Did the Soviets Fail to Establish Meaningful Equality towards Women?
Research Paper – Did the Soviets Fail to Establish Meaningful Equality towards Women?
Soviet society underwent a major and challenging cultural revolution encouraged by Stalin’s political ambitions during the 1920’s. The government made Soviet women not simply the most liberated but, moreover, given the most far- reaching political rights of any nation in the world. A women’s department of the Central Committee (Zhenotdel) was founded in 1919 and had stimulated abortion free of charge, easier divorce laws, female literacy and the increase in the number of women employees. But still, the party itself, had the dominance of the other sex as a social category and failed to establish meaningful equality between the sexes and to understand that many of its orders contained fundamental gender prejudice because they refused to differentiate on paper between the two sexes, in direct difference with what was happening in practice. So even though Soviet women received more liberties, the Soviets failed on granting them the true sense of moral equality: women were discriminated in their workplaces, the NEP resulted in negative impact on the social conditions for women such as prostitution etc and the degree of female participation at the political level was incredibly low.
Stalin’s first main failure towards the attempt to establish equality towards women was how females got discriminated at their workplaces. First of all, most women were employed in traditionally “female jobs”, such as in the textile manufacturing and they were disappointingly represented in heavy industries such as steel-making construction and engineering. And on top of that – women also had to face lower rates of pay than men and were less likely to be promoted. Female members were often pushed into service especially for qualities that were considered characteristically female. For example, they were recruited into anti profiteering objectivities during the Civil War because of their "tender hearts and sharp eyes." In the eyes of many people this was not equality, as the state strived to achieve and failed to do. As Elizabeth Wood has illustrated,”women were perpetually recruited through patriarchal images in which the party or state replaced the male authorities to which they had been subservient in the prerevolutionary era. In addition, the kinds of jobs into which they were being placed reflected the sexism of old: inspecting kindergartens rather than factories, for instance. The first glass ceiling was being put in place.” Even though the Soviets managed to get the female’s to work, which many countries still hadn’t accomplished yet, they still weren’t equal in society towards the higher ranked males at that time and is considered to be an unsuccessful achievement.
