Domestic Service in the Soviet Union
Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor

This innovative study is the first to explore the evolution and ideological contradictions of domestic service in the Soviet Union.

Alissa Klots (Author)

9781009467162, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 June 2025

318 pages
23 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.446 kg

'… Alissa Klots's book represents a landmark contribution to Soviet historiography, opening new analytical pathways for examining live-in domestic labor.' Tamar Qeburia, H-Soz-Kult

This innovative study is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Alissa Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.

Introduction: a kitchen maid to rule the state
Prologue: domestic service and the Bolsheviks before 1917
Part I. Servants into Workers, 1920s: 1. From exploitation to socially useful labor: the early soviet discourse on domestic service
2. Just like any other worker? Class, gender, and labor rights
3. Kitchen maids in the school of communism: union work and political mobilization
4. The new soviet domestic worker: the enlightenment campaign and domestic workers' subjectivity
Part II. In The Land of Victorious Socialism, 1930–1950s: 5. The turn to production: domestic workers and the first five-year plan
6. Serving in a socialist home: paid domestic labor and etatization of the home
7. Like one of the family: domestic service as a site of intimate negotiations
8. The meanings of privilege: domestic workers in postwar society
Conclusion
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]