The Bolsheviks believed that the freedom to divorce – to dissolve a union no longer founded on love – was essential to the freedom of the individual. The right to divorce was particularly important to women, whose true feelings and abilities were so often stifled by the unbreakable bonds of marriage. This idea was widely shared by most of the progressive, prewar intelligentsia. Liberal jurists tried repeatedly to reform Russia's unbending divorce laws. Tolstoy immortalized the desperate plight of a young mother in her struggle to free herself of a loveless marriage in his famous novel, Anna Karenina. And both Vera Figner, the leader of the terrorist People's Will, and Alexandra Kollontai, among countless others, struggled to escape the control of husbands and families.

Yet the issue of divorce had a class as well as a gender dimension. The young women rebels who fought for their rights to emotional fulfillment, education, and careers at the end of the nineteenth century came mainly from upper-and middle-class families.