The foreword is signed by Valentina Nikolayeva-Tereshkova, Chairman of the Soviet Women's Committee and the first woman to go into space, and it states the commission plainly: "Women Today is an extremely topical work, appearing as it does in 1975, which has been declared by the UN General Assembly to be International Women's Year." A World Conference was to meet in Mexico City that summer and a rival congress in Berlin that October, organised by the Women's International Democratic Federation, the Soviet-aligned international whose activities occupy the volume's final hundred pages. Progress Publishers needed an English-language statement of the Soviet case, ready for delegates, and it got one.
The book is not the work of a single apparatus hack. Ten women are named on the title page — Balakhovskaya, Berezhnaya, Blinova, Gilevskaya, Khalfina, Novikova, Shibarina, Smirnova, Tatarinova, Yefimova — with N. A. Kovalsky as chief editor and Blinova as co-editor. The chapters on the capitalist and developing countries read like the work of people who had done the reading: ILO conventions cited correctly, wage differentials by country, nursery provision in Italy and West Germany, the difficulty of water-carrying for village women in Laos and Vietnam.
The structure is a four-part comparison: women in the USSR, in the other socialist countries, in the developed capitalist countries, in the developing world. The comparison is the argument, and it is worth taking seriously, because in 1975 much of it was true.
The account of the first Soviet decrees is accurate and should not be grudged. The book lists them: the eight-hour-day decree of 29 October (11 November) 1917 prohibiting night work for women; social security regulations of 14 (27) November providing maternity benefit for eight weeks before and after the birth; a decree on rates of pay upholding equal remuneration for equal work; and, on "December 18 (31), 1917", "a decree on civil marriage giving men and women equal rights in marriage and in the family". The RSFSR Constitution of July 1918 wrote women's equality into fundamental law. Lenin's boast, which the book quotes, was justified: "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."
The material record the book sets out for 1975 is also, in outline, real. Women were 51 per cent of workers and office employees in 1974, against 46 per cent in 1955, and 59 per cent of specialists with higher or specialised secondary education: "31 per cent of all Soviet engineers", "64 per cent of its economists", and — the figures that most struck Western readers — "70 per cent of its doctors" and "71 per cent of its teachers". Paid maternity leave ran to 112 calendar days with the job held open for a further unpaid year. Some 11 million children were in creches and nursery schools in 1974, at parental contributions capped at 12 roubles 50 kopeks a month and free for many large families. Medical care, including confinement, was free. Set against the pre-revolutionary baseline the book gives — "A mere 17 per cent of all women were literate", 43 per cent of children dead before five, "A woman's average life expectancy was 33 years (now 74)" — the transformation was among the largest improvements in the condition of women recorded anywhere in the twentieth century. A British or American woman reading this in 1975 had no equivalent to most of it. The Soviet claim to have delivered materially for women was not a lie, and an introduction that pretended otherwise would be worthless.
The book is also fairer to the Western women's movement than its own footnotes suggest. An early note defines feminism as "a bourgeois women's movement aiming to provide women with equal rights with men within the framework of a capitalist state" — the standard dismissal. Yet the survey chapter reports without sneering that "In 1968 the Women's Liberation Movement, representing a coalition of ideologically distinct groups, came into existence in the USA", correctly identifies the National Organisation for Women, founded 1966, as its largest component, and records that it "initiated the mass strike by women across the country which took place on August 26, 1970". The date and character of the Women's Strike for Equality are right. Somebody in Moscow was reading the American press attentively and reporting it honestly.
Now the silences, which are neither accidental nor small.
The Bolshevik record on women between 1917 and the mid-1920s was the most advanced in the world, and went further than this book admits. In November 1920 Soviet Russia became the first state anywhere to legalise abortion on request, performed free in state hospitals. The word "abortion" does not appear in this book. Not once, in eighty thousand words on the status of women across four continents. Neither does "contraception", "birth control" or "family planning". In 1975 abortion was legal in the USSR — re-legalised in 1955 — and, in the near-total absence of modern contraceptives, was the principal method by which Soviet women limited their families, at rates among the highest ever recorded. The single most consequential fact about Soviet women's reproductive lives is absent from the Soviet book about Soviet women.
It is absent because saying it would require explaining the gap. Abortion was recriminalised by decree on 27 June 1936 and remained a crime for nineteen years. The same period saw divorce made progressively difficult and expensive, culminating in the family edict of July 1944, which stripped unregistered marriages of legal standing and abolished paternity suits. This was a deliberate reversal of the family policy of the revolution's first decade, and the single most important thing that happened to Soviet women between 1917 and 1975.
Watch how the book handles the year. The narrative runs from the women's sections of 1919, through the Central Asian khujum of the 1920s, through the women's press, and then: "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 is quoted entire, guaranteeing equal rights, maternity leave with full pay and a wide network of nurseries. The chapter moves straight on to the number of women engineers by 1941. Nineteen thirty-six is in the book. It is in the book as good news.
The only other appearance of the year is a jab at somebody else: Irène Joliot-Curie, offered a post in the French Popular Front government in 1936, "had to present a written consent from her husband in order to occupy it". The humiliation was real. But a book that can find the family law of the Third Republic in 1936 and cannot find the family law of the USSR in 1936 is not reporting. It is selecting.
Divorce makes the pattern unmistakable. The word appears thirty-seven times in the chapter on the capitalist countries and twice in the chapter on the developing world. In the chapter on socialist society, which covers the USSR and eight other states across more than a hundred pages, it appears zero times. A book that opens by celebrating the Bolsheviks for making divorce freely available cannot bring itself to mention divorce in a socialist country — at a moment when the Soviet divorce rate was among the highest in the world. Other people's marriage law is a subject. Ours is not.
The book does discuss the Zhenotdel. It never uses the word. What it gives is "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" — the founding date is right — followed by an accurate, rather warm description of what they did: initiated government decrees, checked enforcement of protective legislation, intervened in the state budget, and ran the delegate system under which working women were elected for a year and assigned to a Soviet institution for practical training. All true — a remarkable institution, without parallel before or since.
Then the passage simply stops, and the narrative continues into the 1930s as though the sections had quietly become something else. They did not. The Zhenotdel was abolished in January 1930, in a Party reorganisation justified on the ground that the woman question had been solved. Its abolition is not mentioned, dated or explained. A reader has no way of knowing that the body the book praises had been shut down forty-five years before the book was printed.
The women who ran it fare no better. Inessa Armand, its first director, and Alexandra Kollontai, its second, appear exactly once each — inside a single sentence, in a list of eleven names, as part of "a whole galaxy of outstanding professional women revolutionaries": "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". Three of the Zhenotdel's directors are in that list — Armand, Kollontai and Smidovich — and not one is connected to it. Kollontai — the first woman in modern history to hold ministerial office, People's Commissar for Social Welfare from October 1917, the most original Marxist writer on sexual and family relations the revolution produced, and a leader of the Workers' Opposition in 1921 before she was removed to a diplomatic career abroad — is a name in an undifferentiated string. This is a book about women's emancipation that cannot describe its own most important theorist of it, because to describe her would raise the question of what happened to her.
The same evasion covers the khujum, the campaign against the veil in Central Asia. Women "threw off their yashmaks and horsehair nets—the symbols of slavery—and burnt them on bonfires", and "The battle for a new way of life for women was a hard one and was accompanied by many sacrifices." The sacrifices were unveiled women murdered by male relatives and neighbours, in numbers historians place in the thousands for Uzbekistan alone in 1927–28. That the sentence appears at all is to the authors' credit; that it does not say who died or at whose hands is the book's method in miniature. And of collectivisation the volume says only that it "enabled women to occupy an equal place alongside men in agricultural production" — a sentence written about the years in which the countryside starved.
Soviet sociology in the 1960s and 1970s did study domestic labour seriously; the USSR took part in the multinational time-budget research of the mid-1960s, and the results showed what everyone knew, that women in full-time employment carried the household as well.
This book knows the concept and quarantines it. The phrase "twofold burden" occurs once — "This twofold burden results in an early loss of working capacity among women" — and it is about Italy, England, West Germany and Spain. The "double burden" occurs once more, again in the capitalist chapter, describing women forced by inadequate services to carry "the double burden of professional employment and housework preventing them from taking an active part in social and political life" (the scan reads "doxible"). In the entire chapter on socialist society, the word "burden" is used once, of the load Soviet women carried during the Second World War. The double shift is diagnosed as a disease of capitalism.
What the USSR gets instead is infrastructure: canteens serving 80 million people a day, laundries and dry cleaners, flats with gas and central heating, "labour-saving gadgets". The state lightens women's housework. Who does it is not asked.
There is one crack, worth marking because it shows what these authors could see. In the section on the other socialist countries, the book concedes that "in other families, however, old prejudices remain: domestic chores are assumed to be the exclusive sphere of women, below the dignity of the husband" (the scan has "to he"), and endorses equal sharing of domestic work. That is an honest sentence. It is placed at a safe geographical distance, framed as a survival of the past, and no comparable sentence is permitted about the Soviet Union.
The section on women and state administration is the most instructive in the volume, and the reason is arithmetic. It reports that women were 31.3 per cent of deputies to the USSR Supreme Soviet and 48.1 per cent of deputies to local government bodies; 34 per cent of people's judges; chairmen of the presidiums of the Supreme Soviets in five autonomous republics. It concludes that "women occupy 63 per cent of all posts in the various bodies of state administration and economic management" — "clear evidence of the genuine democracy of socialist society".
The Supreme Soviet did not govern; it met for a few days a year to ratify. Power lay with the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and the Politburo is not mentioned in this book — not in the section on Soviet state administration, not anywhere in the discussion of the USSR. In 1975 it had no women on it, and had had none since Ekaterina Furtseva was dropped in 1961. She remains the only woman ever to have sat on it as a full member. She had died the previous October, and is not named here either.
Instead the section names two women. Nina Popova heads the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies; Tereshkova, "the first, and as yet the only, woman cosmonaut", chairs the Soviet Women's Committee. Both sit on the Central Committee; both preside over bodies whose function is representation abroad rather than decision at home. Those are the summits the book can point to.
The single most revealing sentence in the volume is about Bulgaria: the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party "passed a resolution on March 6, 1973" entitled "On Increasing the Part Played by Women in Constructing an Advanced Socialist Society". A body of men resolved that women should participate more. The book prints it as an achievement and does not notice.
Then set the book's own figures side by side. Women were 51 per cent of workers and office employees. They were, on the volume's own numbers, over three million of the CPSU's 15 million members — one in five. They were zero per cent of the Politburo. The gradient runs steeply downwards from the shop floor to the room where things were decided, and the apologetic weight of the chapter rests on stopping the count before it reaches the top.
The socialist case for women's emancipation does not depend on this book being right, and the anti-Stalinist left made the argument at the time.
Trotsky answered the 1936 reversal in the year it happened. The Revolution Betrayed, written in exile that spring and summer, devotes its seventh chapter, "Family, Youth and Culture", to exactly this: that the recriminalisation of abortion and the rehabilitation of the family were not moral corrections but the confession of a bureaucracy which had failed to build the laundries, canteens and nurseries that alone could have replaced the household, and chose to restore the household instead. It remains the indispensable text on why 1936 happened, and it was written without hindsight.
The Fourth International kept at it. In Intercontinental Press of 6 March 1978 ("Women Around World Raise Demand for Equal Rights", pp. 260–262), its United Secretariat published an International Women's Day statement tracing the day to the Copenhagen Congress of Socialist Women in 1910 and the Petrograd textile workers of 1917, and observing that in the Soviet Union and the other bureaucratised workers' states March 8 had degenerated into ritual celebration until the women's liberation wave of the late 1960s gave it content again. That is the precise counter-argument to the volume in your hands, published three years after it; the statement of 18 March 1979 ("Working Women of the World Begin to Break Their Chains", pp. 292–294) carried the case further. Earlier, on 20 March 1972 (p. 312), the same body had backed the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition's campaign for abortion as a woman's right to choose — the demand this book cannot name. In November 1979 the Fourth International's world congress adopted a full programmatic resolution, "Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women's Liberation" (reported in Intercontinental Press, 27 November 1979, p. 1170). For the argument against Stalinism specifically, see Michel Pablo's "The Liberation of Women", Fourth International no. 11, pp. 21–27.
The case against Women Today is not that the gains it describes were fake. They were real, they were large, and they were won by a revolution. It is that they were handed down rather than taken, and what is handed down can be taken back. The women of 1919 had the Zhenotdel, legal abortion, divorce for the asking, and an organised political existence of their own inside the ruling party. They lost all four — without a vote, without a debate anyone was allowed to report, and without the means to resist, because the political power that would have let them defend those gains had already been taken from the working class as a whole. That is what 1936 proves, and it is why this book, which had every reason to mention the year, mentions it only to praise a constitution.
Read it, then, as evidence rather than history: an accurate record of what Soviet women had by 1975 — the clinics, the creches, the degrees, the 70 per cent of doctors — and an equally accurate record of what could not be said about how they got it, what had been taken from them on the way, and who was permitted to decide. The book closes with a sentence its authors meant and the state that commissioned it did not: "The full liberation of women and the cause of socialism are inseparable." They were right. That is the standard by which the rest of the volume has to be judged.