In the post-war period, celebration of women's domestic roles intensified. Demobilised men often replaced women in the responsible and well-paid positions the women had gained during the war and thanks to new entry requirements that favoured male veterans, in institutions of higher education, too. The proportion of women enrolled in higher education dropped from the wartime high of 77 per cent to 52 per cent in 1955, then to 42 per cent in 1962. However, the majority ofthe adult female population continued to work, their labour essential to rebuilding the Soviet Union. To ensure that they did, food distribution was tied to the workplace. Between i945 and i950, the number of women in the workforce grew by over three million, although the proportion of women workers dropped from 56 to 47 per cent because of returning soldiers.[218] Yet despite the need for women's labour, fiction treated women's waged work as 'a mere adjunct' to women's domestic responsibilities, which consisted primarily of restoring men's self-esteem and faith in their own manhood. 'Images of wives welcoming mutilated and traumatized husbands and fiances home functioned as a promise and a hope for men and as a suggestion and instruction to women.'[219]
To an unprecedented extent, the post-war media celebrated personal and family happiness. Love, peripheral at best in 1930s fiction, became central to the fiction of the post-war era, reflecting as well as shaping popular priorities. The media encouraged women to make themselves more attractive. Magazines intended for women featured advice on beautifying the home and housekeeping, skin care, exercise, gardening and cooking. Exhorted to work hard, make a home, comfort their shell-shocked husbands, bear children and be feminine, in the post-war period women were expected to be all things to all people. While the Soviet government continued to proclaim the equality of men and women, women were now asked to accept the 'Orwellian doctrine' that men were the more equal.[220]
Fertility rates once again reflected the pressures on women. True, roughly a quarter of a million unmarried women bore children in 1946 and sizeable numbers ofsingle women continued to bear children into the i950s, helping to replenish the decimated population. Nevertheless, despite policies penalising small families and encouraging large ones, most women continued to limit their fertility. The means they employed were the usuaclass="underline" abortion. In i954, abortions numbered 6.84 per thousand women, according to official figures that undoubtedly underestimate them.[221] The result of women's refusal to reproduce was that as of 1954-5, the birth rate per thousand women remained approximately 60 per cent of its pre-war level.
De-Stalinising the 'woman question'
The death of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev brought a shift in the state's relationship to the 'question of women'. For the first time since the 1930s, the leadership toned down propaganda celebrating women's emancipation and took steps to address some of the worst shortcomings. Yet policies were contradictory and results limited. Reproductive politics provide one example. In 1955, the leadership legalised abortion, claiming the need to protect women's health. While continuing to maintain that the duty of women was to reproduce, and to warn of the danger of abortion, the Soviet state explicitly acknowledged women's freedom to choose for the first time. It was up to women to decide 'the question of motherhood', declared the newspaper Izvestiia. Women in state enterprises, although not collective farm women, regained sixteen weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Legal abortion remained a painful and humiliating procedure, however, and contraception unavailable.[222]Family policy reflected similar contradictions. In conformity with increased openness, the leadership permitted a highly critical discussion ofthe 1944 family law. Many of the proponents of liberalising the law were women, beneficiaries of post-revolutionary educational opportunities. Possessing the expertise to participate in policy debates and drawing upon early Bolshevik discourse, they spoke forcefully for a more egalitarian view of marriage and the family than that embodied in existing legislation. Reformers called for freedom of marriage and divorce and equal rights for all children, regardless of whether the biological parents were legally married. Reformers' stance evoked fierce opposition from conservatives, who upheld the double standard and feared the threat to men and family stability of women bringing unfounded paternity suits. Khrushchev sided with the conservatives; family law remained unchanged. Yet divorce became more accessible. Taking advantage of greater freedom to exercise initiative, judges responded favourably to applications for divorce, resolving a growing proportion of them in favour of the plaintiff. Perhaps in response, the number of divorce applications increased dramatically. Women initiated the majority of divorces, a sign of new assertiveness. Between 1950 and 1965, divorce rates per thousand people quadrupled.[223]
The leadership also drew attention to women's secondary economic status, but did little to ameliorate it. The entire Soviet economy rested upon the unpaid and underpaid labour of women. Women comprised two-thirds of the agricultural labour force, and virtually all collective farm women engaged in manual labour. The majority of the work was seasonal, unskilled and poorly paid; it remained difficult for women to advance. The most highly paid, year-round work to which rural women could aspire was dairying, which also ranked among the most arduous labour that collective farm workers performed. In the industrial sector, the low wages paid to women in female-dominated trades such as textiles helped to subsidise the entire industrial economy. Almost a quarter of all women workers were employed in the textile or garment industry. Work in these light industries was as intense as industrial work ever became: women were on the job more than 95 per cent of the time, with only 8 to 10 minutes of break per shift. Poorly designed machinery, inadequate ventilation and shifting schedules exacted an enormous physical toll. The stress of the job put workers 'right at the physiological limit of human capabilities'. Yet such workers received less annual leave than all other industrial workers, and earned less than 80 per cent of the average wage of an industrial worker and two-thirds of that of a metalworker. Women's low wages meant that light industry turned a profit, which the state used to subsidise investment in heavy industry. Women's low wages also made it 'unprofitable' to invest in the costly machinery that would have lightened their work. Gendered assumptions also contributed to restricting women to the least desirable positions. Where machinery was introduced, men often took charge of it, leaving women to perform the remaining unskilled, manual labour. This arrangement was simply too advantageous for the state to abandon voluntarily, and women lacked the clout to force a change from the shop floor. The economic position of women workers continued to deteriorate.[224]
219
Anna Krylova, '"Healers of Wounded Souls": The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature, 1944-1946',
220
Vera S. Dunham,
221
Christopher Williams, 'Abortion and Women's Health in Russia and the Soviet Successor States', in Rosalind Marsh (ed.),
223
Lapidus,
224
Susan Bridger,