Women, the State & Revolution: Soviet Family Policy & Social Life, 1917-1936
By Wendy Z. Goldman
Cambridge University Press, 1993. 351 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
The official organisers of the International Year of the Family are probably be relieved that the Russian Revolution can now be discussed only in the past tense, because the IYF's political bouncers would have had their hands full with the Bolshevik party-poopers who would have come not to celebrate the family but to bury it.
The socialist revolution in Russia, in its brief years in the sun, made the boldest attempt yet seen to liberate women from the galley-slavery of the family. So argues Wendy Goldman in her book on socialism, women and the family in Russia.
The revolutionary government immediately began to grant legal equality to women. With "the most progressive legislation the world had ever seen", Soviet law enshrined equal pay, equal opportunity, easy divorce at the request of the wife, paid maternity leave, work restrictions for pregnant and nursing women workers, and free abortion on demand.
This legislation, however, was recognised as merely a first step — what was needed for (in Lenin's words) the "real emancipation of women" was the "wholesale transformation" of women's domestic work from the private family to the socialised, public provision of services. Communal kitchens, socialised cleaning, washing, sewing and other household tasks were organised.
Most importantly, free public child-care was seen as essential to freeing women for involvement in the political world of waged work and economic independence and their own multifaceted cultural and personal self-development.
In contrast to "today's feminist" concern with the "redivision of housework within the family", the aim of the Russian socialists was to "free [both] men and women from petty household labour". The "key to women's emancipation", they believed, was "the abolition of the family, rather than gender conflict within it".
There were, however, survivals of the family structure arising from Russia's economic backwardness. Alimony remained while the state did not have the resources to support its needy citizens. Registered marriage and court-determined divorce remained — complete sexual freedom, "free unions" based solely on affection and love, were limited because in times of economic hardship and thus women's continued dependence on the male wage-earner, "sexual freedom tended to be freedom for men only" whilst women were left holding the baby. The socialist courts' concern was to meet the economic needs of the mother by ruling on paternity and alimony.
Nevertheless, as Goldman argues, although many men were sexually irresponsible, it was limited income which determined the survival of such family legacies. Alimony, for example, was not enough for the mother and child to live on, yet it was too much for the father to lose and survive on. For Goldman, as for the Bolsheviks, "the individual male wage-earner did not hold the key to women's liberation" — the collective wealth of economic resources was fundamental.
In the poverty-stricken soil of Russia, the family's economic roots proved stubborn. Child-care by women still largely remained in the family as "an inexpensive alternative" to child-care institutions. Thus "socialist idealism and harsh reality" met in a "headlong collision". Throughout the '20s, socialism, workers' democracy and women's liberation all retreated decree by decree. The "libertarian-socialist strain within Bolshevism", with its hopes for the withering away of marriage, the family, law and the state, was diluted degree by degree.
This "forced retreat", says Goldman, was reluctantly made only under "the desperate pressure" of "the severe constraints imposed by a ruined economy", and the Bolsheviks "did not make a virtue out of necessity".
All this changed, she argues, in 1936 with a "clear ideological shift" towards resurrection of the traditional family. Stalin, by now in full control, sought to industrialise Russia through the super-exploitation of labour. For women this meant shouldering an intensive double burden of waged production and unwaged reproduction.
Abortion was criminalised, divorce made harder to get. Other "pro-natalist" measures and pro-family propaganda were instituted. As real wages fell by 50% from 1928 to 1932, the family became an economic haven.
Dissent with this new orientation was resolved by political terror. Progressive judges and advocates of women's liberation from the '20s were shot in show trials, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, murdered in prison, sent to labour camps or, like Alexandra Kollontai, "the most powerful advocate of women's liberation", intimidated into silence. One can dispute the exact year (1936) that Goldman chooses for the defeat of the socialism of the 1917 Bolsheviks by Stalin (the late '20s, with Trotsky's expulsion, were pivotal), but although it is difficult to determine exactly when day becomes night, for women and socialism in Russia, 1936 was very definitely dark.
Goldman's book is not your typical anti-Bolshevik polemic. Nor does it hoot and holler at men as the villains of the piece. Neither, however, is it uncritical of some aspects of Bolshevik social policy. The legalising of abortion, for example, was tardy (not until 1920) and was adopted solely as a health and labour productivity measure, not as "women's right to make their own reproductive choices".
So, too, whilst the Bolsheviks decriminalised homosexuality and encouraged free debate on sexual liberation, the "hidebound Victorian prejudices" of some Bolshevik leaders may have made them willing to retreat from radical sexual politics before the deluge of pro-family economic necessity.
Overall, however, Goldman is clearly on the side of the socialist project for women's liberation. The Bolshevik experiment went sour, she says, only because of the "tragic contradiction of trying to build socialism in an underdeveloped country".
The Bolsheviks tried and failed because of the lack of material resources. ALP governments in Australia have not even tried. They have no excuse.