Soviet Gender Relations

Women reforms in Russia take place during Catherine(1762-1796) and Peter(1682-1725) period but still
not of that calibre,1 some of the reform include women right over patrimonial estates 1725, here it is
important to understand if a man was survived by unmarried daughters, elder daughter inherit his
state and rest divide his movable property,2 Smolny Institute and Novodevichii Institute were formed
by Catherine for both noble and commoners 1764-65,ensure women in education,3 Marriage
customs changed gradually with the new reforms instituted by Peter the Great average marriageable
age increased and legal age is 15 now,4 right to sell his own property, in short both westernization
Russia,women of merchant class now involve in commercial and manufacturing activity,as the
farming is more depended on men power the birth of son is preferred but after that daughters also
have good condition in Russia, now women of any class can appeal in court for martial matters,5
1900s Russia have more professional women's comparing to rest Europe, March 1917 they also get
right to vote and hold political office by provisional government,6

Till the time of revolution women's in Russia not so weak to accept suppression over them and in
such conditions Russia facing labour crises due to war, Lenin saw women as a force of labour,
workforce rose from 423,200 in 1923 to 885,000 in 19307, at the same time communist in Russia
issue family code that means separated marriages from church and have the right to gave there
name to illicit child even, equal pay, equal work hours, leaves during maternity period, marital rape is
illegal now,8

Zhenotdel is a women-centric organization for communist propaganda that encourages women’s

participation in communist party formed in the 1920s and dissolves in 1930, indicate women's
importance for the success of communism in Russia as supporters of ideology, Zenotdel second
family plan during NEP gave freedom to women to decide over her illicit pregnancy9

1
Pushkareva, Natalia (1997). Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe. p. 153.
2
Lamarche-Marrese, Michelle (2002). A Woman's Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia,
1700-1861. NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 30–31
3
Bisha, Robin (2002). Russian Women, 1698-1917 Experience and Expression: An Anthology of Sources.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. pp. 162–163.
4
Pushkareva, Natalia (1997). Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century. Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe. p. 157.
5
Rosslyn, Wendy (2003). Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. pp. 228–
229.
6
Ruthchild, R. (2010). Equality & revolution : Women's rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Series in Russian
and East European studies). Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press
7
Goldman, Wendy Z. Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2002., 12
8
Buckley, Mary. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989, p.35
9
Buckley, Mary. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989, p.40
Changes made by Lenin no longer secured during Stalin Period abortion was made illegal,
homosexuality was declared a crime, legal differences between legitimate and illegitimate children were
restored, and divorce was once again difficult to attain10, From 1934-1940, the number of women that
were gulag prisoners rose from 30,108 to 108,898 can be seen as victims of great purge, Women in the
camps were often subjects of violence and/or sexual abuse11, 8,476 girls went into the Red army and
Soviet navy to assist in the Great Patriotic War on the other hand women also force as labor in farming
during Stalin period12, till 1977 Soviet Constitution and pubic life (Art 35) family life (art Art 53) misery
and suffering of womens mark up and down13 during Lenin period The First Soviet (strictly, Russian)
Constitution, adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918, proclaimed the equality
of all citizens of the (Russian) Soviet Republic regardless of sex, race and nationality (art. 22) and the
equal right of men and women to vote and to be elected to the Soviets (art. 64), Reform of the marriage
law, rendering divorce readily available and making matrimony a purely civil matter, began with two
decrees in December 1917, which were systematized and replaced a year later, on 17 October 1918, by
the Code of Laws concerning the civil registration of deaths, births and marriages (Family Code),14

More than 13,000 sexual abuse and 14,000 murder records we have during 1990s Russia and even vast
number of human trafficking that clearly indicate the condition of women before and after both in a
critical way, even recruitment of large numbers of girls into the army, promoted sexual abstinence and
feminine culturedness, while the Party and Army acquiesced to the desire of commanders to take lovers
from among their subordinates, ends with a discussion of pregnancy and its implications15

Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, government,
cultural, political, and other public activity." In practice, this legal equality has been an efficient tool for
the utilization of women workers in heavy and dangerous work, of the type restricted by law or custom
to men in the United States16 Dr Halle convincingly shows that much of the equalization of the women
status has been done through propaganda rather than law and through social pressure rather than
punishment of the male17

During the war and in the postwar period, absenteeism without valid reason and tardiness were
severely punished. Absenteeism which includes being late more than 20 minutes, or being late less than
20 minutes 3 times in 1 month was defined as crime and punishment of such crimes 25% cut in earning

10
Engel, Barbara Alpern. 1987. “Women in Russia and the Soviet Union”. Signs 12 (4). University of Chicago Press:
781–96.
11
Ilič, Melanie. Women in the Stalin Era. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001, p.131-138
12
Buckley, Mary. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989, p.121
13
Women's Activism in Contemporary Russia, by Linda Racioppi, Katherine O'Sullivan. See, pg 31-33.
14
Dekrety Sovetskoi VIasti (Decrees of the Soviet Power) vol. 1, p. 247-49, no. 171.
15
“Girls” and “Women”. Love, Sex, Duty and Sexual Harassment in the Ranks of the Red Army 1941-1945
Brandon M. Schechter
16
For a discussion of the status of criminal penalties for breaches of Soviet labor discipline, see Monthly Labor
Review, August
17
F.W.Halle, Women in Soviet Russia xvii-363
and applied for girls(15-18) boys(14-17) since 1952 no complain reported bit hard to digest here it is not
so difficult to understand for whom such laws were made to punish,18

Women’s in 1929, women constituted 27 per cent of all wage and salary earners in 1940, 38 per cent (41
per cent in manufacturing industries3)in 1942, 53 percent (the wartime high)and at the beginning of
1949, "about half of all wage and salary earners in the Soviet Union were women,19,In such fields as
dentistry and pharmacy, women have almost a monopoly, as 83 per cent of the dentists and 95 per cent
of the pharmacists were women in 1959,20, 70 per cent of the teachers in elementary and secondary
school, but at a higher educational level the proportion of women is considerably smaller proportion of
women was 41 percent at the end of 1956, and among heads of institutions, deans, and other important
academic administrators the proportion was only 15 per cent21,

While about 20 per cent of Party members are female, the higher reaches of the Communist Party have
remained almost exclusively under male control22 Lenin declared in a speech delivered at the Fourth
Moscow City,

Lenin declared in a speech delivered at the Fourth Moscow Conference of non-Party working women on
September 23, 1919, "You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually
downtrodden because all housework is left to them23

18
Ibid 15
19
Professionalnye Soyuzy (Trade Unions, a trade union monthly), March 1949 (p. 9).
20
Dodge, op. cit., pp. 208-299
21
Nicholas DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment in the USSR, Washington, D. C., National Science
Foundation, 1961, p. 421
22
Dodge, op. cit., pp. 213,
In agriculture the numbers were even great nearly 65% during 1954 and before war it was almost 55-
58% 24, factory working women’s force o pay 8-10% of earning for nursery-kindergarten of factory
owners here according to Trud, women’s have to wait for a long period for finding a place in
kindergarten 25, women workers have to carry 20kg by hand and 50 kg by wheelbarrow26, in Oct 1944
women permitted to work underground 7 March 1954 kazakhstanskaya Pravda reported thousand of
women’s working in underground coal mines of Kazakhstan,27

According to Soviet claims, in 1954 there were at work over a million women specialist' (including
engineers and agronomists) with university and other technical school training, while over 1 million
women were in "specialist" training institutions 17 (in 1955, over 1,400,000) at the end of 1952 nearly
5.5 Million28,

Women workers are entitled to 35 calendars days7 prenatal leave from work and 42 calendar days
postnatal leave (56 days, in case of multiple births). During this period they are entitled to receive free
medical attention and payments from the state social insurance fund - the latter ranging from 50 to 100
per cent of average earnings, Women who are pregnant or who breast-feed infants are exempt from
night and overtime work,29

The living condition of average soviet working women are also difficult Housing is conceded to be
extremely inadequate and both consumer goods and services are in short supply, according to a 1954
Soviet book which stated: ‘’We still lack cloth, shoes, clothing, books, furniture’’ 30,Government has sent
hundreds of thousands of persons (among them "not a few women") to the Central Asian steppes,
where living conditions are most primitive, and has asked them to establish families and settle
permanently31

This widespread employment of women was made possible by a number of unusual circumstances. First
of all, the basic tenets of communist ideology-as postulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel shad
stressed that the first example of class oppression was that of the female by the male and was caused by
the existence of private property and consequently real freedom for women was possible only through
communism32, Lenin emphasized that women had to realize what the proletarian dictatorship would

23
Pravda, no. 213, reprinted in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1965, XXX,p. 43.
24
» Shimkin, Demitri B. Manpower and Manpower Problems. Studies in Business Economics No. 44, National
Industrial Conference Board, May 1954.
25
Trud, March 15, 1955.
26
Washington (D. C.) Post, October 18, 1953
27
Abramova, op. cit. (p. 25
28
88 Ovsiannikova, op. cit. (p26)
29
Zakonodatelstvo O Trade (pp. 202-203)
30
Ovsiannikova, op. cit. (p.19)
31
Ovsiannikova, op. cit. (p.23)
32
Women and Communism: Selections from the Writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, London, 1950, pp. 9, 35-36
mean for them: complete equality with men in law and practice, in the family, in the state, and in
society Indeed, instead of trying to appease women by reforms, he actually wanted to turn women into
ardent defenders of the new order to prevent them from undermining the men's revolutionary ideals."33
Stalin was ready to carry out Lenin's ideas about the role of women in a communist society, urging
women to rally round the Communist Party, He emphasized that women should wholeheartedly support
the proletarian revolution, saying that "there has not been in the history of mankind a single great
movement of the oppressed in which women toilers have not participated34

Without the labour provided by women, the Soviet economy could not operate. The losses of the war
are evidenced by the fact that in 1959 there were 20 million more women than men Representing about
half of the labour force, women played a major role in the most strenuous kinds of work35

on the other hand we have Rural women’s there was not much change in the position of women in the
1920s and 30s the rapid expansion of industry in the 1930s resulted in large-scale migration of males to
the cities, participation of women in mechanized agriculture was low during this phase, in the late 1930s
only 8 per cent of tractor and combine drivers were women, Between 1959 and 1979 there was a rapid
decline in the rural population. It fell from 52 per cent to 34 per cent. Though rural women accounted
for half of the rural workforce, the proportion of women engaged outside agriculture increase, odds are
still stacked against women succeeding in management as overwork, prejudice and, not least, For
instance, her contention that there was not much change in the status of women between 1920s and
1940s could have been explained by the fact that during the initial decades the Soviet Union faced
immense hostility from the industrialized world36

According to Engels, the abolition of individualism and of economic exploitation will result in the
abolition of the family as we know it, as an economic unit, If the family is to survive as a non- economic
unit, as a human bond between persons who love each other, then its nature will be determined by the
public opinion of a new generation freed from economic fear37, The emancipation of women and the
reintroduction of "the whole female sex into public industry" will spell the end of the supremacy of
men38

V. Svetlov described the Decree of 27 June 1936 of Stalin on soviet families less divorce, as being of
great international significance; It strongly bears out the strengthening of the socialist family as against
the disintegrating family in capitalist countries. It gives the lie to all the counterrevolutionary bourgeois

33
Klara Zetkin, My Recollections of Lenin, Moscow, 1956, pp. 69, 73, 77
34
Pravda, no. 56 (March 8, 1925) reprinted in Joseph Stalin, Works, Moscow, 1954,VII, p. 48.
35
15 Nina Popova, "Equality of Soviet Women in the Economic Sphere," Equality of Women in the USSR, Moscow,
1957, pp. 101-104
36
Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women's role in Rural Development in the Soviet Union by Susan Bridger;
Cambrfdge University Press, Cambridge, 1987; pp xvii + 259.
37
Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 48 (1942). Pp 56
38
Engels, "Grundsaitze des Kommunismus," in Marx-Engels, Historisch- kritische Gesamtausgabe Sect I, vol. 6, 503-
22 (ed. by Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow 1972 f.) transl. by Sweezy as "The Principles of Communism," and Marx
and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, etc. 67 at 80 (1964
gossip about the alleged collapse of the family in USSR39, another writer, S. Volfson, admitted: It would
be a camouflage unworthy of reality to conceal the fact that the Soviet family still has many negative
side40, here it is important to understand that even the fee for Decree also increased the fees for
divorce registration to 50 rubles for the first divorce, 150 for the second and 300 for the third and each
subsequent divorce (art. 28) and it imposed a prison sentence for failure to pay maintenance awarded
by a court for the support of children,

Art. 3 provided State assistance in the form of monthly payments for single (unmarried) mothers for
each child beginning with the first, as well as a lump sum on the birth of the third child and subsequent
children, such assistance to continue even after marriage41

Probably the most primal explanation for differences in female attitudes is the biological argument that
there is a connection between politics, aggression, and maleness,Woman is a different physical, and
thus political, being, Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and Lionel Tiger have made variations of this
argument, If biology alone explains differences in behaviour, then sex alone should explain differences
in political attitudes42

Analysts disagree, though, on whether gender alone has the expected effect or whether gender
mediates a number of other variables, the structural variables of income, age, and education, socialized
attitudes toward gender roles, ranging from the traditional to the feminist, and the stimulating effect of
working outside the home43,

stimulated by Brezhnev's concept of "developed socialism," Soviet theorists began to acknowledge that
the equality of the sexes had not yet been achieved and that the attainment of equality, like the
creation of socialism, would be a long and protracted process, women, Barbara Jancar concluded that
Soviet women see politics as a man's field,women are less interested in politics and have a lower sense
of political efficacy 44

Tatyana Mamonova, one of the founding members of the Soviet feminist journal, Almanac: Women in
Russia, has argued that women naturally oppose war and other uses of violence45

39
"Socialist society and the family," in Pod znamenem Marksizma (Under the banner of Marxism) (1936), also cited
in Schlesinger, ibid., Document no. 14 at 316.
40
Vol'fson, "Socialism and the family," in Pod znamenem Marksizma (1936), in Document no. 14, "Explanations of
the New Family Policy by Soviet Theorists," Schlesinger, supra n. 6 at 280, 314-15.
41
Earlier, a Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 21 November 1941, imposed taxes on
single and childless citizens of the USSR.
42
See Lapidus, pp. 199-200, and Jaquette, p. vi, for summaries
43 Political Attitudes and the Gender Gap in the USSR,Author(s): Ellen Carnaghan and Donna Bahry Pp381
44
Jancar, pp. 202-205; see also Sharon Wolchik, "Women and Politics," in Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred D. Meyer,
eds., Women, State and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1985), p. 118; Genia Browning,
"Soviet Politics-Where Are the Women?," in Holland, ed., pp. 208-209.
45
Tatyana Mamonova, "Introduction: The Feminist Movement in the Soviet Union," in Tatyana Mamonova, ed.,
Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. xiii
Like western women, Soviet women are also thought to be more concerned with social welfare
questions, particularly, in the Soviet case, with the provision of public services and the availability of
consumer, Ethel Klein argued that new group consciousness is the product of changed social and
economic circumstances 46.

46
25. Alex Inkeles and H. K. Geiger, "Critical Letters to the Soviet Press," in Alex Inkeles, ed., Social Change in Soviet
Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 309; Jan Adams, "Critical Letters to the Soviet Press: An
Increasingly Important Public Forum," in Donald E. Schulz and Jan S. Adams, eds., Political Participation in
Communist Systems (Elmsford: Pergamon Press, 1981), p. 124; Sharon Wolchik, "The Precommunist Legacy,
Economic Development, Social Transformation, and Women's Roles in Eastern Europe," in Wolchik and Meyer
eds., pp. 42-43.