Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist feminist, and Bolshevik leader who insisted that the liberation of women was inseparable from the liberation of the working class. Born in St. Petersburg in 1872 to an aristocratic family, she broke with her class after seeing the poverty of textile workers. In 1905 she witnessed the massacre of peaceful marchers on Bloody Sunday, and she devoted herself to the socialist movement. She organized working women, helped build the international socialist women's movement alongside Clara Zetkin, and was forced into exile for her activity.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Kollontai became People's Commissar of Social Welfare, one of the first women in the world to hold a government ministry. The revolutionary government legalized divorce and civil marriage and established maternity care and protections for working mothers. In 1920 it made the Soviet Union the first country to legalize abortion. Kollontai helped found and led the Zhenotdel, the Communist Party's women's department, which organized millions of working and peasant women and fought for literacy, childcare, and communal kitchens and laundries to free women from domestic drudgery.

In her writings, from The Social Basis of the Woman Question to her essays on love and the family, Kollontai argued that capitalism turned the family into a unit of private property and dependence. She held that communism would make possible new relationships based on equality, solidarity, and free choice. She later served as one of the world's first women ambassadors, representing the Soviet Union in Norway, Mexico, and Sweden. Kollontai died in 1952. Her legacy endures as a vision of revolution that transforms not only the economy and the state but everyday life, love, and the relations between women and men.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*