How effective was the Zhenotdel as an agent of proletarian women's emancipation? Activists sought to mobilise lower-class women on their own behalf, to keep women's issues on the party agenda, to fight for the rights of labouring women and to ensure the transformation of everyday life.[191]They fought an uphill battle. Zhenotdel-style feminism had little support even among female party members; some of them actively opposed it. Zhenot- del members themselves disagreed over tactics and goals. And in regional and local organisations, prejudice against the Zhenotdel and its work was endemic. Many party cadres resisted women's emancipation and barely concealed their contempt for the Zhenotdel. Trade union leaders, too, often disliked co-operating with the Zhenotdel or providing facilities for its meetings. Inthe course ofthe 1920s, Zhenotdel funding decreased: the organisation operated on a shoestring, many of its activists really volunteers. The Zhenotdel found itself in an impossible position, dependent on party largesse and charged with mobilising a group whose negative qualities (backwardness, ignorance) justified their mission.[192]
In any case, efforts to emancipate women were often ill-suited to material realities. During the civil-war years, urban dwellers, now mostly women and children, starved or froze to death. Millions of homeless children wandered the streets. Instead of serving as shining examples of the socialist future, state- sponsored efforts to assume domestic functions, starved of resources, repelled those who used them. The New Economic Policy in some respects made matters worse. Men returning from the civil war took jobs from women. In an effort to protect their superior status in the workplace and monopoly on skilled 'male' trades, male workers routinely sabotaged women's efforts to acquire advanced skills and upgrade their work status.[193] Managers often preferred to hire men, who had higher skill levels and would not require costly maternity leave and day care. Despite decrees that forbade it, managers discriminated against women workers and dismissed pregnant and nursing women on leave. They used laws banning night work for women as an excuse to lay off women workers. To save money, the state cut back on childcare centres. As a result, working mothers had no place to leave their children and the largely female staffs found themselves without employment. Women's share ofthe labour force dropped from 45 per cent in 1918 to under 30 per cent, where it remained throughout the 1920s, even as the number of workers slowly grew.[194] Zhenotdel complaints about the situation fell on deaf ears.
Family upheaval intensified women's vulnerability. Millions of Russians, mostly urban residents, exercised their new right to divorce. Courts became swamped with alimony suits, many of them initiated by unmarried women who had borne children in unregistered unions, for which the 1918 lawmadeno provision. Unprepared to devote resources to implementing women's equality in the workplace or restructuring the family, the state instead revised the law. A new family code was issued in 1926 after considerable discussion. Designed 'to shield women and children from the negative effects of NEP', but also to promote the withering away of the family, the code granted new rights to women in unregistered unions and further simplified divorce procedures, transferring contested divorces from the courts to registry offices.[195] The code failed to ameliorate the problems it sought to address.
Other policies that targeted women served to replicate women's subordinate status. Reaffirming the connection between women's sexuality and reproduction, the 1920 abortion law referred to abortion as a serious 'evil', necessitated by the 'moral survivals' of the past and by difficult economic conditions. Once those conditions disappeared, the assumption went, so would the need to limit births.[196] Contraception was legalised only in 1923. Physicians gained greater control over reproduction and authorisation to pursue their campaign to modernise motherhood. Only qualified doctors, not midwives, were certified to perform legal abortions, which deprived most village women of access to them. Propaganda vilified village midwives, the primary source of medical care for village women, and portrayed physicians as male. Posters intended for urban women represented healthy female sexuality as linked to reproduction and offered viewers images of mothers surrounded by healthy children. Yet mothering, propaganda emphasised, was a craft that had to be learned from the physicians who best understood it. To oversee the process, the government created an organisation for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (OMM).[197] Women's attempts to control their own reproductive lives through the use of abortion encountered increasing criticism. Facing difficult material conditions, perhaps eager to seize new opportunities, women ignored pro-natalist propaganda. By the late 1920s, abortions had become so commonplace that in some cities they considerably outnumbered births. Experts expressed profound concern about the extent of abortion, a threat to population growth in their view. Referringto the 'antisocial' nature of abortion and its 'epidemic' dimensions, they emphasised the state's need for children, not women's need to control their fertility.[198]
Revolution comes to the countryside
By contrast with urbanites, village women remained largely unaffected by post-revolutionary upheavals. To be sure, the land code that the Bolsheviks introduced in 1922 promised much on paper: it equalised women's legal position in the peasant household, and entitled women to an equal right to land and other property and to equal participation in village self-government; it provided protection for pregnant women and introduced maternity leave for agricultural labourers. The Zhenotdel and press campaigned to educate village women and mobilise them on their own behalf - to set up nurseries for their children, to divorce abusive husbands. But most of these initiatives went nowhere. The state lacked the means to pursue them, or back up its promises with the resources necessary to support real change.
Only with the collectivisation drive did the Soviet state decisively intrude on peasant women's lives, and the impact was mostly negative. The collectivisation campaign threatened the sphere of women. Activists seized as collective property the livestock that women customarily tended; they broke up families and dispersed their members. Although by depriving male household heads of control of household property and labour, collectivisation promised to undermine the peasantry's patriarchal order, it failed to attract peasant women. In the regime's view, women's bitter opposition further demonstrated their greater 'backwardness' and susceptibility to 'kulak' manipulation.[199] Taking advantage of the immunity that such perceptions ensured, enormous numbers of women engaged in acts of resistance. Women also demonstrated against the closing of churches and continued to baptise their children despite prohibitions against the practice. Baptism became a 'conspicuous site of resistance' to official values, if largely a hidden one.[200]
191
Wendy Zeva Goldman, 'The Death of the Proletarian Women's Movement',
193
Diane Koenker, 'Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia',
194
Wendy Zeva Goldman,
196
Rex Wade (ed.),
197
Elizabeth Waters, 'The Modernization ofRussian Motherhood, 1917-1936',
199
Lynne Viola, 'Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectivization',
200
David Ransel,