In all major countries in 1917 women not only lacked the vote but were enmeshed in a thick web of discriminatory laws and sexist oppression. The Soviet government of October 1917 took swift action: women in Soviet Russia achieved full legal and political rights, including the right to hold property, act as head of the household, leave the marital home and obtain a divorce on request. Soviet law guaranteed women equal pay for equal work, while also providing on-the-job protection for them. Other laws protected and assisted mothers and assured full rights for children born outside marriage. Abortion became legal in 1920. Women’s freedom of choice was also strengthened by the Soviet law, adopted in 1922, legalising homosexual relations among consenting adults. Europe’s most backward country achieved more in five years than most advanced capitalist countries would accomplish by the new millennium.[79]
In 1919, the Bolshevik Party created the Zhenotdel (women’s department), an organisation that united women in struggle to affirm their newly-acquired legal rights. Thousands of Zhenotdel personnel went to workers’ districts and rural villages. They organised women’s clubs and through these enabled the election of tens of thousands of women delegates to local soviets and other organisations. For the first time women served as judges and were appointed to important positions in the state apparatus. However, a large proportion of the membership of Zhenotdel were Party members or the wives of Party members and this tended to make it a female auxiliary of the Party.[80]
With the rise of Stalinism, these moves were reversed. The international women’s monthly magazine was closed in 1925, the women’s secretariat in 1926, and the Zhenotdel in 1930.[81] These were part of a deliberate policy by the Stalinist regime to strengthen conservative attitudes and structures within soviet society; the question of women’s rights was pushed off the agenda. The bureaucracy found the traditional family useful, because it provided what the state did not – domestic work and child care – and also because it helped meet the bureaucracy’s need for conservative supports throughout society; thus, the regime now trumpeted the sanctity of the family. Marriage and family laws established by the October Revolution were rewritten. In the years immediately following the Revolution the government’s priority was the protection of children from “stagnant traditions” including the “natural” authority structure of the family. Now the Soviet regime made a sharp turn, becoming a wife and mother was the goal lauded by the state propaganda machine.[82]
In 1934, homosexuality was made a criminal offence, punishable with up to eight years of imprisonment. An energetic nationwide campaign was launched against sexual promiscuity, quick and easy marriage, and adultery. In 1936, legal abortion was abolished, except where life or health were endangered or a serious disease might be inherited.[83] A campaign was opened against too frequent and easy divorces and in 1935-36 a tax for divorce was introduced: fees of 50, 150 and 300 rubles for the first, second and subsequent divorces.[84]
The massive industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture, launched in 1929, brought millions of women into the workforce. Employment of women creates conditions for their liberation but it is not necessarily liberation itself. Because improving the lives of women workers was not a political priority for the Stalinist regime, it never really progressed beyond seeing it as an economic problem, a cost on production. Thus, the condition of the social dining halls (e.g. factory canteens) and social laundries continued to be appalling; the better-off workers virtually stopped using them – meaning the return of workers’ wives to their pots and pans. The number of crêches and kindergartens continued to be much lower than the demand, and quality was dismal.[85]
A clear indication of the conservative attitudes of the bureaucracy and the reaction as regards the family reached its climax with the law of 8 July 1944, which made divorce virtually impossible to obtain and which re-established the legal differences between a child born in wedlock and one born out of wedlock. The latter could no longer claim the surname, the support or the inheritance of his or her father.[86]
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Riddell, J. Comintern: Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin’s Time, Socialist Voice, 2008.
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Atkinson, D. Women in Russia, Stanford, U.P., 1977, p122.
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Riddell, Op. cit.
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Trotsky, L. The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder Press, 1972. p153-154.
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Cliff, T. Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation, Bookmarks, 1984, p148-149.
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Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Op. cit. p152.
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Ibid p145-147.
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Cliff, Class Struggle … Op. cit. p150-151.