Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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where it remained throughout the 1920s, even as the number of workers slowly

grew.

Zhenotdel complaints about the situation fell on deaf ears.

Family upheaval intensiﬁed women’s vulnerability. Millions of Russians,

mostly urban residents, exercised their new right to divorce. Courts became

swamped with alimony suits, many of them initiated by unmarried women

whohad borne children in unregistered unions, for which the 1918 lawmadeno

provision. Unprepared to devote resources to implementing women’s equality

in the workplace or restructuring the family, the state instead revised the law.

A new family code was issued in 1926 after considerable discussion. Designed

‘to shield women and children from the negative effects of NEP’, but also to

promote the withering away of the family, the code granted new rights to

women in unregistered unions and further simpliﬁed divorce procedures,

transferring contested divorces from the courts to registry ofﬁces.

The code

failed to ameliorate the problems it sought to address.

Other policies that targeted women served to replicate women’s subor-

dinate status. Reafﬁrming the connection between women’s sexuality and

reproduction, the 1920 abortion law referred to abortion as a serious ‘evil’,

necessitated by the ‘moral survivals’ of the past and by difﬁcult economic con-

ditions. Once those conditions disappeared, the assumption went, so would

the need to limit births.

Contraception was legalised only in 1923. Physicians

gained greater control over reproduction and authorisation to pursue their

campaign to modernise motherhood. Only qualiﬁed doctors, not midwives,

were certiﬁed to perform legal abortions, which deprived most village women

of access to them. Propaganda viliﬁed village midwives, the primary source

of medical care for village women, and portrayed physicians as male. Posters

intended for urban women represented healthy female sexuality as linked to

reproduction and offered viewers images of mothers surrounded by healthy

children. Yet mothering, propaganda emphasised, was a craft that had to be

learned from the physicians who best understood it. To oversee the process,

the government created an organisation for the Protection of Motherhood

and Infancy (OMM).

Women’s attempts to control their own reproductive

lives through the use of abortion encountered increasing criticism. Facing dif-

ﬁcult material conditions, perhaps eager to seize new opportunities, women

20 Wendy Zeva Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social

Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 101–44.

21 Ibid., pp. 212–13.

22 Rex Wade (ed.), Documents of Soviet History, vol. ii: Triumph and Retreat, 1920–1922 (Gulf

Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 1991), p. 145.

23 Elizabeth Waters, ‘The Modernization of Russian Motherhood, 1917–1936’, Soviet Studies

44, 1 (1992): 124–9.

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Women and the state

ignored pro-natalist propaganda. By the late 1920s, abortions had become

so commonplace that in some cities they considerably outnumbered births.

Experts expressed profound concern about the extent of abortion, a threat to

population growth in their view. Referring to the ‘antisocial’ nature of abortion

and its ‘epidemic’ dimensions, they emphasised the state’s need for children,

not women’s need to control their fertility.

Revolution comes to the countryside

By contrast with urbanites, village women remained largely unaffected by

post-revolutionary upheavals. To be sure, the land code that the Bolsheviks

introduced in 1922 promised much on paper: it equalised women’s legal posi-

tion in the peasant household, and entitled women to an equal right to land

and other property and to equal participation in village self-government; it

provided protection for pregnant women and introduced maternity leave for

agricultural labourers. The Zhenotdel and press campaigned to educate vil-

lage women and mobilise them on their own behalf – to set up nurseries for

their children, to divorce abusive husbands. But most of these initiatives went

nowhere. The state lacked the means to pursue them, or back up its promises

with the resources necessary to support real change.

Only with the collectivisation drive did the Soviet state decisively intrude

on peasant women’s lives, and the impact was mostly negative. The collectivi-

sation campaign threatened the sphere of women. Activists seized as collective

property the livestock that women customarily tended; they broke up families

and dispersed their members. Although by depriving male household heads of

control of household property and labour, collectivisation promised to under-

mine the peasantry’s patriarchal order, it failed to attract peasant women. In the

regime’s view, women’s bitter opposition further demonstrated their greater

‘backwardness’ and susceptibility to ‘kulak’ manipulation.

Taking advantage

of the immunity that such perceptions ensured, enormous numbers of women

engaged in acts of resistance. Women also demonstrated against the closing of

churches and continued to baptise their children despite prohibitions against

the practice. Baptism became a ‘conspicuous site of resistance’ to ofﬁcial val-

ues, if largely a hidden one.

24 Goldman, Women, the State,pp.288–9.

25 Lynne Viola, ‘Bab’i Bunty and Peasant Women’sProtest during Collectivization’, Russian

Review 45 (1986): 28–38.

26 David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 164.

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Theregime mobilised to overcome women’s resistance. In 1929, it instructed

the Zhenotdel to work with this ‘backward layer’, organising peasant women

to support collectivisation. Posters and ﬁlms trumpeted the advantages that

collectivisation brought to women and recast the image of the peasant woman

to portray her as a collective farm woman (kolkhoznitsa), the antithesis of the

backward peasant baba who opposed collectivisation. Young and slim, the

kolkhoznitsa had become a ‘new woman’, the rural counterpart of her liber-

ated urban sisters.

Enthusiastic about constructing socialism, earning her

own income and prizing her independence, she was fully committed to the

goals of the party-state. Those peasant women who embraced their govern-

ment’s values received considerable publicity, which often emphasised their

freedom from traditional constraints on women and subordination to men.

The regime rewarded its female supporters more concretely, too. In addition

to meeting important functionaries and having their pictures displayed, such

women became eligible for goods in short supply. Whether in traditionally

male occupations such as tractor driver, or, far more commonly, in tradition-

ally female ones such as milkmaid, such women became poster-children of the

new era in the countryside, symbols of the success of the Stalinist revolution

and its commitment to promoting women.

Most rural women, however, enjoyed none of these beneﬁts. Comprising

roughly 58 per cent of collective farm workers by the late 1930s, women sup-

plied two-thirds of the backbreaking labour. A rigid sexual division of labour

prevailed, making it hard for women to work in trades labelled ‘male’. Access

to health and maternity care improved only slowly. By 1939, there were 7,000

hospitals, 7,503 maternity homes, 14,300 clinics and 26,000 medical assistants

in the entire USSR, serving a rural population of over 114,400,000.

A genuine

advance over the previous decade, these facilities nevertheless remained a drop

in the bucket. The network of rural day-care centres intended to free women

from childcare fell far short of the goals set by the Five-Year Plan. As always,

it was women who shouldered the burden of housework, and without basic

amenities such as running water, indoor plumbing and electricity. Women also

assumed primary responsibility for tending the private plot that fed most fam-

ilies. Consequently, women’s work-days lasted far longer than men’s. Women

earned far less, however, because most of their work was considered ‘unskilled’

and they devoted a smaller fraction of it to collective production. In any case,

27 Bonnell, Iconography,pp.109–10.

28 Roberta Manning, ‘Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II’, in

Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynn Viola (eds.), Russian Peasant Women (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), pp. 208, 217.

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Women and the state

despite celebration of the newly independent collective farm woman with her

own individual wage, collective farm payments, such as they were, customarily

went to the household and not the individual.

A great retreat?

During the First Five-Year Plan, the leadership ceased even to pay lip-service

to women’s emancipation as a goal in itself; emancipation became linked

exclusively with women’s participation in production and contribution to

building socialism. In December 1928, the government eliminated all women’s

organisers within trade unions, thereby halting efforts to train, promote and

defend women workers on the shop ﬂoor. On 5 January 1930, the Zhenotdel

itself was abolished, ending advocacy within party circles on behalf of women.

Some women in other ofﬁcial organs tried but failed to ﬁll the gap. The absence

of persistent advocacy on women’s behalf left the leadership free to deploy the

female labour force as it chose and at the lowest possible cost. Slowly at ﬁrst,

and then at breakneck speed, the industrialisation drive encouraged women

to take up new trades and opened the gates of the industrial labour force to

them. In 1928, there were 2.8 million women in the labour force; by 1932, there

were twice as many and over four times as many by 1940.

However, despite claims to the contrary, industrialisation failed to provide

women with equal employment opportunity. During the First Five-Year Plan,

women’s share of every branch of industry increased, including those branches,

such as chemicals, metallurgy and mining, traditionally dominated by men.

The introduction of machinery made women’s lack of skill and education

less of an obstacle to hiring them, enabling the state to replace men with

women and to transfer men where needed. Old lines of gender segregation

gave way. However, new ones took their place, as industries and sectors of

the economy were designated ‘best suited’ for women’s labour. Entire sectors

of the economy became ‘female’, including food processing, textiles and the

production of consumer goods, and the lower and middle ranks of white-collar

and service professions.

The 1930s brought some women unprecedented social mobility. The pro-

portion of women in institutions of higher education grew from 31 per cent in

1926 to 43 per cent in 1937. Women’s progress was particularly marked in ﬁelds

29 Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 166.

30 Wendy Zeva Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 149.

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such as economics, law, construction and transport, where the proportion of

women students had hitherto been quite low. Most of the women who bene-

ﬁted derived from lower-class backgrounds. Female role models encouraged

women to choose new paths. In September 1938, Valentina Griazodubova,

Marina Raskova and Polina Osipenko set a world record for non-stop ﬂight by

women. Yet despite the highly acclaimed breakthroughs of a few, the major-

ity of women workers continued to ﬁll the lowest-paid and most physically

arduous positions. Concentrated in light industries, such women were left

behind by investment policies that favoured heavy industry and neglected

consumption. Some experienced a worsening of working conditions and liv-

ing standards so severe that they staged protests, as did about 16,000 mostly

female workers in 1932.

Moreover, because the state failed to socialise domestic labour as promised,

working women often did two jobs rather than one. Despite ambitious goals

in both the First and Second Five-Year Plans, only modest progress was made

because heavy industry took priority. Managers even commandeered for other

purposes buildings designated for childcare. According to ofﬁcial ﬁgures, the

number of children in childcare centres in 1936 numbered 1,048,309, a tenfold

increase from 1928, but still far short of the goals.

The First Five-Year Plan

actually made housekeeping more difﬁcult. Collectivisation severely disrupted

food production. Having abolished private trade with the onset of the plan,

the state experienced substantial difﬁculties in distributing goods. Women, not

men, were encouraged to assume the housekeeping burden. In 1936, employed

wives spent on housework a total of 147 of their leisure hours each month, as

compared to thirty spent by husbands. Women spent almost as many hours

on housework as they spent on the job.

Women’s reproduction was likewise harnessed to the needs of the state.

Between 1927 and 1935, the birth rate declined from 45 births per 1,000 people

to 30.1; the working-class family decreased in size. Ofﬁcials found the change

alarming. As did other European states, the Soviet state sought to increase the

size of its population to meet the demands of industry and modern warfare.

Bearing and raising children ceased entirely to be a private matter; instead,

they became women’s responsibility to society and the state. As Joseph Stalin

put it, the fact that a Soviet woman enjoyed the same rights as a man did

not release her from the ‘great and honourable duty’ of being a mother.

31 Jeffrey Rossman, ‘The Teikovo Cotton Workers’ Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender, and

Identity Politics in Stalin’s Russia’, Russian Review 56 (1997): 48–9.

32 Goldman, WomenattheGates,p.274.

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Women and the state

Not a private matter, motherhood had ‘great social signiﬁcance’.

Efforts to

modernise motherhood continued, now entirely directed by the state and

linked to productivist goals. Media portrayed motherhood as a natural part of

women’s lives and avoiding motherhood as ‘abnormal’.

The state attempted to strengthen the family, employing legislation and

propaganda similar to that of other European nations. In 1934, homosexual

acts between consenting males became a criminal offence; the regime did not

outlaw female homosexuality, less publicly visible.

In 1936, the regime circu-

lated for discussion the draft of a new family law, which would recognise only

registered marriages, make divorce more complicated and expensive, and pro-

hibit abortion except when childbearing threatened the mother’s life or health.

The draft also included incentives, similar to those offered by Catholic coun-

tries and Nazi Germany, designed to encourage childbearing. Women who

bore more than six children would receive a 2,000-rouble annual bonus for

each additional child and a 5,000-rouble bonus for each child over ten chil-

dren. The law raised both the level of child support and penalties for men

who failed to pay it. Despite letters from women protesting against the pro-

hibition on abortion, it was retained when the draft became law in 1936.In

1936, a secret directive from the Commissariat of Health ordered contraceptive

devices to be withdrawn from sale.

Socialism had solved the ‘woman ques-

tion’, the regime proudly declared. Soviet women had become the freest in the

world.

The state’s pro-natalist efforts enjoyed only short-lived success. The birth

rate increased to 39.7 births in 1937, but thereafter declined. In 1938, as the nation

prepared for war, maternity leave was reduced from sixteen weeks to nine

and became contingent on seven continuous months of prior employment.

The birth rate in 1940 dropped below that of 1936, partly in consequence.

Underground abortion was primarily responsible for the decline. Despite the

‘sin’ they attached to it, rural women resorted to it frequently, learning to

perform abortions on themselves or turning to local abortionists. Women’s

33 Choi Chatterjee, ‘Soviet Heroines and Public Identity, 1930–1939’, Carl Beck Papers in

Russian and East European Studies,no.1402 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East

European Studies, 1999), p. 13.

34 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender

Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 184–5.

35 David Hoffman, ‘Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European

Context’, Journal of Social History (Fall, 2000): 39.

36 Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1989), pp. 108–13.

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use of illegal abortion constituted a form of resistance to the demand that they

produce and reproduce without support from the state. At a terrible physical,

and in the case of peasant women, moral price, women took control of their

fertility as best they could.

The new emphasis on the family brought a redeﬁnition of wifehood. Devot-

ing oneself to one’s man assumed new importance for all but peasant women.

Honouring a Soviet hero, the press would also lavish praise on his wife. The

celebration of socially conscious wifehood reached its peak in the movement

of wife-activists (obshchestvennitsy), which lasted from 1936 until 1941. For the

ﬁrst time since 1917, full-time housewives were treated respectfully and invited

to contribute their unpaid labour to the creation of a new society. At its height

in 1936–7 the movement mobilised tens of thousands of housewives to organ-

ise kindergartens and camps for children, furnish workers’ dormitories, plant

ﬂowers and the like. Dominated by the wives of industrial managers and engi-

neers, the movement extended women’s domestic responsibilities into the

public sphere and provided social services neglected by economic planners.

At the same time, the neatly groomed and fashionably dressed obshchestven-

nitsy served as exemplars of the ‘cultured’ society of the future. Working-class

women often resented obshchestvennitsy, whose celebration signiﬁed increased

acceptance of class distinctions.

Family ties sometimes brought arrest and imprisonment. Women consti-

tuted 11 per cent of those formally prosecuted by the legal system during

the Terror, and 8 per cent of the prison population in 1940.

Many of the

women political prisoners were mothers, daughters, sisters and, most com-

monly, wives of arrested men. So many wives of arrested Old Bolsheviks were

themselves arrested in 1937 that special camps were created to hold them.

The motherhood that the regime now celebrated intensiﬁed the sufferings

of women prisoners. Their children were frequently sent away to children’s

homes, their names changed, their pasts effaced. In the communal prison

cells described by Evgenia Ginzberg and others, women who had remained

stalwart under brutal interrogation and in punishment cells would succumb

to hysterical weeping when they permitted themselves to think of their

children.

37 Ransel, Village Mothers,p.115.

38 Rebecca Balmas Neary, ‘Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement

and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life’, Russian Review 58, 3 (July 1999): 396–412; Sheila

Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 216–37;

Sarah Davies, ‘“A Mother’s Cares”: Women Workers and Popular Opinion in Stalin’s

Russia’, in Melanie Ilic (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 100.

39 Clements, Bolshevik Women,p.280.

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Women and the state

The Second World War and its aftermath

The massive mobilisation during the Second World War both obscured and

intensiﬁed gender differences. The line separating men’s work from women’s

work dissolved. Tens of thousands of women were compelled to prepare

defences when German forces threatened. To replace the labour of men

under arms, on 13 February 1942, the Soviet government ordered full labour

mobilisation, incorporating into the labour force the ‘non-working’ popula-

tion aged sixteen to forty-ﬁve, except for pregnant women, nursing mothers

and mothers without access to childcare. By the beginning of October 1942,

women comprised 52 per cent of the labour force in military-related indus-

try and 81 per cent of the labour in light industry (up from 60 per cent on

the eve of invasion). In 1945, 56 per cent of the entire industrial labour force

was female. Seventy per cent of the agricultural labour force was female in

1943, 91.7 per cent in 1945. Between 1940 and 1944, the proportion of trac-

tor drivers who were women rose from 4 to 81 per cent.

The war cre-

ated opportunities for women to advance on the job and in party and state

institutions.

Millions of women served at the front. The government immediately

drafted women medical students and established crash courses to prepare

front-line medics and nurses. Forty-one per cent of physicians at the front

were female, as were 43 per cent of ﬁeld surgeons, 43 per cent of medical

assistants and 100 per cent of nurses. Other women participated directly in the

ﬁghting, rendering the Soviet Union’s wartime experience unique. Women

constituted 9.3 per cent of partisan forces that appeared behind enemy lines.

To shore up resistance against the invaders, Communist Party and Komsomol

members were mobilised for combat immediately after war broke out, with-

out regard to gender. Early in 1942 the Central Committee of the Communist

Party formally accepted women into the military. By the end of 1943, when

female participation reached its peak, over 800,000 served in the armed forces

and partisan units; by the end of the war, over a million had performed mili-

tary service. Women fought on every front and in all branches of the services,

constituting about 8 per cent of military personnel overall.

Yet while gender distinctions disappeared in much of early wartime prac-

tice, they resurfaced in wartime propaganda and towards the end of the war,

40 John Erickson, ‘Soviet Women at War’, in John and Carol Garrard (eds.), Wo r l d Wa r 2 and

the Soviet People: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European

Studies, Harrogate, 1 990 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 53–6.

41 K. Jean Cottam, ‘Soviet Women in World War II: The Ground Forces and the Navy’,

International Journal of Women’s Studies 3 (1980): 345.

483

barbara alpern engel

in state policy. Media reinforced the gendered imagery that had evolved by the

end of the 1930s, representing women ﬁrst and foremost as mothers but, more

generally, as embodiments of the home and family for which men fought.

Women’s front-line responsibilities received relatively little attention during

the war. In the rare cases when the media did depict women soldiers, it almost

invariably portrayed them as feminine and girlish, by contrast with brave and

manly men.

Towards the end of the war, gender distinctions became newly

institutionalised. In 1943, co-education, the norm since 1918, was abolished

in urban secondary schools in order to give proper attention to the different

requirements of boys’ and girls’ ‘vocational training, practical activities, prepa-

ration for leadership and military service’.

A new family code was issued on

8 July 1944, the 1936 code having failed to reduce the divorce rate. Intended to

strengthen the family, the code reinforced marital ties by making divorce still

more difﬁcult. The new law deprived people in unregistered unions of legal

beneﬁts and access to housing, and restored the distinction between legitimate

and illegitimate children. It barred women from bringing paternity suits. At the

same time, the code was unabashedly pro-natalist: single people were taxed, as

were married couples with fewer than three children, except for those under

the age of twenty-ﬁve and attending college full time, or who had lost children

during the war. The new legislation also augmented the cult of motherhood.

Even unmarried mothers, otherwise stigmatised by the new laws, were eligi-

ble for additional ﬁnancial support from the state. In the summer of 1944, the

state instituted military-style ‘motherhood medals’, almost identical to those

awarded by the Nazis and graduated according to the number of children a

woman had borne and reared. After 1944, when the press began publishing the

names of women who won these awards, mothering became women’s most

publicised work.

In the post-war period, celebration of women’s domestic roles intensiﬁed.

Demobilised men often replaced women in the responsible and well-paid

positions the women had gained during the war and thanks to new entry

requirements that favoured male veterans, in institutions of higher education,

too. The proportion of women enrolled in higher education dropped from the

wartime high of 77 per cent to 52 per cent in 1955, then to 42 per cent in 1962.

However, the majority of the adult female population continued to work, their

42 Katharine Hodgson, ‘The Other Veterans: Soviet Women’s Poetry of World War 2’, in

Garrard and Garrard, Wo r l d Wa r 2,p.81.

43 Rudolf Schlesinger (ed.), The Family in the USSR: Documents and Readings (London: Rout-

ledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 363.

484

Women and the state

labour essential to rebuilding the Soviet Union. To ensure that they did, food

distribution was tied to the workplace. Between 1945 and 1950, the number

of women in the workforce grew by over three million, although the propor-

tion of women workers dropped from 56 to 47 per cent because of returning

soldiers.

Yet despite the need for women’s labour, ﬁction treated women’s

waged work as ‘a mere adjunct’ to women’s domestic responsibilities, which

consisted primarily of restoring men’s self-esteem and faith in their own man-

hood. ‘Images of wives welcoming mutilated and traumatized husbands and

ﬁanc

es home functioned as a promise and a hope for men and as a suggestion

and instruction to women.’

To an unprecedented extent, the post-war media celebrated personal and

family happiness. Love, peripheral at best in 1930s ﬁction, became central to the

ﬁction of the post-war era, reﬂecting as well as shaping popular priorities. The

media encouraged women to make themselves more attractive. Magazines

intended for women featured advice on beautifying the home and housekeep-

ing, skin care, exercise, gardening and cooking. Exhorted to work hard, make

a home, comfort their shell-shocked husbands, bear children and be feminine,

in the post-war period women were expected to be all things to all people.

While the Soviet government continued to proclaim the equality of men and

women, women were now asked to accept the ‘Orwellian doctrine’ that men

were the more equal.

Fertility rates once again reﬂected the pressures on women. True, roughly

a quarter of a million unmarried women bore children in 1946 and sizeable

numbers of single women continued to bear children into the 1950s, helping to

replenish the decimated population. Nevertheless, despite policies penalising

small families and encouraging large ones, most women continued to limit

their fertility. The means they employed were the usual: abortion. In 1954,

abortions numbered 6.84 per thousand women, according to ofﬁcial ﬁgures

that undoubtedly underestimate them.

The result of women’s refusal to

reproduce was that as of 1954–5, the birth rate per thousand women remained

approximately 60 per cent of its pre-war level.

44 Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society,pp.150, 166.

45 Anna Krylova, ‘“Healers of Wounded Souls”: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Litera-

ture, 1944–1946’, Journal of Modern History 73, 2 (2001): 324–5, 326.

46 Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 1990), p. 216.

47 Christopher Williams, ‘Abortion and Women’s Health in Russia and the Soviet Successor

States’, in Rosalind Marsh (ed.), Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p. 137.

485