhere was this more visible than on the question of reproductive rights. The CWM had been an advocate for abortion since its earliest days, after the Soviet government legalised it in 1920. While advocating for state support of motherhood, the CWM fought against anti-abortion laws prevalent in Europe and beyond and demanded free, safe, medicalised abortions. But by the mid-1930s, this position was becoming uncomfortable.
In July 1935, an IWS meeting discussed abortion in detail. A Soviet delegate made a disturbing argument: in fascist countries, abortion was being used as a eugenic tool. In this context, the CWM’s pro-abortion position therefore risked being misinterpreted as neo-Malthusianism or conflated with far-right eugenicist policies. Klavdia Kirsanova went further. As a mother of five, she believed that most women wanted to have children, they just lacked the economic conditions to do so. The CWM, she argued, needed to focus on making governments provide such conditions. Such a stance would inevitably rally more women, especially those belonging to anti-fascist religious groups (such as Catholic or Quaker Women within the Committee against War and Fascism) who would not support abortion.
This was not just about coalitional strategy. Kirsanova was also aware that the Soviet leadership was already preparing to ban abortion. It would be awkward, if not politically dangerous, for communist women abroad to continue campaigning for something the USSR was about to re-criminalise. In 1936, the Soviet Union indeed banned abortion. The movement that had once championed women’s reproductive autonomy slowly fell silent on the issue. What replaced the radical abortion demands? A new emphasis on motherhood, children and family welfare. In 1937, Maria Krylova, a former IWS leader and polyglot who had been active in the communist movement since 1918 and developed transnational connections with women in Europe, drafted a message for International Women’s Day celebrations: ‘Whatever your political and religious convictions, all of you are interested in the struggle for the defence of Peace, freedom, and the happy future of your children’. The focus had moved from women’s reproductive autonomy to protecting the mother and children’s well-being. Communist women in various countries started emphasising working motherhood combined with paid maternity leave, family allowances, public childcare and access to contraception.
The Popular Front was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed communist women to expand their influence and build genuinely broad anti-fascist coalitions. On the other hand, they had to mute one of their most progressive and radical demands – the right to abortion. The Soviet retreat on abortion made it even harder for communist women abroad to maintain a radical edge. Yet the communist women of the 1930s were not simply puppets of Moscow. They understood that unity against fascism required compromise. They did not abandon the core values they had promoted since 1920 – women’s emancipation as part of socialist transformation; social, economic and political gender equality; a combination of motherhood and work; and state support of mothers and families through socialisation of reproductive labour. They recalibrated their message to reach a broader audience. This was a calculated trade-off in a world increasingly dominated by fascist violence and the threat of war.
Was this choice adequate in these circumstances? Was the sacrifice of reproductive rights justified by the scale of women’s involvement in anti-fascist politics and the opportunity to make their voices heard in a male-dominated political world? Could communist women have chosen another path? These questions invite a broader hypothesis: does their sacrifice suggest that women’s liberation is frequently subordinated to national or political liberation? These are complex questions, but, the experience of communist women highlights the delicate balance between building broad alliances and staying true to fundamental progressive values. It is a story of women who believed in liberation, and who sometimes sacrificed parts of that dream to keep the bigger dream alive. They compromised and adapted, to mobilise as many women as possible against fascism at a time when others were silent or complicit. Their ingenuity and commitment to solidarity deserve to be remembered, even as their choices prompt us to reflect on how we navigate political compromises today.