Christine Williams
Contemporary Europe
Final Research Paper
Soviet Women as Producers and Reproducers: How Soviet Postwar Policies Worsened Women's’ Double Burden
Research Question: Despite the Soviet Union’s claim that it had moved past any “women’s problems” and that feminism was unnecessary in a communist country where everyone was considered “equal,” what challenges did Soviet women face in the home and workforce following World War Two due to Soviet policy?
Secondary Questions: How did the USSR’s ideology and popular demands shape their lives? In particular, how did the Soviet Union address women’s health in the postwar period?
All of Europe suffered from catastrophic casualties after the Second World War, but perhaps none suffered as much as the USSR in terms of military deaths. Some estimates suggest 8.6 million military deaths while others purport as high as 10.7 million. In order to get a clearer picture of what these massive numbers might look like, imagine the entire population of New York City, with its 8.5 million residents, or Seoul and its population of 10 million being completely wiped out. These figures do not even take into account civilian deaths.
Being that many of those who perished in the War were both husbands and fathers, widowed women became 100 percent responsible for caring for their children, for working to support their families on their own, and for continuing to reproduce. Indeed, all women of childbearing age were expected to rebuild the population. The Soviet Union also heavily relied on its existing population, the majority of which was comprised of women, to rebuild its economy following the War, and women’s participation in the workforce became not only extremely valued but absolutely necessary. The Soviet Union recognized the problematic position in which women found themselves after the War and attempted to adopt policies that would allow women to more easily work and raise children simultaneously. Yet Soviet women continued to struggle to fulfill their state-required responsibilities as both economic producers and reproducers. Their choices in terms of family planning were severely limited by restrictive population policy, they faced challenges at home due to the state’s disinvestment in the consumer industry, and they were inadequately cared for by the state’s health care system. In the end, the Soviet Union’s promises to ease women’s double burden of work and home life went unfulfilled.
In the years following the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union made efforts to increase women’s education levels and push women into the workforce. It is estimated that by 1970, 51 percent of the entire workforce in the Soviet Union was comprised of female workers. While this change may be seen by some as the “emancipation” of women from their arduous work as housewives and caretakers, to many Soviet women, this “freedom” from “domestic slavery” did not relieve them of their duties as homemakers at all. It equated to overwork and oppression and only added to their home life responsibilities. For this reason, Soviet women felt that true emancipation meant the right not to work. While Western European women fought for the right to work and be seen as equals with men in the professional field, Soviet women felt oppressed by the intensity of the double burden of their duties at home as well as in the working world.
Although the Soviet Union invested in heavy industry to help rebuild its economy following the War, it did not invest adequately in other sectors such as consumer goods. Western European women found themselves saving time with appliances and products such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons. Women in the Soviet Union did not have such luxuries. Rather than saving a few trips to the grocery store because a refrigerator could keep food fresh for a few days, Soviet women were required to buy and cook food every day, that is, if the country was not experiencing a food shortage. All the cleaning and washing had to be done daily and by hand. Western European women during the movement of Second Wave Feminism became critical of consumerism, while Soviet women came to value the free market with its emphasis on consumer goods. Along with the state’s demands that women contribute to the growth of the Soviet economy as active members of the workforce, women were expected to care for the home and the children without the help of time-saving consumer goods.
The duty of being a working woman and mother is often called the “double burden,” and women are often described as having to work a “double shift.” For rural women, the burden was even greater. Many women in the countryside maintained was is called a “triple burden” lifestyle, as they were also responsible for maintaining the family’s private garden and caring for the domesticated farm animals. While all women, both urban and rural, were certainly expected to contribute to the rebuilding of the economy as members of the workforce, a woman’s greatest responsibility to her nation was that of motherhood and the upbringing of the next generation of soldiers and workers.
In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and future Premier of the USSR, proclaimed:
[B]ourgeois ideology invented many cannibalistic theories, among them the theory of overpopulation. Their concern is to cut down the birth rate, reduce the rate of population increase. It is quite different with us, comrades. If about 100 million people were added to our 200 million, even that would not be enough.
The USSR was in need of a young population that would contribute to its economic growth and military might. The state’s desire for population growth was also evident in Soviet media, particularly media whose audience was women. A 1947 article in the women’s magazine Rabotnitsa began with the words of Soviet writer and politician Maksim Gorky. It heralded mothers as those “whose love knows no boundaries,” and claimed that “everything that is splendid in the human being comes from the rays of the sun and the milk of the mother, who saturates him with her love of life.” Motherhood was so glorified that if a woman did not find it to be the greatest source of her happiness, much less have no desire to bear children, she was likely seen as unpatriotic and not fully devoted to the wellbeing of her country. An article in another women’s magazine, Krest’yanka, praised the work of a collective farm woman, Anna Platonova, who could not only work at a faster than average rate and exceed production demands, but also manage to raise many children. The article, entitled “Glava sem’i,” or “housemother,” applauded her as a woman who would be “remembered above all as a mother who gave the country eight soldiers and workers.” Women were continuously bombarded with stories and images such as these that overlooked the economic and emotional burden women endured and placed unrealistic expectations and weight upon their shoulders.
Being that at the end of the war there were 13 million more women than men in the country, the pro-natal state even proclaimed that children out of wedlock were better than no children at all, which had a legitimizing effect on single mothers who were not war widows. The public was encouraged to recognize that single motherhood, and therefore sex outside of marriage, was acceptable in some circumstances. The argument of natalism appeared to have stamped out the no longer overriding concept of what many might have deemed moral behavior. While the majority of mothers had children while married to their spouse, women could more easily become single mothers when divorce restrictions were eased in 1956 and again in 1968. Due to these policy changes, single motherhood was seen as not quite so deplorable as it had previously.
Yet support for single motherhood alone could not be relied upon to increase the population size adequately. In an attempt to enforce it demands that women both contribute to the country as mothers and as workers, the Soviet Union resorted to restrictive policies that it hoped would lead to even greater population growth: illegalization of abortion and limited access to contraceptives.
Modern contraceptives were either completely unavailable or not accessible due to shortages. Many were unregulated, unreliable, and unsafe. In 1968, it was estimated that only 25 percent of family planning was done by way of contraception while 75 percent was conducted by abortion. Additionally, after using a contraceptive and becoming pregnant due to its failure, women often discontinued using any form of contraception and turned to abortion. Hence, abortion became the primary method of family planning as it was the most reliable and could often be controlled more adequately by the woman in that she could often induce a miscarriage rather than have a secretive and dangerous abortion performed. It is, therefore, not surprising that abortion rates in the Soviet Union remained rather high.
Abortion in the Soviet Union was legalized in 1920; however, Stalin banned abortion entirely in 1936. Having been granted this right for 16 years, women did not simply forego having abortions, and the practice continued while being illegal. Shortly following Stalin’s death, reproductive laws were changed in 1955 to allow abortion only in cases in which the pregnancy was a danger to the mother’s life or health. While the USSR has never published abortion statistics for the entire nation prior to 1973, population experts have estimated that by 1965, there were 2.5 to 3 abortions for every live birth. The Population Council in 1973 reported 10 million abortions per 4.5 million live births, making the Soviet Union’s abortion rate the highest in the world at the time.
Following the re-legalization of abortion under very limited circumstances, the USSR continued to highly discourage the practice. The state even went as far as to register any woman of childbearing age so that she might receive better gynecological care, any pregnancy might be detected early and carried to term, and in order to spy on women suspected of self-induced abortions. Women suspected of abortion were often treated poorly in clinics, regardless of whether they truly had aborted or had in fact unintentionally miscarried.
When Tanya, a typical Soviet housewife, became pregnant in 1957, she suffered a horrific, but often typical experience in the gynecology ward of a hospital.
Those women who wanted to save their babies were in beds, but those who were waiting to be cleaned out after [illegal] abortions lay on the floor, women covered in gray, bloody, dirty gowns. These were not women, they were creatures, dreadful creatures.
When she arrived at the hospital, Tanya was at first suspected of having had an abortion and treated in this same manner, even being incorrectly told that she had a “dead womb” by a doctor who had probably not seen a healthy womb in years. While the state’s goal was to protect the unborn, potential additions to its population by providing high quality health care to its female citizens, it nearly failed to do so by almost inadvertently aborting Tanya’s healthy baby. Tanya’s experience, as well as those of many other Soviet women, demonstrates the discriminatory nature of women’s health care in that a woman’s level of service and care was based on whether or not she had, or even appeared to have had an abortion.
Due to women’s inability to receive an abortion at a clinic that could often provide safer conditions, many women resorted to clandestine and unsafe methods of abortions. In Moscow alone, it is estimated that 400 women died due to complications from illegal abortions between 1952 and 1954. For women living in rural areas, only 4 percent of terminated pregnancies were conducted through abortion by a medical professional during this same period. Despite the decriminalization of some abortions in 1955 as long as they were performed in clinics and by medical professionals, rural women could not easily access medical facilities and therefore, continued to receive abortions from unlicensed practices. Due to this lack of access, a third of all abortions in remote areas were classified as illegal.
The state outwardly recognized that if it expected birth rates to rise, it would need to not only adopt restrictive policies, but also increase its investment in women’s health, yet it did little to adopt and effectively implement health care policies in the postwar period. While the Soviet Union is known for its achievements in creating a widespread public health care system, it still fell short of providing for the country’s needs. The USSR continued to invest in heavy industry with the hope that the country would rebuild and grow economically following the War, but it could not manage to invest adequately in both heavy industry and health care.
In one aspect, that of the building of women’s clinics and providing many more beds, the state did remarkably well. In 1946, there were only 0.32 gynecological beds per 1000 women available in Moscow. The Ministry of Health promised it would provide 77,000 birthing beds by 1950, which it managed to achieve by 1951, surpassing its goal by 35,520 beds as well as 6,570 women’s clinics. Yet, despite this investment in physical capital, supplies and staff were often lacking or simply of poor quality. The Ministry of Health proclaimed women’s health issues to be a priority, but it often lacked the resources necessary to make its hopes for an improved system a reality. Personnel often reused the same gloves and gowns as well as other tools, not because they were unaware of these unhygienic practices, but because they simply did not have the resources to maintain a sanitary environment.
Additionally, gynecology was seen as a very unattractive area of the medical field, and certainly not a profession one would have gone into in order to climb the professional ladder. Doctors and nurses in gynecology were expected to do “police work” for the state, constantly keeping records on women’s fertility and histories of miscarriages (or supposed abortions) as well as looking for any signs of abortion or miscarriage in their patients. When Tanya became pregnant in the early 1950s, she did not have enough money to raise a child nor could she give up her job and income. She induced an abortion by pushing a wardrobe around her room until utterly exhausted. When she went to a women’s clinic, she was not accused of having had an illegal abortion as there was no sure evidence but was to be monitored as being “prone to miscarriage.” This duty of policing their patients created uncomfortable relationships between doctors and patients and led women to become suspicious of the state’s health care system and untrusting of doctors and nurses.
In addition to limited access to contraceptives and abortion, the Soviet Union encouraged population growth by offering subsidies to mothers in an effort to discourage women from avoiding childbirth due to financial constraints. Family allowance programs of various kinds had existed since 1936 and were designed to provide families with increasingly larger allowances depending on the number of children in the household. However, in 1948, funding for these programs was cut in half. It is estimated that by 1966, a typical allowance payment for a family with four children amounted to only 4.4 percent relative to the average annual wage of a Soviet worker, not nearly enough to bear even a small portion of the cost of raising four children. Add a fifth child, and, assuming the fourth is less than five at the time, this figure increased to 12.3 percent of average annual wages, still not an adequate amount. In the earlier years of the program, allowances for this size of family amounted to 51 percent. It is therefore very likely that the continuation of family allowance programs in the USSR did little to increase population growth, as evidenced by the declining birth rates following the end of World War Two as allowances were no longer substantial enough to incentivize women to bear more children. Nonetheless, women were still expected to make sacrifices, both personal and economic, because the state claimed it was their duty to promote the wellbeing of the socialist society. The Soviet Union continued to maintain the belief that a woman had no legitimate reason to postpone or avoid motherhood, despite its limited economic support.
The USSR also attempted to support and encourage a growing population by providing subsidized child care, discounted milk, free baby clothes, as well as other resources intended to assist mothers in providing for their children. Yet, these resources were disproportionately available and were made more accessible to women in urban regions of the country than those residing in rural areas. The number of children enrolled in Soviet Union-provided child care increased from around 13 percent in the 1950s to 22 percent in 1965; however, while close to half of urban children were enrolled in 1965, only 12 percent of rural children were.
Despite the state’s attempts to ease the burdens of motherhood, women continued to feel this weight heavily. A survey conducted between 1965 and 1967 of nearly 450 working women of Moscow showed that 65 percent of respondents felt that they were the one solely responsible for raising their children. In another study, working women indicated that when a child became sick and needed to be picked up from child care, or if a parent needed to stay home to nurse a sick child, it was always the wife that was expected to leave her job to carry out this duty, never the husband. This often prevented women from being granted promotions and the opportunity to build their careers.
It is clear that both the duties of production and reproduction weighed heavily on women’s shoulders in post-war Soviet society, and their limited access to family planning, the inaccessibility of consumer goods, and the state’s deplorable women’s health care system exacerbated women’s struggles. The Soviet Union’s attempts to remove some of the weight of women’s home responsibilities were largely unsuccessful. It is often hard to believe after studying women’s lives and freedoms in the Soviet Union that Stalin himself declared that women had achieved equality with men as early as 1929. Yet it is clear that this was not so. Women were far from equal to men in Soviet society in 1929 in all aspects of life. While women have certainly made strides in regaining their rights and furthering gender equality since the downfall of the Soviet Union, their struggle still exists to this day.