URBAN WOMEN AND GENDER NORMS

Even while it was hunting for lishentsy and countenancing women’s unemployment, the government opened up new opportunities in education and employment in the cities. Primary schooling and literacy programs expanded substantially. Women were also now eligible for jobs in the civil service, education, medicine, and sales that had been closed to them in the past. These improvements were particularly beneficial to young single women. Urban women, although less likely than urban men to join the Communist Party, vote, or serve as elected officials, were far more likely to do so than peasant women.

Life in the cities was hard. Everyone coped with food shortages, inadequate housing, and deficient social services; for single women, as in the past, the difficulties were often insuperable. Desperate ones took to prostitution or begging to survive; children who could not get enough to eat at home ran away to the streets. Many people were deeply troubled by these developments, for it seemed as though once again the most vulnerable were suffering the most. Furthermore, drunkenness, crime, overcrowded tenements, filth, and decrepitude seemed more prevalent than ever before, even while a fortunate few nouveaux riches flaunted the money they had made in the small businesses permitted by the government.

Soviet people were also concerned about the Revolution’s effects on family life. Some young people were living in communes similar to those set up by the nihilists so many decades before, with the significant exception that the members of these communes took no vows of sexual abstinence. Instead they declared that the Revolution had destroyed all the old rules, so people could do as they pleased with their sex lives. Same‑sex love, which the new government had decriminalized, was also being practiced more openly than ever before. The negative consequences of this experimentation drew a lot of attention. Young women complained in the press that young men were pressuring them into intimacy by claiming that it was old‑fashioned to say no. Then they, the women, were left to cope with the resulting venereal infections or pregnancies on their own. Some resorted to abortion, which had been legalized in 1920. So did many married women. Studies done in 1926 revealed that one‑third of urban women had had the procedure at least once and that the great majority of these women were not unmarried young people, as conventional wisdom might have assumed, but married women with children. And marriages were disintegrating. By 1926, the Soviet Union had the highest divorce rate in Europe, three times higher that of Germany or France. Most of these divorces were occurring in the cities among young people.⁶⁹

Many communist leaders believed that men were the problem. They bemoaned the delinquency of homeless boys, the licentiousness of male students, the corruption of male party members by power, greed, and alcohol, and the irresponsibility of husbands who refused to support their wives and children. These criticisms had widespread public support, because there was a good deal of truth in them. For the party, they had the added attraction of permitting the leaders to blame individual men for problems that were caused in part by the party’s economic policies.

In the mid‑1920s, Lev Trotsky, then commander of the Red Army, Nikolai Semashko, the commissar of health, Anatoli Lunacharskii, the commissar of education, and a number of less prominent communists began to develop definitions of ideal masculinity for propagation to the party and the public. They perceived their endeavor as a response to men’s bad behavior. It can also be seen as a basic task of any regime that seeks to transform a nation and believes that a prerequisite to such change is remaking the character of the men who will do the transforming. Peter the Great had tried to do it, as had Nicolas I.

There were surprisingly strong similarities between Peter’s and Nicholas’s definitions of the ideal man and those formulated by Trotsky, Semashko, and Lunacharskii. The communists wrote that the men of the Soviet Union needed to be diligent, skilled, and devoted to the building of a new social order. Such men were moral and abstemious; they did not drink to excess or frequent prostitutes or line their own pockets. They carried out the orders of their superiors. They supported the party. They treated all women with respect and consideration, were faithful to their wives, and provided for their children.

As this discussion developed in the mid‑1920s, it became clear that most of the party’s intellectuals advocated a reformed nuclear family based on monogamous heterosexuality, because they believed such a family would teach men responsibility and therefore help discipline them into being productive members of Soviet society. It was also the best way to bring up new citizens. “To rear children, to set them on their own feet, requires a minimum of fifteen years,” Lunacharskii wrote in 1927. “That means marriage should be a long, companionate marriage.”⁷⁰

With a view to promoting this kind of marriage and protecting women from victimization, Soviet jurists in 1925 announced that they were going to revise the 1918 marriage law. The law had created no‑fault divorce and decreed that husbands and wives had equal rights to marital property and to the custody of their children. The jurists already knew that peasants in the European areas of the Soviet Union and people in Central Asia rejected these provisions as unworkable and unsuitable. When they invited public comment in 1925, they heard from urban people that the law did not take into account women’s unequal situation in Soviet Russia. Women earned much less than men, critics of the marriage law declared. They were more likely than men to lose their jobs and they bore the primary responsibility for children. Therefore the law’s treatment of divorcing wives and husbands as equals needed to be reconsidered.

Thousands of women took part in the discussion of the marriage‑law revisions. Kollontai, now a Soviet diplomat, urged the government to establish generous benefits for needy women, so that they would not be dependent on their ex‑husbands. Other women favored a more conventional approach; they wanted men to pay child support. Julia Zaitseva, the wife of a factory worker, summed up the prevailing opinion: “In most cases a woman is more backward and has fewer skills, and therefore she is less independent than a man. For a woman marriage is often the only way ‘to defend herself.’ To get married, to have children, to become enslaved to the kitchen, and then to be thrown out by a man–it’s very hard for a woman.”⁷¹

Zaitseva and many others saw such women as victimized not just by their husbands, but also by the women who enticed those husbands into extramarital relationships. Women who slept with married men, they declared, were little better than prostitutes. The new law should not grant them any right to support from their lovers. Attentive to this heartfelt testimony, government officials issued a revised code in 1926 that legalized the payment of alimony and child support, and defined common‑law marriage so as to clarify the obligations of people who had not legally registered their relationships. A common‑law marriage existed, the law declared, when a couple had lived together, reared their children together, and presented themselves to others as married. Fifteen states in the United States, plus the District of Columbia, have very similar definitions of common‑law marriage today.

The notion that extramarital sexual relationships, heterosexual as well as homosexual, were immoral and socially damaging had widespread support within the Communist Party and among the public. In the aftermath of the marriage‑law discussion, party spokespeople began to stress the virtues of premarital abstinence and marital fidelity. It was time for young people to stop partying and get to work, they said. Socialism was about self‑discipline, labor for the common good, and responsibility to kith and kin, not hedonism and self‑indulgence. Many peasant and working‑class women agreed. A female communist named Shurupova summed up their feelings during the marriage‑law discussion: “He took two wives, each gave him a baby, so he must pay both of them. It’s nobody else’s fault. If you like tobogganing, you must like pulling your sledge uphill.”⁷²

The pronouncements on responsible masculinity, the revisions of the marriage law, and the condemnations of extramarital sex demonstrated widespread support among Soviet people, rulers and ruled alike, for the values of the contemporary nuclear family that were prevalent throughout urban Europe in the 1920s. Married women had more rights under Soviet law than did women elsewhere. They would continue throughout the Soviet period to limit their family size and to divorce at a record‑setting pace. But by the end of the 1920s, the discussion of radical reconstruction of the family was over. And other sorts of experimentation–in lifestyle, in art, in women’s emancipation–were also waning, as the revolutionary ferment subsided, the society stabilized, and a new party leadership, led by Joseph Stalin, pushed its way into power.

Conclusions

Between 1890 and 1930, female activists in Russia played a more important part in changing their society than did contemporary women in any other country. Before 1917, they propagated feminist values, expanded female education, gained admittance to most of the professions, and broke new ground in the arts and sciences. The Revolution empowered them to push for legal and political equality and left behind a structure of law that progressive women elsewhere saw as the gold standard of women’s human rights. In the NEP years, female activists from the pre‑revolutionary era led a new generation of women in a wide‑ranging discussion of the woman question and in projects that affected more women from more of Russia’s social groups than ever before. The patterns of women’s participation in the public world established then would outlast the Soviet Union itself and would be spread by communist parties around the world.

The tsarist government failed to control the upsurge of female activism that began in the late nineteenth century, because it was too diverse to be contained. It included female doctors, feldshers, nurses, and teachers, whom the government relied on to deliver much‑needed services; nuns who strengthened the church; artists and journalists who enriched cultural life; and revolutionaries who sought the government’s destruction. So the tsars’ administrators promoted women’s participation in the paid‑labor force and tolerated those activists who helped the poor, while refusing to accede to many of the feminists’ demands and hunting down the revolutionaries.

The communists who supplanted the tsarist regime were more successful in harnessing female activism to their agenda. From the time they took power, the party’s leaders encouraged women to be involved in the public world, because they genuinely wanted to abolish patriarchal abuses and because they thought women should join men in building socialism. To that end they rewrote the laws, provided greater access to education and employment, and, through the Zhenotdel, gave continuing prominence and support to the drive to equalize opportunities and promote respect for the nation’s women. They also allowed female activists some leeway in discussing the woman question. As NEP drew to a close, the party leadership took a more regulatory course. It moved against the right and left wings of female activism, shutting down the convents in 1929 and the Zhenotdel less than a year later. This new autocracy intended to encourage female activism, while keeping it within approved boundaries.