Imagine a world where women were property, traded like livestock, silenced by veils and worked to death by the age of 30.

That was the context in which the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 launched history’s most radical experiment for women’s emancipation. The Bolsheviks devoted resources to ensure women were no longer slaves. They made childcare free, awarded equal pay and allowed women reproductive freedoms, reforms that were revolutionary for the time.

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While the Bolsheviks’ reforms were short lived (because of policy reversals under Joseph Stalin from the 1930s), they nevertheless showed how inextricably linked capitalism is to women’s oppression.

Today, even though such policies are about achieving gender equality, many nations, including Australia, lag behind.

At the time of the revolution, the vast majority of Russians were peasants struggling to survive. More than 60% were illiterate and there was extreme scarcity. World War I, 1914–1918, had caused even greater privations and disease.

Women had few rights in Tsarist Russia. Females had no voting or property rights.

Whatever her class, a woman was expected to marry a man of her parents’ choice and live as his dutiful wife. There was no escape from abusive marriages.

In the 1890s, one quarter of factory workers were women. Women worked 18-hour shifts, gave birth on factory floors and were told to “make up wages on the streets” during economic downturns. Sexual exploitation of women workers by their bosses was rampant.

Textile workers would work eight hours a day and take workhome to do for another eight hours.Women who worked at home winding cotton often worked 18 hours a day, but earned very little. Girls started work at five........

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