Los Angeles Valley College Feminist Club

“The Reality of Women’s Lives During the Soviet Union”

Many a person seems to be under the impression that during the Soviet Union, many women experienced emancipation unlike never before, under the Communist Party. While that could be said about some aspects of Soviet culture, it must be noted that it is entirely dependent on what period of Soviet history you are referring to.

In the aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917, women’s rights enjoyed an immediate boost under the newly born Soviet Union. Unlike their situation during the Imperial Russian era, women could go to work (Were given equal pay for their work), participate in the Armed Forces (Even in combat roles), were encouraged to obtain land and go into the political process. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky strongly believed that a real revolution was only successful when the whole of the female population was involved and invested in the cause. And so women enjoyed their newfound freedom and suffrage. They posited themselves as the real emancipators in opposition to the “Bourgeoisie Feminism” of the West. The Soviet State provided child-care centers, maternity leave access, legalized abortion and literacy programs in an attempt to bring Russian women, who had low levels of education up to par with Russian men. Things ran smoothly until bad economic times hit the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Progress slowed and the Soviets scrambled to save themselves from collapse. Then, bad went to worse. Vladimir Lenin died in 1924 and the New Economic Plan (Light Reestablishment of Capitalism) was introduced (It was a last ditch attempt to fix the economy and income inequality started returning). Within the next few years, many of the original Bolsheviks (Dedicated to women’s emancipation among other rights) were outmaneuvered by Joseph Stalin and purged from the Communist Party. Even Leon Trotsky was targeted and subsequently exiled from the USSR (He was later assassinated by Stalin’s agents in Mexico in 1940). Even women like the Soviet Feminist Alexandra Kollontai (Who advocated gender equity and free love and was the first modern ambassador to a foreign nation) threw aside their efforts and joined the Stalinists, most likely to avoid being purged.

Stalin’s reign from the late 1920s to 1953 represented a seismic shift in women’s rights. Abortion, which had previously been accessible and legal was criminalized (As well as homosexuality, which had been legalized under Lenin, and prostitution), leading to scores of Soviet women obtaining illegal abortions and becoming ill or suffering death as a result. Women’s working rights were also stifled. While women continued to work outside the home, the Stalinist regime encouraged (In an extremely forceful manner) women to “rejoice in motherhood” and simultaneously birth large families and sustain the economy during the Soviet heavy industrial drive that was occurring during the 30s. Men on the other hand were expected to work, but not to assist in the domestic sphere, representing a serious loss in equity during this period. The family now reigned supreme and women were expected to provide it, whether they liked it or not. Divorce, which had also been made accesible to Soviet women, was now severely restricted and became a luxury that only bureaucrats and elites could obtain. Coeducation was now also abolished, leading to single sex classrooms. And so it went until Stalin’s death.

De-Stalinization however, did not mean a full return to women’s emancipation. Abortion restrictions began to be loosened (But this was because the Soviet State did not put much in expenditures towards contraceptives) and women were again encouraged to become scientists (Like the pictured cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova), engineers and laborers. Though this was sometimes for expedient propaganda-related reasons, as the Soviets were in the midst of the Cold War and needed to put their best image forward (So as to be fair, it must be said that American women were not much better off). The rights of women in the Soviet Union never fully recovered from Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and even today in the modern Russian Federation, the culture is quite conservative, especially concerning contraceptive use and reproductive rights. Safe sex is not promoted. The State Duma has curbed financial support to family planning facilities and promoted the social and cultural views of the Russian Orthodox Church. All this having been said, it is important to remember that in reality, there is almost always gaps between the nominal and what occurs in practice.

The Female In History - Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912)

An American anarchist, Voltairine de Cleyre was sent to a Catholic convent as a young girl to be educated, which had the interesting effect of driving her to atheism, while she attempted, at every turn to flee the school. A supporter of Libertarian Socialism/Stateless Communism (Though she always called herself an anarchist) she believed in any system so long as it didn’t encourage the use of violent force. She also wrote on marriage as a restrictive institution, the negative aspects of child socialization and female dress as well as political revolution.

“Who thinks a dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness of a man who would put a skirt upon his, horse and compel it to walk or run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” would arrest him, take the beast from him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score of an impure mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women”. - From, Sex Slavery (1890)

The Female In History: Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz. A Roman Catholic nun from Mexico City who lived in the 17th Century, Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz was a prodigy and self-educated woman who was a poet and author (As well as a voracious reader), she was renowned and admired for her knowledge and artistic ability. By the 1670s however, after asserting in a essay (Over 100 years before the much more well known British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication on the Rights of Woman”) that women had a fundamental right to education, the Roman Catholic authorities balked at her postulations and attempted to have her silenced. Her poetry was not amateur or shallow in the slightest and represents some of the best of the Baroque era, and dealt with topics such as love, sex, male-female relations and double-standards.

English Translation of the Spanish poem “Foolish Men” by Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz

You foolish men who lay
the guilt on women,
not seeing you’re the cause
of the very thing you blame;

if you invite their disdain
with measureless desire
why wish they well behave
if you incite to ill.

You fight their stubbornness,
then, weightily,
you say it was their lightness
when it was your guile.

In all your crazy shows
you act just like a child
who plays the bogeyman
of which he’s then afraid.

With foolish arrogance
you hope to find a Thais
in her you court, but a Lucretia
when you’ve possessed her.

What kind of mind is odder
than his who mists
a mirror and then complains
that it’s not clear.

Their favour and disdain
you hold in equal state,
if they mistreat, you complain,
you mock if they treat you well.

No woman wins esteem of you:
the most modest is ungrateful
if she refuses to admit you;
yet if she does, she’s loose.

You always are so foolish
your censure is unfair;
one you blame for cruelty
the other for being easy.

What must be her temper
who offends when she’s
ungrateful and wearies
when compliant?

But with the anger and the grief
that your pleasure tells
good luck to her who doesn’t love you
and you go on and complain.

Your lover’s moans give wings
to women’s liberty:
and having made them bad,
you want to find them good.

Who has embraced
the greater blame in passion?
She who, solicited, falls,
or he who, fallen, pleads?

Who is more to blame,
though either should do wrong?
She who sins for pay
or he who pays to sin?

Why be outraged at the guilt
that is of your own doing?
Have them as you make them
or make them what you will.

Leave off your wooing
and then, with greater cause,
you can blame the passion
of her who comes to court?

Patent is your arrogance
that fights with many weapons
since in promise and insistence
you join world, flesh and devil.

The Female in History: In the days before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, before the rise of the Aztec Empire when the Aztecs were subservient to the Tlacopan Toltec kingdom, the Aztecs would always tread lightly. One day during a grand festival, Tlacopan assassins came and murdered the 3rd Aztec king. It is recorded in a historical codex that the men began to deliberate on how such a thing could have happened. As they did, the women assembled and shouted out in protest. No time for talking! It’s time to go fight! Soon enough, off the coast of Tlacopan, boats were seen filled with male and female warriors coming to avenge their king. Women in warrior roles were not uncommon in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and most societies in Mesoamerica were not patriarchal, rather, they were matriarchal, or a combination of both. (Pictured: Xochiquetzal, The Aztec/Mexica Goddess of Fertility, beauty and feminine sexual power)