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p The question of women’s rights in the Soviet Union was resolved through a fundamental restructuring of the old society with the active participation of the women themselves. The Bolshevik Party founded by Lenin, which guided the October Revolution and consolidated the new social system, viewed the question of women’s rights as one of the most important social problems that the triumphant Revolution had to solve.

p In order to appreciate the colossal amount of work that had to be done in this field, one must recall the status of women in tsarist Russia.

p In pre-Revolutionary Russia women had no electoral rights whatsoever. The head of the family was the husband. Deprived of any rights and oppressed in the family as well as in society at large, women had no access to education or to qualifications, and were unable to participate in political or cultural life.Of the women employed in hired labour 55 per cent worked as domestic servants, and 25 per cent worked as farm labourers for the big landowners and kulaks (rich peasants). 26 Only 13 per cent were employed in enterprises or on building sites (and even then on work requiring little skill), and 4 per cent were in educational or health establishments. A mere 17 per cent of all women were literate, and only a handful managed with great difficulty to fight their way into the academic world.

p The working day at enterprises lasted for 13-14 hours and was the longest in Europe. Women did the same jobs as men, but were only paid 75 per cent or even 50 per cent as much. There were no labour laws affording women any protection. The peasant woman was no better off: she had no rights whatsoever, not even the right to a plot of land. She worked for the kulak or the landowner from dawn to dusk.

p The infant mortality rate in pre-Revolutionary Russia was enormous: 43 per cent of all children died before they reached the age of five. There were hardly any maternity and child protection institutions. A woman’s average life expectancy was 33 years (now 74).

p Life was particularly hard for women in the Central Asian areas of the country. Here feudal and even clan relations prevailed. Polygamy was practised, as well as the marrying off of minors and the buying and selling of brides. Forced seclusion and the wearing of the yashmak cut women off completely from the outside world.

p Guided by the Marxist-Leninist theory that the social emancipation of women is part of the question of social emancipation in general, and bearing in mind the specific features of the question of women’s status, the Bolshevik Party strove to raise the political awareness of women, to involve them in the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and to turn them into fighters 27 for their own emancipation. "Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of history,” Marx wrote, "knows also that great social upheavals are impossible without women’s ferment."  [27•1  For this reason, the Bolshevik Party made use of all available forms and methods of work, and gave women a political education, raising their consciousness and involving them in revolutionary struggle.

p The years of hard struggle against the autocracy and capitalism in the underground and in open political struggle, in prisons and in exile saw the rise of a whole galaxy of outstanding professional women revolutionaries, who combined in themselves implicit devotion to the cause of the revolution, unfaltering courage, broad knowledge and the ability to work with the masses.

p Nadezhda Krupskaya, Maria Ulyanova, Anna Yelizarova, Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, Konkordia Samoilova, Yelena Stasova, Klavdia Nikolayeva, Sofia Smidovich, Feodosia Drabkina, Raissa Zemlyachka and many others tirelessly spread Leninist ideas among the women workers and peasants, and drew them into the Party and the revolutionary movement.

p As a result of the activity of the Bolshevik Party and of the whole pre-Revolutionary political development, many working women of Russia became active participants in class battles, the 1905 revolution, the February revolution and the October Revolution of 1917. They took part in the strike movement, in revolutionary demonstrations and in armed uprisings, and they acted as organisers, fighters, agitators, scouts, messengers and nurses.

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p On October 25 (November 7), 1917, the Great October Socialist Revolution was triumphant and women made a considerable contribution to the victory.

p The building of the new society began in extremely difficult circumstances. Thefourbloody years of the First World War (1914-1918) had undermined the country’s economy. Sparked off by counter-revolutionaries, the Civil War broke out (1918-1920). In order to stifle the Revolution, 14 foreign states fell upon the young Soviet Republic in an armed intervention. A great deal of intensive work and the mobilisation of all forces were required of the Soviet people in order to defend their revolutionary gains. Despite all this, the breakdown of the old social relations and the creation of new ones were accomplished during the very first days after the victory of the October Revolution.

p Alongside such major matters as ending the war and concluding peace, abolishing landownership and transferring the land to the peasants, establishing control over production and over the distribution of material wealth, the question of the social emancipation of women was also being decided.

p The first Soviet Decrees on Peace and Land, which were signed by Lenin, were very much in the interests of women. The Decree on Land enabled a peasant woman to obtain as much land as a man. A whole series of further decrees were enacted containing special points affecting women. The decree establishing an 8-hour working day dated October 29 (November 11), 1917, prohibited the employment of women for night work. The social security regulations of November 14 (27) provided for maternity benefits, 29 payable 8 weeks before the birth and 8 weeks after it. The decree on pay established a minimum wage level irrespective of sex. The decree on rates of pay upheld the principle of equal remuneration for equal work for both men and women. December 18 (31), 1917, saw the adoption of a decree on civil marriage giving men and women equal rights in marriage and in the family. The first Constitution of the RSFSR (July 1918) institutionalised the equality of women and their political and civil rights.

p Summing up all that had been done by Soviet power immediately after its establishment, Lenin said: "In this field, not a single democratic party in the world, not even in the most advanced bourgeois republic, has done in decades so much as a hundredth part of what we did in our very first year in power. We really razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality.... But the more thoroughly we have cleared the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on but are not yet building."  [29•1 

p It only took a few months to abolish the old laws and adopt new ones which recognised the full equality of women, but it took years and years to resolve the fundamental problems involved in providing women with equal rights.

p It was only possible to accomplish the social emancipation of women through the development of productive forces, the socialist industrialisation of the country and the collectivisation of agriculture, and the all-round development of 30 culture, i.e., through the building of a new, socialist society. To a considerable degree, the success of socialist construction depended on the participation of the women themselves in it. It formed a single interconnected and indissoluble process. A vast amount of work was required to train women for active participation in production, state and socio-political life.

p The first thing to be done was to abolish illiteracy and semi-literacy. At the same time it was also necessary to provide women with the opportunity of undergoing vocational training and raise their skills, and to involve them in sociopolitical and state affairs.

p In accordance with a decree passed by the Council of People’s Commissars on December 26, 1919, the elimination of illiteracy and semi-literacy in the case of people aged between 8 and 50 became a task for the whole of the state and the people. Tens of thousands of schools and centres for the elimination of illiteracy were opened. The individual teaching scheme whereby a person who could read and write gave instruction to someone else who could not was very popular. Illiteracy among women had been largely abolished by 1939.

p The doors of all educational establishments were opened to women. In order to help working people to obtain a higher education, workers’ faculties were established under the auspices of higher educational establishments, and they prepared working men and women for entry to institutes and universities. Factory apprenticeship, vocational schools and individual on-job training were, during the early stages, the principal forms taken by the training of women for skilled work. Alongside the Party and the 31 Government, the trade unions, the young people’s and cooperative organisations dealt with all these issues.

p A large part in the involvement of women in production and socio-political affairs was played by the sections for work among women (women’s sections) that were set up in mid-1919 under the auspices of the CC RCP(B) and all lower Party bodies.

p The women’s sections carried out broad political and educational work among women. They organised meetings, congresses and conferences at which all the vital questions concerning the life and work of women were discussed. They were concerned to improve the working and living conditions of women in town and country, and made checks to see that the laws and provisions protecting female labour were carried out. The women’s sections took part in the discussion of draft laws affecting the interests of women, were themselves the initiators of many government decrees, and tabled their suggestions during the examinations of state budgets and economic development plans.

p Meetings of women’s delegates were held under the direct control of the women’s sections. The delegates were elected for one year from representatives of women workers, office employees, peasants and housewives. Papers and talks on political topics were given at the delegates’ meetings, and practical questions concerning the functioning of Soviet institutions were discussed. Each delegate was assigned for practical work to a particular Soviet institution, a nursery school or a cooperative shop. After their practical work many delegates took up permanent employment at the places they had been assigned to. 32 In this way, women were introduced to social activity.

p Soviet power also took steps to assist mothers in the upbringing and care of children and to lighten their housework. A network of childcare centres was gradually built up, and the foundations were laid for setting up consumer service establishments.

p In the eastern part of the country work among women had to take account of the local peculiarities. In addition to meetings, conferences and the work of delegates’ meetings, women’s clubs and various other centres were founded. Here women were taught to read and write, were given production training and received medical advice. They were introduced to public life and culture, and were taught how to look after children and run a home properly.

p The twenties saw the birth of a movement that came to be known as khujum (offensive) in the republics of Central Asia. It really was an offensive on feudal customs and prejudices. Most women threw off their yashmaks and horsehair nets—the symbols of slavery—and burnt them on bonfires.

p The battle for a new way of life for women was a hard one and was accompanied by many sacrifices. But the battle was won by Soviet power and the Leninist national policy.

p The Soviet press played a great part in women’s political education and their involvement in study and production .Special leaflets and brochures were published, as well as a series of popular books called the "Library of Women Workers and Peasants”. In the central, provincial and many local papers there was a page called the "Working Woman’s Page”. The Woman Worker, 33 The Peasant Woman, Woman Communist and other, later women’s magazines strove constantly to educate women and gradually raise their political and cultural level.

p As a result of the enormous amount of work performed by the Communist Party and Soviet power, and by all the mass organisations of the working people, the role of women in production and in all spheres of the life of society gradually grew on the basis of a general growth in the economy and the culture of the young Soviet state, hand in hand with the building of socialism.

p In 1936, a new Constitution of the USSR was adopted, reflecting the victory of socialism in the country and confirming the fundamental rights of women. Article 122 of the Constitution reads as follows:

p “Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, government, cultural, political and other public .activity.

p “The possibility of exercising these rights is rensured by women being accorded an equal right with men to work, payment for work, rest and Heisure, social insurance and education, and by ; state protection of the interests of mother and ichild, state aid to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers, maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens.” This Article of the Constitution reflects all the ;social gains that affect the status of women.

p The status of women changed radically with ’the victory of socialism. The participation of women in social production, culture and politics increased so much that no comparison with the past is possible.

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p The growth was qualitative as well as quantitative. At enterprises women began to work as skilled workers, foremen and engineers. By the beginning of 1941, 43,000 women engineers were employed in the national economy. Many women became production managers.

p The collectivisation of agriculture enabled women to occupy an equal place alongside men in agricultural production. In 1940, there were 19 million women working on collective farms, with 100,000 of them in charge of agriculture machinery, 40,000 running livestock farms, over 14,500 leading brigades and more than 14,000 working as collective farm chairmen and deputy chairmen.

p A new Soviet intelligentsia grew up, a considerable section of which was composed of women. By the beginning of 1941, 36 per cent of all graduates in the country were women, and they formed the majority of teachers and public health workers.

p Many women pioneered the public movement for shock work and for mastering machinery and new professions.

p The women fliers Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko and the navigator Marina Raskova achieved fame during the prewar years when they made their heroic non-stop flight in the plane Rodina from Moscow to the Soviet Far East. They were the first women to be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.

p Women began to play a part in state administration. At the 1937 elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet—the country’s highest organ of state power—189 women deputies were elected; hundreds of thousands of women were elected to local and republican government bodies.

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p The Soviet people’s Great Patriotic War against nazi Germany and imperialist Japan was a stern test of the durability of the whole Soviet system. The war years showed the extent to which the part played by the Soviet woman in the country’s economic and political life had increased, and made clear the growth in her awareness and moral qualities. During the war Soviet women were able to shoulder the main burden of labour, as well as the responsibility for the efficient and uninterrupted work of the home front, without which victory in the fight against fascism would have been unthinkable. Women took the place of men in enterprises, on transport, on building sites, in scientific institutions and in educational establishments. They were also the decisive force in agriculture.

p Soviet women distinguished themselveis not only by their selfless labour in the rear, but also by their heroic struggle on the front and in partisan detachments. Over a million women took part directly in military operations against the enemy. The names of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya,

Liza Chaikina, Maryte Melnikaite and many other heroines have forever been inscribed in the chronicle of the Soviet people’s struggle. For their courage and bravery 320,000 women were decorated with military Orders and medals. 91 women were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. After the war the Soviet people were faced by the task of healing the serious wounds inflicted by the fascist invaders, rehabilitating thousands of towns and villages, raising from the ruins tens of thousands of factories, power stations, schools and hospitals, ensuring the peaceful development of all spheres in the life of the people, and 36 continuing the building of socialism. Millions of Soviet women took part in the struggle to accomplish the postwar tasks and to complete the building of a socialist society.