Women, the State and Revolution
Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936

This book focuses on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences in turn were used by the state to meet its own needs.

Wendy Z. Goldman (Author)

9780521458160, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 November 1993

368 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.54 kg

"In her intelligent and sympathetic book, Wendy Goldman studies the reaction of the Bolsheviks to what they saw as the 'conservatism' of Russian women, for whom neither migration nor employment had changed their traditional dependence on husband and family....contribute[s] in novel ways to thinking about an old, but fundamental aspect of the Revolution, namely, the extent of the continuity and change across the 1917 divide....should convince sceptics that a study of gender differences can deepen our understanding of the relation between social and political change in general." S. A. Smith, Times Literary Supplement

When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they believed that under socialism the family would 'wither away.' They envisioned a society in which communal dining halls, daycare centres, and public laundries would replace the unpaid labour of women in the home. Yet by 1936 legislation designed to liberate women from their legal and economic dependence had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women's reproductive role. This book explains the reversal, focusing on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences in turn were used by the state to meet its own needs.

1. The origins of the Bolshevik vision: love unfettered: women free
2. The first retreat: Besprizornost and socialised childrearing
3. Law and life collide: free union and the wage-earning population
4. Stirring the sea of peasant stagnation
5. Pruning the 'Bourgeois Thicket': drafting a new family code
6. Freedom and its consequences: the debate on the 1926 family code
7. Reproduction and the law
8. Recasting the vision: the resurrection of the family
9. Conclusion: the new socialist state, law and family.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]