SOURCE: “Women as Proletarians,” in Partisan Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 640–43.

In the following essay, Elshtain describes Soviet Women as a fascinating and illuminating view of Soviet life.

Marx didn't have a whole lot to say about women. One passage from his essay, “Private Property and Communism,” acquired a totemistic status among Marxist feminists. Marx argued rather murkily that the nature of a society's relationships between males and females demonstrates the “extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of development.” That can take you as far as you want to go, mostly in all sorts of utopian directions along the lines of creating a social world in which human essences have become natural and sex differences are dissolved into some generic...