women

• Lenin

  Extolled liberation of women – outlawed sex discrimination, easier divorce and abortions, women employed like men
• Family - Lenin

  Relic of bourgeois society
• Stalin

  To further strengthen Soviet families, to fight against the survivals of a bourgeois attitude towards marriage ['free-love' and disorderly sex-lives]
• Great Retreat

  Conscious rejection of social experiment of post-rev period
• Policies to emphasise the family


  • Re-emphasised importance of marriage, reintroduced marriage rings, new-style wedding certificates
  • Encourages and manipulates couples to make that 'next step' for them to be part of the reformed lifestyle
• Legalisations in 'family code' in May-June 1936


  • Illegalised abortions
  • More difficult to get divorce
  • Banned contraception unless on medical grounds
  • Mothers of 6+ children rewarded with tax exemptions and bonuses for every additional child under 10 y/o
  • Fixed child support payments at 60% of income for fathers
  • 12+ y/o who committed violent crimes to be treated like adults
  • Criminalised adultery – exposed male offenders in the press
• Decrees against prostitution and homosexuality – to encourage women to reproduce with men and increase population of Russia
• 1935 abortions from 1.9 million to 570,000 in 1937 but rose again 755,000 in 1939
• Encouragement of traditional marriage – 1937: 91% men and 82% women in their thirties were married
• Birth rates fell from 1938
• 1929-40 slower rate of population growth
• 1928 3 million women work in factories and collective farms and grew to 13 million in 1940
• Single and divorced women more like to be left unemployed and not get compensation – a result of pressure to prioritise building a family over earning a salary; if other married women saw single/divorced women earning, they'd realise they can still contribute w/o conforming to Stalinism which'd undermine his 'Great Retreat'; absence of compensation would encourage those single/divorced women to regret their decision and conform to the Great Retreat
• Female participation in high Party politics declined in 1930s
• Prostitution and homosexuality – regime just reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the practice; prostitution rose in the city
• Working in factories and collective farms – increased number of them
• Divorce rate still high – 37% in Moscow in 1934
• Abortions still occurred – over 150,000 abortions to every 57,000 live births
• Poorer women still expected to look after kids and home despite additional burden of contributing to full-time work force – constructing socialism
• Women in Asian Islamic Republics had lower status – part of Stalinist deprivation of religion