Khrushchev and the Woman Question, 1955–64

Reforms came quickly after Stalin died. In 1953 and 1954, the new leaders reduced the power of the police and began releasing prisoners from the Gulag. They also eased press censorship and promised to provide more consumer goods and lighten the load on the peasants. By 1955, Nikita Khrushchev had maneuvered his way into the top position, first secretary of the Communist Party. He set out to mobilize the population to work diligently and enthusiastically to fulfill the government’s plans for economic growth.

Although Khrushchev never made the woman question a high priority, his administration did institute important changes. In 1955 it legalized abortion, on the grounds that backstreet procedures were harming women’s health. In the late 1950s it lowered the fees charged for divorce and increased paid maternity leave from 77 to 112 days. The government also instituted stricter enforcement of protective labor laws, which benefited some women while excluding others from better‑paid jobs.

Accompanying these improvements was the most unfettered consideration of the woman question since the 1920s. Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka, the national women’s magazines, had bemoaned the burdens of the double shift throughout the Stalinist period. Now, with Khrushchev’s encouragement, magazines such as Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette) and Trud (Labor) joined the women’s press in calling for expanded social services. They also wrote about the dismal working conditions some women endured and lamented the fact that women on average earned less than men. Some writers declared that husbands should stop bossing their wives around and do more housework and childcare.¹

The first secretary himself joined in, charging that sexism pervaded the Soviet system. Women suffered from the double shift, Khrushchev charged, because the Soviet Union had been too poor in the past to provide adequate services and labor‑saving household appliances, and also because men discriminated against women. The result of the prejudice, he asserted, was that very few women occupied leadership positions. This was an extraordinary charge for a member of Stalin’s leadership to make; on the handful of earlier occasions when the men of the Politburo had talked about the woman question, they had congratulated themselves on all they had done for Soviet women. Khrushchev may have been sensitized to sexist behavior by his wife Nina, a Bolshevik who had served in the Zhenotdel during the civil war. Perhaps he also discussed discrimination with Elena Furtseva, an official in the Moscow party organization who was one of his political allies. Furtseva served on the party Presidium (i.e., the Politburo), the first woman ever to do so. She was also minister of culture in the early 1960s.

To set a better example, Khrushchev ordered more women appointed to government committees and regional soviets. He approved the creation of a training program for female cosmonauts and personally selected Valentina Tereshkova, a textile worker, to be the first woman to orbit the Earth. Khrushchev also authorized the establishment of “women’s soviets” (zhensovety) to involve women in improving their communities.

Enthusiastic promoters of the zhensovety hailed them as reincarnations of the zhenotdel. There were similarities. The zhenotdel and the zhensovety consisted of networks of committees led by female communists. Both enrolled tens of thousands of women in community‑service projects. Both advised women on getting the social services they needed. They suffered from similar weaknesses, too. The zhensovety’s relationship to the party was even more vaguely defined than the zhenotdel’s had been. It was not clear whether they were party organizations or a revival of the obshchestvennitsy movement, with a membership no longer confined to the wives of elite men. Furthermore, no zhensovety were established in Moscow or Leningrad, on the grounds that women’s consciousness was already sufficiently high there. Rather, they were concentrated in rural areas, smaller cities, and non‑European republics, far from the centers of power, where their members had to address their complaints and suggestions to local leaders with limited authority and resources.²

NINA KHRUSHCHEVA (1900–84) AND VALENTINA TERESHKOVA (b. 1937)

The two Soviet women best known in the West during Khrushchev’s rule were the leader’s wife and the woman he sent into space. American journalists built their coverage of them on Cold War stereotypes. They made fun of Khrushcheva’s matronly figure and unfashionable clothing and trivialized Tereshkova’s flight as a propaganda stunt. Soviet women, reporters suggested, were either frumpy peasants or party puppets. Had they done their homework, these people might have understood that Khrushcheva and Tereshkova exemplified Soviet gender ideals that valorized both homemaking and breaking down gender barriers. This was a complexity then unknown in the dominant gender regimes of the United States and Western Europe.

Khrushcheva was the daughter of Ukrainian peasants. She graduated from secondary school in 1919, joined the Communist Party in 1920, and for a short time headed the zhenotdel in western Ukraine. She met Khrushchev in 1922, they married, and when his career blossomed, she retired from party work to rear their three children. Khrushcheva remained true to communism’s egalitarian principles after her husband became a party boss. Her son Sergei remembered, “She tried to bring us up so that we didn’t go around thinking we were the children of powerful people and could do whatever we wanted.” Khrushcheva also hired tutors to teach her children English and music, filled their home with books, and took the family to the opera and ballet. In short she was an exemplary Soviet first lady, a well‑educated, culturally sophisticated, strong‑willed communist who devoted herself to her family.³

Tereshkova was also a lower‑class woman who rose to prominence. Like Pasha Angelina, she became a highly publicized pioneer in a field dominated by men. She was a textile worker in the Iaroslavl area, a member of the Komsomol, and an amateur parachute jumper at a local flying club when, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Tereshkova and many other young women, who had grown up idealizing the female pilots of the past, were fascinated by these new heroes of aviation. “Everything fell into place… when I read that Gagarin was a student of an aerospace club, just like I was,” Tereshkova remembered. “And then I decided. I’ll be a cosmonaut.”⁴ Her parachuting experience was an important qualification, because cosmonauts ejected from their spacecraft on re‑entry and parachuted to earth.

When letters from women requesting admission to cosmonaut training began flooding in, the administrators of the spaceflight program decided to admit a few in order to score points against the United States in the space race. A small group, Tereshkova among them, trained with the men, under the tutelage of and with the support of experienced cosmonauts. “In general they accepted me into their ‘cosmic family,’” Tereshkova remembered, “without even a shadow of coldness or special accommodation to the ‘weaker sex.’”⁵ Khrushchev then chose Tereshkova from among the four women who had performed best during training, because she had charmed him and because she was from the working class.

^{A photograph of Valentina Tereshkova widely circulated after her flight.}

^{Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.}