Socialising Housework: Kollontai’s Vision for Women’s Liberation

Most discussions about women’s equality focus on the right to vote, equal pay, or access to education. Alexandra Kollontai looked somewhere far less glamorous: the kitchen sink. For this Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist, the real chains binding women weren’t only legal or political-they were the endless, unpaid hours of cooking, cleaning, washing, and child-rearing that society treated as a woman’s natural duty. Her solution was radical for her time and remains provocative today: take housework out of the private home and make it a public, collective responsibility. This idea, known as the socialisation of housework, sits at the heart of her vision for genuine women’s liberation.

Who was Alexandra Kollontai? 🔗

Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai (1872-1952) was born into an aristocratic family in St. Petersburg but became one of the most influential socialist thinkers on the “woman question.” She was a leading member of the Bolshevik Party, served as People’s Commissar of Social Welfare after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and later became one of the world’s first female ambassadors. She is widely regarded as a pioneer of the struggle for socialist women’s liberation.

Her personal life shaped her politics. Married young, Kollontai later described domestic life as a “cage” and eventually left her husband to study political economy abroad. This tension-between the demands of family and a woman’s own personhood-runs through all her writing. Her famous line, “I am a person before I am a woman,” captures the core of her philosophy: the refusal to let marriage, family, or domestic duty define the limits of a woman’s existence.

The problem: a double burden on women 🔗

To understand why Kollontai focused on housework, you have to understand what she called the crushing weight placed on working women. By the early twentieth century, large numbers of women had entered factories and workplaces. But entering paid work did not free them from their old responsibilities at home. Instead, it added a second job on top of the first.

As Kollontai put it in her 1920 essay Communism and the Family, a working woman “has to work the same hours as her husband in some factory” and then, on top of that, find time to manage the household and look after the children. In her analysis, capitalism had made woman a wage-worker without reducing her duties as housekeeper and mother. This is what modern researchers call the double burden-the combination of paid employment and unpaid domestic labour that falls disproportionately on women.

Kollontai was sharp about the class dimension of this problem. Wealthy women, she noted, had long been freed from domestic chores-not by liberation, but by hiring servants. Why, she asked, should only the rich be relieved of cleaning, cooking, washing, and mending? For working-class and peasant women, housework amounted to a form of domestic servitude, with no escape and no recognition.

The solution: socialising housework 🔗

Kollontai’s answer was not to ask husbands to “help out more” within the existing family structure. She argued that the entire system of individual housekeeping-where each household separately cooks, cleans, and cares-was wasteful, isolating, and oppressive. Her solution was to collectivise these tasks and transfer them from the private family to society as a whole.

Communal kitchens and public dining 🔗

Instead of each woman spending her last free hours preparing meals in a private kitchen, Kollontai envisioned communist society organising public restaurants and communal kitchens. Meals would be prepared collectively and made available to everyone, not just to those with money to dine out. This single change, she believed, would return hours of life to women every single day.

Central laundries and cleaning services 🔗

The same logic applied to washing and household upkeep. Rather than each woman struggling over her own laundry, she proposed central laundries where clothes could be dropped off and collected, already washed and ironed. She even imagined teams of workers whose paid job was to clean homes in the morning-again, a service that wealthy households already enjoyed through private servants, now made available to all.

Childcare, nurseries, and collective upbringing 🔗

Perhaps the most far-reaching part of her vision concerned children. Kollontai argued that childcare should not be the private, isolated responsibility of individual mothers. She pointed to the network of facilities already being built in Soviet Russia: homes for infants, day nurseries, kindergartens, and children’s colonies. The aim was to give women the chance to combine participation in society with motherhood, rather than forcing them to choose between the two.

It is important to address a common misreading here. Kollontai was clear that the state was not trying to seize children or tear babies from their mothers. The goal was to support mothers-married or unmarried-by sharing the labour of raising and educating children, so that motherhood would no longer be a barrier to a full social and economic life. After the revolution, Kollontai helped organise the Zhenotdel, the women’s department of the Communist Party, which worked to introduce egalitarian marriage and divorce laws alongside these care services.

Why only socialism could deliver it 🔗

A crucial point in Kollontai’s argument is that this comprehensive socialisation of housework could only be achieved under socialism. She was a committed Marxist, and her thinking on women was inseparable from her thinking about class and economic structure.

Her reasoning was direct. Building communal kitchens, laundries, nurseries, and cleaning services on a mass scale requires enormous public investment. A capitalist system, organised around private profit, has little incentive to make that investment, because women’s unpaid labour at home is effectively free-it sustains the workforce at no cost to employers or the state. Only a society that had abolished private profit and organised production for collective welfare, she argued, would willingly pour resources into freeing women from domestic drudgery.

This is also why Kollontai was critical of what she saw as bourgeois feminism. She believed that defining women’s emancipation purely in terms of legal and civil rights-like the vote-ignored the material reality that kept working-class women trapped. Without changing the economic basis of the family, formal equality would remain hollow for the majority of women.

The link between housework and the family 🔗

For Kollontai, socialising housework was not just a practical convenience-it was tied to a deeper transformation of the family itself. She argued that once the family stopped functioning as an economic unit responsible for cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, it would also stop being a structure of dependence in which women were tied to men out of material necessity.

In her view, this would allow relationships to be based on what she called a union of affection and comradeship-genuine mutual choice between equals-rather than economic survival. A woman who did not need a husband to feed and house her could enter or leave relationships freely. The end of “domestic slavery,” in other words, was also meant to be the foundation of more honest and equal human relationships.

Why Kollontai still matters today 🔗

It would be easy to treat these ideas as a relic of revolutionary Russia a century ago. But the core problem Kollontai identified-the unequal distribution of unpaid domestic and care work-remains strikingly current, and nowhere more visibly than in contemporary data.

According to the government’s Time Use Survey, the imbalance is stark. The Economic Survey 2025-26 noted that women spend roughly 363 minutes a day on unpaid activities, compared with about 123 minutes for men, producing what it explicitly called a “dual burden” that limits women’s ability to stay in paid work. A gendered analysis by the Observer Research Foundation found that women in paid employment take on roughly six times more unpaid care work than employed men-and that this gap does not shrink with higher education or higher income.

The consequences are not just personal but economic. Survey after survey shows that heavy care responsibilities push women out of the workforce or into low-paying, insecure jobs. The International Labour Organization has estimated that hundreds of millions of people worldwide remain outside the labour force because of care responsibilities, the overwhelming majority of them women. This is precisely the dynamic Kollontai diagnosed: unpaid domestic work is not a private inconvenience but a structural barrier to women’s full participation in social and economic life.

From revolution to policy 🔗

What is interesting is how Kollontai’s once-radical proposals echo in mainstream policy debates today. The same Economic Survey that documented the care gap argued that women’s ability to remain in paid work depends on care infrastructure-accessible childcare, healthcare, and support services-rather than on job availability alone. Calls for public investment in crèches, childcare centres, and care services are now standard in discussions about raising female labour force participation.

Of course, the contemporary debate is not framed in the language of abolishing the family or building communism. And critics point out, fairly, that economic structure is only part of the story-deeply rooted social norms about whose time is more valuable also keep the burden on women, regardless of the economic system. The Soviet attempt to socialise housework itself faced severe practical limits, from financial instability to housing shortages that left the vision only partially realised. Yet Kollontai’s central insight endures: as long as the work of sustaining daily life is treated as women’s private, unpaid duty, formal equality will only go so far.

What do you think? Should the care of children, the elderly, and the home be treated as a shared social responsibility supported by public investment, or as a private matter for each family to manage on its own? And can the deep gender gap in unpaid work really be closed by building more care infrastructure, or does it ultimately depend on changing the social norms that decide whose time is worth more?

References

1. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2017/03/20/alexandra-kollantai-pioneer-struggle-socialism-womens-liberation/
2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm
3. https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165kollontai.html
4. https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/from-the-old-familyto-the-new/
5. https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/959/women-and-revolution-alexandra-kollontai-a-leading/
6. https://www.businesstoday.in/union-budget/story/healthcare-care-access-key-to-women-staying-in-work-says-economic-survey-2025-26-513537-2026-01-29
7. https://www.orfonline.org/research/building-india-s-economy-on-the-backs-of-women-s-unpaid-work-a-gendered-analysis-of-time-use-data