A major cause of women's poor bargaining position was their infamous 'double burden', that is, keeping house as well as working full time for wages. The double burden served to maintain Soviet women's subordinate status at work, while saving the government millions of roubles. In the post-war period, urban women spent at least an hour a day on shopping, then another one and a half to two hours preparing food and cleaning up. In the countryside, running water, indoor plumbing and central heating remained almost nonexistent. Rural women, facing empty shelves in village shops, had to travel periodically to a nearby city to stock up on necessities. Roughly 13 per cent of children aged one to six could be accommodated in children's institutions, whereas over 75 per cent of women of childbearing age worked outside the
home.[225]
Under Khrushchev's leadership, the state tried to ease the double burden, which prevented women from joining the labour force in the desired numbers. Besides, consumption and comfort had become an important dimension of the socialist promise, and failure to provide them, a source of humiliation internationally.[226] Khrushchev redirected resources away from defence and heavy industry and towards consumer-related production for the first time since the industrialisation drive of the 1930s. The government undertook vast new housing projects: between 1955 and 1964, the state's housing stock nearly doubled. Many of the new structures, although poorly built, were nevertheless supplied with heat and water. The number of pre-school institutions increased, providing spaces for 22.5 per cent of eligible children by 1965 - about half of urban children, less than 12 per cent of rural ones. The standard of living improved modestly. However, because most women worked outside the home, the need remained greater. Women still had to compensate with their time and energy for the many shortcomings of the Soviet production and distribution system - figuring out where to obtain scarce goods and cultivating the personal relations that provided access to them, standing in queues and performing by hand the work that Westerners performed by machine. Women's 'titanic efforts' kept the Soviet system functioning.[227] Their onerous double burden prevented them from upgrading skills and advancing on the job; prevented most from even seeking more demanding and well-paid employment, because such employment took more energy than most women had. As a result, many women filled positions for which they were over-qualified. Ironically, such decisions confirmed people's prejudices about women's inability to perform skilled or responsible work.
Under Leonid Brezhnev the leadership finally reformed family law. In December 1965, a new divorce law simplified procedures and reduced costs. A new family law of 1968 permitted paternity suits and enabled mothers to eliminate the blank space on the birth certificate of an out-of-wedlock child.
It also contained a definition of rape that included forced sexual intercourse between spouses. Birth control became available on a limited basis, mainly barrier methods, intra-uterine devices, and the condoms that men half-jokingly referred to as 'galoshes' and often refused to use. Without abandoning the priority given to heavy industry and defence, the leadership nevertheless redirected greater resources to consumer goods. By the mid-i970s, about half of Soviet families owned a refrigerator and two-thirds, a washing machine; the places in childcare centres had grown to accommodate about 45 per cent of pre-school children. Still, improvement was relative, shortages remained endemic and women continued to bear a heavy double burden.
Growing numbers of women expressed discontent with their situation. A survey published in 1970 found that 50 per cent of women who declared themselves unhappily married were dissatisfied with the division of labour in their household.[228] Discontent spread to the countryside, where the educational level of rural women had risen substantially in the post-war period. By i979, almost half of the rural female population over the age of ten had received secondary or higher education. Well-educated rural women became far less inclined than their mothers to tolerate lack of consumer amenities and low-paying jobs that required heavy labour. In the European part of the Soviet Union, the outcome was massive migration of rural women away from the countryside and to the cities in pursuit of higher education and more appealing work. Men, faced with a 'bride problem', abandoned collective farms, leaving behind them dying villages, where only ageing women laboured.[229]
Everywhere in the European sectors of the Soviet Union, although not in Central Asia, urbanisation and women's rising expectations led to a reduction of the birth rate and increase in divorce. The birth rate steadily dropped, from 26.7 births per 1,000 people in 1950, to 24.9 in i960, to 23.8 in 1970, to 22.53 in 1980. Divorce rates doubled between 1963 and 1974; by 1978 a third of all marriages ended in divorce, half in Moscow and St Petersburg. Divorce also grew more common in the countryside. Women initiated most divorces, often citing men's alcohol abuse as the primary reason. To the leadership, the declining birth rate and family instability appeared a threat to productivity and military strength, and aroused fears that the European population of the Soviet Union would become a minority.
Debate on the 'woman question' intensified. Women as a 'demographic resource' set the tone, as scholars and experts explored ways to induce women to bear more children. Some methods, such as encouraging women to leave the workforce, they ruled out immediately. The economy still depended on women's labour, and besides, ideology taught that labour provided the key to women's emancipation. Introducing part-time work and flexible schedules, which many women requested, was discussed but never implemented. Instead, the leadership offered more legal protection and financial incentives to mothers. Thus, according to the new family code of 1968, it became illegal for a man to divorce his wife without her consent while she was pregnant or raising a child under the age of one. In addition to the already existing, fully paid maternity leave of fifty-six days before and after birth, in March 1981, the government introduced a partially paid leave for working mothers, to enable them to care for a child up to the age of one. Women (but not men) gained the option of taking an additional six months of unpaid leave, with no loss of position or job status, replacing the previous policy, which offered a year's unpaid leave. Women also received a lump sum payment of 50 roubles for their first child, with double that amount for the second and third. These policy changes failed to affect the birth rate, however. Starting in i960, abortions outnumbered live births every year, and were the primary cause of the
decline. [230]
Concern with family instability permitted critics to attack women's alleged 'emancipation' for the first time. Ever since women began to work outside the home, men had lost 'the title of family breadwinner', 'experts' declared. Without this role, 'the very earth slips from beneath [a man's] feet'. Newly publicised social problems, such as hooliganism and alcoholism, were blamed on women's failure to be yielding and feminine. A truly feminine woman could even cure the problems of men: 'Marriage with a really feminine girl instills in a man two things. On the one hand, he becomes more masculine from the need to protect and defend her, and on the other hand, sharp traits in his character soften; gradually, he becomes more tender and kind.'[231] To preserve marital harmony, articles warned young rural women to avoid jealousy or pos- sessiveness, and most importantly, not to nag.[232] Many women came to believe that the much-vaunted emancipation, rather than incomplete emancipation, was the source of their difficult lives.
225
Michael Sacks,
226
Susan Reid, '"Masters of the Earth": Gender and Destalinization in Soviet Reformist Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw',
227
Alia Sariban, 'The Soviet Woman: Support and Mainstay of the Regime', in Tatyana Mamonova (ed.),
229
Susan Allott, 'Soviet Rural Women: Employment and Family Life', in Barbara Holland (ed.),
231
Lynne Attwood, 'The New Soviet Man and Woman - Soviet Views on Psychological Sex Differences', in Holland,