Disclaimer: this is just my opinion based on posts we make on lemmygrad.
As the title suggests, it is of my opinion that we do not make a good enough effort at highlighting the accomplishments and contributions of women in revolutions besides Luxembourg and Kolontai. I myself am relatively ignorant on the subject, and it wasn’t until recently in history that we have started to take note of the vast contributions women made, oftentimes in the background, to revolutions or progress in general. I think that it’s a task that shouldn’t just be handed over for the socialist-feminists to deal with either. It should be a conscious effort to make women be seen in revolution and communist societies. It would help us become more approachable and make places like the ussr a real place that wasn’t just the place of great men like Stalin, Lenin or Marx. These happen to be the biggest names in communism but the revolution was not made by them but by the men and women that contributed their lives and careers in upholding communist nations. It is a positive thing to find the ones whose names we’ve forgotten, and give them new life in our minds.
For example: Nadezhda Krupskaya was the secretary of the Central committee and held important positions as a newspaper editor and helped create the Soviet education system. There is also an asteroid named after her.
Anyone got any favorite, underrated socialist women they know?
Yes! While admittedly I don’t know for sure if she ever identified herself as socialist (it seems more likely than not), I have a great deal of respect for Dorothy W. Douglas, an economic anthropologist who closely studied life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Polish People’s Republic. This is one of my favorite books and it helped me develop a more mature understanding of the people’s republics. (It seems that she also studied child labor in Imperial America, but I haven’t read that one yet.)
There are various other women that I could mention, but I can’t say with absolute certainty if they were socialists either. Others that I could mention are people that I can’t identify.