Stalinism.
The Soviet bureaucrats needed an obedient compliant working class. The 'stable' family and the subservient mother were essential props on which that process rested. Who needs emancipated, political women 'interfering in Soviet society, when the bureaucracy can take all the necessary decisions?
In her pamphlet A Woman's Place in the USSR, Tamara Volkova - basing herself on recent official surveys - shows the inequalities and oppression that Soviet women still suffer The USSR boasts that over half the workforce consists of women. But as Volkova explains, 'there are 19 million more women than men in the country.
She explains: *The.real situation of female employment is grasped only if we look at persons outside the labour force; 94 per cent of those eligible but not working are of the female sex.. Surveys show 'that most of these women would be willing to work but the burden of domestic duties prevents them. In Leningrad 50 per cent of those questioned replied that they would work if there was somewhere to put their children.....
HOUSEWORK
Housework, which has been women's lot since time immemorial, still retains its stifling grip. Russian sociologists have calculated that housework takes up to 150 billion hours every year: its abolition would be equivalent to the freeing of another 60 million persons for production." The crippling burden of this work talls on the women.
A survey made of 8,468 women in Gorky shows that the less well off the family, the longer the wife is likely to spend on housework. Unskilled workers spend 3½-5 hours a day. The better paid specialists spend 2½ - 3½ hours a day. A survey of their working week showed that a woman with no children spent 28.1 hours a week on housework and personal care, whereas women with three children spent 48.5 hours.
Another survey carried out amongst 280 women in two Vilnius plants revealed that 67.1 per cent of the women did the washing and ironing by themselves in contrast to 1.6 per cent of the men; 81.2 per cent of women washed, dressed and fed the children by themselves, compared to 1.2 per cent of the men.
KITCHEN FIRST'
This perpetuation of the age-old division of labour is reinforced when the Soviet magazine The Week (Vol. 6, 1974) approvingly publishes letters which say: "A wife must be a wife and only second a doctor, an engineer or professor; not the other way round; or comThe 1917 Revolution offered exciting possibilities for transforming the position of women in the new Soviet Union. The first workers' state, by providing the basis for the emancipation of women, could have inspired millions of working class women throughout the world to identify with the proletarian revolution.
Unfortunately it offered nothing more than a brief flicker of hope. Soon the light of women's emancipation was buried under the smothering darkness of plain: "Why do girls try to be like men?" Another letter advises young men to 'find a representative of the "weaker" sex who is feminine, cultivated and an excellent housekeeper.
That issue of The Week included 10 such letters, all printed without editorial comment - a sure sign of approval. It also had a caption which read: "Feminity and more femInity - such is the opinion of the majority of our readers...' communism versus stalinism no. 4 A WOMAN'S PLACE IN THE U.S.S.R. preface by Branka Magas IMG Even the one letter that did speak of women's emancipation said: "The cultured man may not be gallant....He may not know how to cook a tasty meal, but he does know how to help his wife around the house. There is many a trendy young Tory who would subCOMMUNIST PARTY In 1970 only 21 per cent of Soviet Communist Party members were women. This represented an increase of 0.8 per cent in five years and is only 0.3 per cent higher than the 1950 figure. This absence, as Volkova explains, is 'not just a result of formal education.
Although in the highest reaches of the educa tional system women are still under-represented, the educational opportunities appear in general to be genuinely equal....
But the burden of the family, the onerous nature of domestic work, and the strains that these impose on the individual woman, mean that they have little time to think, study, or engage in political or social activities.
of the female sex'.
time as she can in the family..... cooking was unnecessary.
25р offer.' women than men in the country, as Famara volkova explains, Ine real situation or temale empioyment Is grasped only if we look at persons outside the labour force; 94 per cent of those eligible but not working are Two Russian sociologists who made a study of women in Leningrad and Kostrona wrote: "A woman, especially if she is a mother, tries to spend as much of her non-working HOUSEHOLD TASKS iet citizens Because there has been no real effort to socialise household tasks, the domestic jobs still remain like a fetter around women's necks. A mere 2 percent of Soviet washing goes through public laundries. Even in Leningrad only 15 per cent of children are covered by creche facilities. Ten per cent of women in Leningrad who have just had children do not go back to work immediately because there are not enough nursery facilities.
There is still a chronic shortage of places tion of labour. to eat out which supply well-cooked cheap meals. When the two sociologists Kharchev and Golod questioned 1,230 women in Leningrad, 256 of them considered the expense of canteen food 'the main drawback' and 211 complained that the meals "were poorly cooked". Only 12 women, however, thought communal As Volkova writes: 'Given that women have to shoulder the domestic burden themselves, receiving little help from the state in the life. form of communal facilities or co-operation from their husbands, there is nothing surprising about their secondary unequal position.
'RELIC OF THE PAST' sasses.
The Soviet bureaucracy control production working class. administration and propaganda in the USSR. Apologists for the bureaucracy claim that male chauvinism in Russia is a relic of the past'. It is of course true that old prejudices die hard, but whilst the socialisation of domestic labour drags at a tortoise-like pace the material basis for these ideas still remains.
Not only has the allocation of economic resources to public services been insufficient — in 1964 they accounted for only 5 per cent -the use by an all powerful government of the propaganda media has been scandalous. Volk• ova correctly denounces the media for not only holding consciousness at the level of economic development but 'keeping it begind the level of possibilities that the productive forces now 'FEMININE VIRTUES After the revolution the school was considered to be a major instrument in destroying the Unlike the architects of the Revolution who grasped that a programme of action was needed to bring about the liberation of women, the epigones say that the family is a socialist institution. They claim that it will play a key role in education and the socialisation of SovThis is a position that has nothing in common with Marxism. The Bolsheviks were for the abolition of the bourgeois family. They understood that this corresponds to a central task of the proletarian revolution which is to end the oppression of women.
The abolition of wage labour through nation alising and socialising the means of production lays the basis for a planned economy. This establishes the means for the socialisation of domestic labour, ending for all time the alienation and exploitation which rests on the privatisaEMANCIPATION The emergence of the bureaucracy temporily brought a halt to that process in the USSR. By taking out of the hands of the working class the state power and appropriating it for its own use, Stalinism dominated the working class and excluded it from political The bureaucracy are congenitally incapable of transforming the backwardness that runs right through Soviet society. What characterises the bureaucracy is its devotion to its own privileges and its deep hostility to the working Soviet women will only achieve their emancipation in alliance with the Russian That will involve transforming the political institutions of the USSR and once more putting Soviet power back into the hands of working men and women.
The world-wide struggle of socialists in the fight for the liberation of women can give impetus and act as an inspiration to the Soviet working class, when they - as inevitably they will - begin to fight for the restoration of Soviet democracy.
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Dodie Weppler ЗА РОДИНУ-МАТЬ!