Nine hundred workers in seven factories were asked to keep a diary. Between 1965 and 1968, at the Petrovsky iron and steel works and the Krasny Profintern machine-building plant in Dnepropetrovsk, the Dneprovsk aluminium plant in Zaporozhie, the Lenin flax works and the Iskra Oktyabrya factory in Kostroma, and the jute works in Odessa, 550 women and 350 men wrote down what they did with their hours. Leonid Gordon and Eduard Klopov then counted. Man After Work is what the counting produced, and it is one of the few books in this series whose argument can be checked.
Begin with the date, because the spine misleads. Progress issued this English translation, by John and Kristine Bushnell, in 1975. The Russian text is older. Its fieldwork ran 1965–68; the Taganrog survey it draws on was carried out "in 1967–69 in Taganrog by several institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences"; the Pskov material comes from the international comparative time-budget study of 1965–66. More decisively, the book speaks of the Ninth Five-Year Plan of 1971–75 wholly in the future tense — "In 1975, social consumption funds will provide 30 per cent of the total volume of allowances and services" — and its latest source of any kind is a statistical handbook published in 1973. This is an early-1970s book describing the late 1960s, appearing in English in the middle of the decade it predicts. That gap matters, because the authors are careful to flag it themselves: "it is necessary to take into account that our data were obtained from studies undertaken from 1965 through 1968. At the present time, the level of the workers' income has risen substantially." A propagandist would have quietly refreshed the numbers.
That instinct runs through the methodology, which is stated openly and can be criticised. The sample was drawn in two stages — typical shops chosen with help from management and "social organizations", then every tenth worker taken from a list — and the authors concede the first stage is not random while defending the second. They give a confidence statement: "with a probability of P— 0.9 that the relative magnitude (weight) of the basic social, demographic, educational, etc., groups differs from the corresponding indices of the hypothetical total group by no more than 5 per cent in each case." They restrict their claim accordingly: "quantitative results are limited to the cities studied." They belong to a real discipline with real ancestors, and they name them in the first footnote — Strumilin, whose time-budget work goes back to the 1920s, Prudensky, Patrushev, Grushin, Kharchev. Soviet sociology of everyday life was not invented for export. It had been running for a decade before this book, and it had a habit of finding things.
The decisive test for a book of this kind, published by this publisher, in this year, is the double burden. Progress issued Women Today in 1975 as well. That volume knows the concept perfectly — "twofold burden", "double burden" — and uses it only about Italy, England, West Germany and Spain. In its chapter on socialist society the double shift does not exist. The word "abortion" appears nowhere in it; neither does the Politburo; and the 1936 recriminalisation of abortion is unmentioned though 1936 is praised for its constitution. It is a book that quarantines the truth geographically.
Man After Work does not. It publishes the numbers.
"Working women devote from 2 to 2.5 times more of their time to housework than do the men, therefore they have less opportunity for rest, raising their professional skills, and cultural levels — in general, less opportunity for their own development." The gap "is approximately 12 hours a week among unmarried youth and young childless families, but reaches 18–20 hours a week in families with minor children." Table 1, the summary table of the whole study, is stark: housework, women 27 hours 20 minutes a week against men's 11 hours 40; and — the column the state would have preferred left out — "Daily cultural activity", women 11 hours 50, men 19 hours 50. The men have eight hours a week more life.
Broken down by task it is worse. On cooking: "there is no equality—nor even a hint of equality!—between women and men in this activity", and "the mean duration of food preparation and related activities for working women in major cities is 9 times(!) greater than for working men: 10–11 hours per week as opposed to 1-1.5 hours." On laundry: "in this area of housework, almost all the work is done by women". Among workers with the least education, mothers of small children spent 41 hours a week on housework — a second full-time job — against 13 hours 10 for the equivalent men. And the authors name it in exactly the words Women Today reserved for the capitalist world: "women's" activities "consume an especially large amount of non-working time and form a sort of second shift for working women."
They also isolate the variable. Young men and women in factory dormitories live in the same rooms, eat the same food, have the same laundry to do and no family to serve. "The average duration of housework among men living in dormitories was about 5-6 hours per week, while for women it was three times greater (about 18 hours), the difference between them being more than 12 hours per week (!)." No shortage of nurseries explains that. It is a finding about men.
And there is one sentence that no Soviet book of the period had any obligation to print. Comparing mothers in two-parent households with single, widowed and divorced mothers, they find the latter do less housework — three to eight hours a week less, despite having fewer adults to help. Their conclusion: "Obviously, waiting on the husband is an important part of the domestic obligations of married working women."
Read that beside Trotsky. The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, argued in its seventh chapter that the collapse of the socialised household had thrown women back on "home cooking and the home washtub … that is, to the old slavery", and used, of the collective-farm woman, the very phrase Progress would spend the next forty years confining to the capitalist chapter: the private plots, he wrote, "lay a double burden upon woman." His picture of the working woman's day — "compelled to run to the shops, prepare dinner herself, and carry her children on foot from the kindergarten" — is, thirty years later, Gordon and Klopov's shopping, kitchen-work and childcare columns. Where the two books differ is in what follows. Trotsky treated the double burden as an indictment of the bureaucracy; the sociologists treat it as a planning problem with two levers, "reduce the necessary volume of housework" and "create conditions for at least a partial substitution of men's labor for women's". But on the fact itself they agree, and the fact was published in Moscow.
The honesty extends to what the authors expect. They do not promise that services will abolish housework: "the sphere of social services will not, over the next few decades, fully replace the family production of services." They report that when Taganrog workers were asked what they would do with more free time, "almost two-thirds of the female and one-fourth of the male workers surveyed felt a lack of time for domestic affairs" — that is, the shortfall was so severe that most women's first wish for leisure was more housework. And they do the comparison that could only embarrass them. From the 1965–66 multinational study: "Time expenditures in the household economy by working women in the USSR and in the developed capitalist countries—the United States, West Germany, France—were almost identical." Half a century after October, the Soviet working woman's domestic day was the same length as the American's. The authors print it, then change the subject to the structure of those hours rather than their total. But they print it.
That is a real achievement and this introduction will not grudge it. Where the discipline had data, it published, and it outran the propaganda of its own publishing house by a distance that can be measured in a single year: 1975, one imprint, two books, one of which could not say in a hundred pages on socialist society what the other says in its third chapter.
Now the limits, which are of two kinds: subjects handled at arm's length, and subjects excluded by definition.
Drunkenness is discussed — repeatedly, and more frankly than most Progress titles allow — but never measured. It appears as a consequence: of "male companionship", which is "at present excessively widespread"; of the monotony of fathers' lives — "In the working milieu, fathers seek an outlet from the monotony and humdrum of domestic life in drink" — and of half-urbanised peasants whose expectations have outrun their conditions. The best the book can manage quantitatively is a proxy — the male-female gap in "walks without children", which "can serve as an indirect indicator of the relative level of drunkenness" — and a Taganrog finding that among men with elementary education "25–30 per cent mentioned drinking" as customary when visiting, against 10–15 per cent of those with complete secondary education. There is no consumption figure, no clinical figure, no mention that the state held the monopoly on spirits and drew a large revenue from it. Alcohol is treated as a residue of the village, curable by education; not as a fact about the Soviet economy.
Housing is handled the same way. The book knows it matters — "even today the housing problem is connected with the most pressing problems of the daily routine" — and shows its effects precisely: workers in flats with full communal conveniences spend 25–35 per cent less time on kitchen work than those without. But every housing figure it gives is an input, never an outcome: millions of people rehoused, 580 million square metres to be built, 60 per cent of investment directed to services. Square metres per person — the number every Soviet citizen actually knew — does not appear. Divorce appears six times, always as a symptom of domestic imbalance, never as a rate. Religion appears only as something nineteenth-century workers did.
The income data are the most instructive limit, because the limit is built into the sample. Mean per capita income in the families studied was "somewhat over 60 rubles per month"; the top category is "more than 75 rubles per month per capita"; and the authors present the narrow spread as a result: "Our research also reflected the characteristically small differentiation, under socialism, of the levels of industrial workers' per capita income." That is true of urban industrial workers in seven plants. It is a finding about the sample, offered as a finding about socialism. Trotsky's complaint in chapter six of The Revolution Betrayed was that "The budget of the worker's family in the Soviet Union, unbelievable as this may be, is a magnitude incomparably more enigmatical for the investigator than in any capitalist country"; a chapter later, of another suppressed statistic, he added that "The modest bureaucracy orders the statistician to remain silent." Gordon and Klopov are the partial answer to the first half of that charge: here, at last, are the budgets. They are no answer at all to the second. The stratum whose consumption Trotsky was asking about — the officials with the apartments, the cars, the closed shops and, in his phrase, the domestic servants filed in the statistics as "working woman" — is not in this book, because it was never in the shop lists from which the sample was drawn. The one comparison that would have tested the claim of small differentiation is the one comparison a study of factory workers cannot make.
The sharpest silence, though, is announced rather than concealed, and a reader can find it in a footnote on page one of the classification scheme. The authors list the elements of the mode of life. Item III is "Participation in civic and political activity and management". Then: "The given forms of activity (I, II, III) and the corresponding time expenditures are not given in detail, since they are not a part of the daily routine". Politics is defined out of the subject. This is a 93,000-word study of what Soviet workers do after work which measures dominoes, television, lotto, gardening, visiting, walks, reading, evening classes, amateur choirs and the hours men spend not cooking, and does not measure one hour of political life — not a meeting, not a trade-union branch, not a Party cell, not a soviet. The book quotes Lenin on exactly this: "An illiterate person stands outside politics." It never asks whether the literate ones were inside it.
That is the boundary of the discipline, and it was not drawn by these two men. The reply to it is older than the book and, in its most exact form, is Soviet. In 1923 Trotsky ran precisely this kind of enquiry, publishing a questionnaire in an appendix to Problems of Everyday Life. It asked whether workers were showing an interest in the minor problems of daily life — politeness, propriety, elementary hygiene — whether "the unions play an important role in everyday life", "What do the workers do on Sunday and on holidays in general?", and whether the revolution had brought about "transformations in the family life of the workers as well as in their way of looking at the family". Intercontinental Press reprinted it, in Russell Block's translation from the 1976 French edition, on 9 October 1978, alongside Marx's workers' inquiry. The genre Gordon and Klopov were working in had been founded in the Soviet Union by a man whose name they could not print, and it had been founded with the political question inside it rather than fenced off from it. For the later argument, see the Fourth International's 1979 world congress "Resolution on Women's Liberation", published as a special supplement to Intercontinental Press/Inprecor in January 1980, which put the Soviet woman's day at four to seven hours of housework on top of an eight-hour job — a range that brackets this book's own averages, and was arrived at independently of it.
So: read Man After Work as the best kind of evidence, which is evidence its producers did not fully control. It is genuine social science, competently done, honestly bounded, and it contains the single fact that the Soviet state's own propaganda for women could not utter in the same year from the same address. It shows a discipline that had learned to count, working inside a system that had decided in advance which columns would be added up. The women who wrote down ten and eleven hours a week at the stove were telling the truth, and somebody in Moscow printed it. What nobody printed was the arithmetic that would have followed from asking the next question — who decided, and how the hours were distributed above the shop floor. The book stops where the sample stops, and the sample stops exactly where the bureaucracy begins.