The concept known as the "glass of water theory" has nothing to do with the "glass of water" someone has to give to a person in old age. The latter is used as an argument in favor of starting a family, while the "glass of water theory" is the opposite of the very concept of a family.
Clara Zetkin, the founder of the Communist Party of Germany, who became famous for her struggle for women's rights, is often called the creator of the "theory of a glass of water". The authorship is also attributed to Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian statesman who became the first woman ambassador in history, as well as revolutionary Inessa Armand.
It cannot be denied that such views were close to all these women, and yet the palm should be given not to them, but to Aurora Dudevant, a 19th-century French writer who worked under the pseudonym Georges Sand. Her contemporary, Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, quotes the writer's dictum: "Love, like a glass of water, is given to the one who asks for it."
Essence of the concept
"A glass of water" in this context is considered as a generalized image of the simplest human physiological needs, which must be satisfied as they arise, without any connection with any responsibilities. Relations between the sexes are also put on a par with such needs.
Here a man is hungry - and he has eaten something, he is thirsty - and he drank a glass of water. After that, the person returns to his business, not remembering either the need that no longer bothers him, or the circumstances of its satisfaction. It is assumed that the same should be the attitude towards the need for intimacy. There should not be any conventions in the form of moral prohibitions or marriage - they enslave a woman, relegating her to the position of a “tool of production”.
Perception of the concept in society
"The theory of a glass of water", as well as the idea of a community of wives close to it at the beginning of the 20th century. often attributed to socialists and communists. In a sense, the founders of the communist ideology themselves gave a reason for this, predicting the impending withering away of the family. Such forecasts are expressed in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by K. Marx and F. Engels, in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" by F. Engels.
In fact, K. Marx, F. Engels and their followers did not object to the family as such and did not call for the abolition of marriage. They criticized the bourgeois family, built on private property and the fusion of capital - such a family, according to the theorists of Marxism, should really disappear. Karl Marx sarcastically about attributing the idea of family destruction to the communists, pointing out that the "community of wives" actually takes place in the form of prostitution and adultery.
V. Lenin also had a negative attitude to this concept: “Our youth got mad at this theory of a glass of water,” he says. And the statement was not unfounded: in the 1920s, this theory was even discussed at the Komsomol disputes - it was so popular.
This concept was raised not by V. Lenin and his supporters, but by Uvarov, a member of the extreme right-wing monarchist organization, the Union of the Russian People. In 1918, in his "Decree of the Saratov Provincial Council of People's Commissars," he proclaimed "the abolition of private ownership of women." Subsequently, during the Great Patriotic War, the Nazis relied on this document, declaring all Soviet women "prostitutes".
In Soviet society, the "theory of a glass of water" could not be established. She was resurrected in the 70s of the 20th century. in the form of a "sexual revolution" in Western countries and in the 90s was picked up by Russian society.
