page_title: Communist Women's International
section_title: Establishment
hierarchical_section_title: Communist Women's International / Organizational history / Establishment
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Арманд, Инесса ФёдоровнаEnglish: Inessa Armand
context_page_description: The Communist Women's International was launched as an autonomous offshoot of the Communist International in April 1920 for the purpose of advancing communist ideas among women. The Communist Women's International was intended to play the same role for the international women's movement that the Red Peasant International played for poor agrarians and the Red International of Labor Unions played for the international labor movement.
  Operations of the Communist Women's International was directed by a body known as the International Communist Women's Secretariat. This body was renamed the Women's Section of the Executive Committee and made a subordinate department of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and its magazine terminated in May 1925.
  While the Women's Department of the Russian Communist Party had some success in mobilizing Soviet women for administrative tasks in Soviet Russia, the Communist Women's International and the Communist Women's Secretariat ultimately proved a failure outside the borders of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: The Second International, which predated the Communist International by nearly three decades, was founded upon the principles of political and social equality between men and women. The various national socialist parties included the participation of women despite their being denied the right to vote in many places and women's suffrage was made an important programmatic goal of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century radical movement. A special conference of socialist women was convened in Berne, Switzerland in 1915, bringing together such key international socialist leaders as Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, and Clara Zetkin to share common experiences and set common agendas.
  Less than 18 months after the Russian Revolution of November 1917, a new Communist International (Comintern) was established in Moscow in an attempt to supersede the moribund Second International, which had been effectively shattered by World War I. A parallel effort was made to reorganize the revolutionary socialist women of Europe and America. This took the form of the Communist Women's International, headed by an institution known as International Communist Women's Secretariat, established in Moscow by the Comintern in April 1920.
  The International Women's Secretariat was conceived as a small directing circle of half a dozen members or fewer. Ultimately eight women were named to the body, including six Russians — Kollontai, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lyudmila Stal, Zlata Lilina, Konkordia Samoilova, and a woman known to history only as Similova — as well as the Dutch Henriëtte Roland-Holst and Rosa Bloch from Switzerland. Secretary of the organization was the veteran German revolutionary Clara Zetkin.
  An International Conference of Communist Women was convened from July 30 to August 2, 1920 in Moscow, concurrent with the ongoing 2nd World Congress of the Comintern.
  Delegates heard details of the system of so-called "delegates' meetings" conducted in Soviet Russia which brought together assemblies of elected female representatives of factories and villages in an effort to mobilize them on government administrative tasks and to build female participation in village and factory soviets as well as the Russian Communist Party.
caption: The French-born Inessa Armand was a leading figure at the 1915 and 1920 International Women's Conferences of the Second and Third Internationals, respectively. (1916 photo)
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