Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936: 90 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, Series Number 90)
Cambridge University Press, 3/3/1994
EAN 9780521374040, ISBN10: 0521374049
Hardcover, 368 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
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.