The state attempted to strengthen the family, employing legislation and propaganda similar to that of other European nations. In 1934, homosexual acts between consenting males became a criminal offence; the regime did not outlaw female homosexuality, less publicly visible.[208] In 1936, the regime circulated for discussion the draft of a new family law, which would recognise only registered marriages, make divorce more complicated and expensive, and prohibit abortion except when childbearing threatened the mother's life or health. The draft also included incentives, similar to those offered by Catholic countries and Nazi Germany, designed to encourage childbearing. Women who bore more than six children would receive a 2,000-rouble annual bonus for each additional child and a 5,000-rouble bonus for each child over ten children. The law raised both the level of child support and penalties for men who failed to pay it. Despite letters from women protesting against the prohibition on abortion, it was retained when the draft became law in 1936. In 1936, a secret directive from the Commissariat of Health ordered contraceptive devices to be withdrawn from sale.[209] Socialism had solved the 'woman question', the regime proudly declared. Soviet women had become the freest in the
world.[210]
The state's pro-natalist efforts enjoyed only short-lived success. The birth rate increased to 39.7 births in 1937, but thereafter declined. In 1938, as the nation prepared for war, maternity leave was reduced from sixteen weeks to nine and became contingent on seven continuous months of prior employment. The birth rate in i940 dropped below that of i936, partly in consequence. Underground abortion was primarily responsible for the decline. Despite the 'sin' they attached to it, rural women resorted to it frequently, learning to perform abortions on themselves or turning to local abortionists. Women's use ofillegal abortion constituted a form ofresistance to the demand that they produce and reproduce without support from the state. At a terrible physical, and in the case of peasant women, moral price, women took control of their fertility as best they could.[211]
The new emphasis on the family brought a redefinition of wifehood. Devoting oneself to one's man assumed new importance for all but peasant women. Honouring a Soviet hero, the press would also lavish praise on his wife. The celebration of socially conscious wifehood reached its peak in the movement of wife-activists (obshchestvennitsy), which lasted from 1936 until 1941. For the first time since 1917, full-time housewives were treated respectfully and invited to contribute their unpaid labour to the creation of a new society. At its height in 1936-7 the movement mobilised tens of thousands of housewives to organise kindergartens and camps for children, furnish workers' dormitories, plant flowers and the like. Dominated by the wives of industrial managers and engineers, the movement extended women's domestic responsibilities into the public sphere and provided social services neglected by economic planners. At the same time, the neatly groomed and fashionably dressed obshchestven- nitsy served as exemplars of the 'cultured' society of the future. Working-class women often resented obshchestvennitsy, whose celebration signified increased acceptance of class distinctions.[212]
Family ties sometimes brought arrest and imprisonment. Women constituted 11 per cent of those formally prosecuted by the legal system during the Terror, and 8 per cent of the prison population in 1940.[213] Many of the women political prisoners were mothers, daughters, sisters and, most commonly, wives of arrested men. So many wives of arrested Old Bolsheviks were themselves arrested in 1937 that special camps were created to hold them. The motherhood that the regime now celebrated intensified the sufferings of women prisoners. Their children were frequently sent away to children's homes, their names changed, their pasts effaced. In the communal prison cells described by Evgenia Ginzberg and others, women who had remained stalwart under brutal interrogation and in punishment cells would succumb to hysterical weeping when they permitted themselves to think of their children.
The Second World War and its aftermath
The massive mobilisation during the Second World War both obscured and intensified gender differences. The line separating men's work from women's work dissolved. Tens of thousands of women were compelled to prepare defences when German forces threatened. To replace the labour of men under arms, on 13 February 1942, the Soviet government ordered full labour mobilisation, incorporating into the labour force the 'non-working' population aged sixteen to forty-five, except for pregnant women, nursing mothers and mothers without access to childcare. By the beginning of October 1942, women comprised 52 per cent of the labour force in military-related industry and 81 per cent of the labour in light industry (up from 60 per cent on the eve of invasion). In 1945, 56 per cent of the entire industrial labour force was female. Seventy per cent of the agricultural labour force was female in 1943, 91.7 per cent in 1945. Between 1940 and 1944, the proportion of tractor drivers who were women rose from 4 to 81 per cent.[214] The war created opportunities for women to advance on the job and in party and state institutions.
Millions of women served at the front. The government immediately drafted women medical students and established crash courses to prepare front-line medics and nurses. Forty-one per cent of physicians at the front were female, as were 43 per cent of field surgeons, 43 per cent of medical assistants and 100 per cent of nurses. Other women participated directly in the fighting, rendering the Soviet Union's wartime experience unique. Women constituted 9.3 per cent of partisan forces that appeared behind enemy lines. To shore up resistance against the invaders, Communist Party and Komsomol members were mobilised for combat immediately after war broke out, without regard to gender. Early in 1942 the Central Committee of the Communist Party formally accepted women into the military. By the end of 1943, when female participation reached its peak, over 800,000 served in the armed forces and partisan units; by the end of the war, over a million had performed military service. Women fought on every front and in all branches of the services, constituting about 8 per cent of military personnel overall.[215]
Yet while gender distinctions disappeared in much of early wartime practice, they resurfaced in wartime propaganda and towards the end of the war, in state policy. Media reinforced the gendered imagery that had evolved by the end of the 1930s, representing women first and foremost as mothers but, more generally, as embodiments of the home and family for which men fought. Women's front-line responsibilities received relatively little attention during the war. In the rare cases when the media did depict women soldiers, it almost invariably portrayed them as feminine and girlish, by contrast with brave and manly men.[216] Towards the end of the war, gender distinctions became newly institutionalised. In 1943, co-education, the norm since 1918, was abolished in urban secondary schools in order to give proper attention to the different requirements of boys' and girls' 'vocational training, practical activities, preparation for leadership and military service'.[217] A new family code was issued on 8 July 1944, the 1936 code having failed to reduce the divorce rate. Intended to strengthen the family, the code reinforced marital ties by making divorce still more difficult. The new law deprived people in unregistered unions of legal benefits and access to housing, and restored the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. It barred women from bringing paternity suits. At the same time, the code was unabashedly pro-natalist: single people were taxed, as were married couples with fewer than three children, except for those under the age of twenty-five and attending college full time, or who had lost children during the war. The new legislation also augmented the cult of motherhood. Even unmarried mothers, otherwise stigmatised by the new laws, were eligible for additional financial support from the state. In the summer of 1944, the state instituted military-style 'motherhood medals', almost identical to those awarded by the Nazis and graduated according to the number of children a woman had borne and reared. After 1944, when the press began publishing the names of women who won these awards, mothering became women's most publicised work.
208
Dan Healey
209
David Hoffman, 'Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context',
210
Mary Buckley
212
Rebecca Balmas Neary, 'Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists' Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life',
214
John Erickson, 'Soviet Women at War', in John and Carol Garrard (eds.),
215
K. Jean Cottam, 'Soviet Women in World War II: The Ground Forces and the Navy',
216
Katharine Hodgson, 'The Other Veterans: Soviet Women's Poetry of World War 2', in Garrard and Garrard,
217
Rudolf Schlesinger (ed.),