Soviet Legislation on Women's Rights is a brief for the defence, filed in an argument the Soviet Union was conducting at the United Nations. It is a compilation of some hundred and fifty statutes, codes, decrees, ministerial orders and trade-union instructions, given almost entirely in extract and arranged under six headings: general provisions, maternity and child protection, women's rights in the family, labour rights, social insurance, and the international conventions the USSR had ratified. Four women jurists compiled it — A. M. Belyakova, Z. S. Beliayeva, N. N. Sheptulina, and Professor V. N. Tolkunova, who also wrote the preface and took Sections I and VI — and Vladimir Barnashov translated it. Tolkunova states the occasion in her first sentence: the 27th General Assembly of the United Nations had proclaimed 1975 International Women's Year. The book is what the Soviet state chose to put in evidence.
Date it before reading it. The spine says 1978 and the copyright page is more candid than most in this series: the Russian original is © Юридическая литература 1975, and the English is a translation "from a revised and enlarged Russian edition." So the book was conceived for International Women's Year and then brought forward — the Brezhnev Constitution of 1977 stands at the head of Section I, and the latest instruments in the collection are the law on elections to the Supreme Soviet of 6 July 1978 and a decision of the Council of Ministers of 25 April 1978 on women's working conditions. What was compiled for one occasion has been re-dressed for the Decade for Women that the UN declared to 1985, and Tolkunova says so: the recommendations "are valid for the decade ending 1985 since the United Nations approved the plan of world action for equality of women."
The commission is stated as plainly. The preface's second authority, after the UN, is the Women's International Democratic Federation, the Soviet-aligned international whose declarations it quotes at length; its third is the conference of the Communist Parties of the European capitalist countries held in Rome on 15–17 November 1974, whose agenda item was "The Situation of Women in Capitalist Countries" and whose declaration is quoted for the proposition that "only socialism can create real and reliable conditions for equality, completely abolish discrimination for all time, and give every woman opportunities to fully develop her capabilities." This is a book addressed outward, to Western communists, to the women's movement then at its height in the capitalist countries, and to the non-aligned states. Its argument is not made in prose. It is made by the sheer weight of statute: here is the paper, inspect it.
Much of that paper describes something real, and a reader told otherwise would be badly served. The Soviet Union by the late 1970s had built provision for working mothers that most wealthy capitalist states had not: fifty-six days of paid leave before confinement and fifty-six after, extended for complicated births; a job protected by law during that leave and a prohibition on dismissing a pregnant worker or a mother of an infant; paid intervals for nursing counted as working time; free medical care; a network of creches, kindergartens and infant homes with the state carrying most of the cost; allowances to large families and to unmarried mothers; old-age pensions at fifty-five, and earlier for mothers of five. The Constitution of 1977 states the principle without hedging — "Women and men have equal rights in the USSR" — and Article 35 goes on to name the machinery, down to "gradual reduction of working time for mothers with small children." The preface's figures, whatever their provenance, describe a society that had done something no other had: "About as many as 93 per cent of all able-bodied Soviet women are now exercising their right to work," half the labour force, fifty-nine per cent of those with higher and specialised secondary education. Its remark that "This Collection has been compiled by women legal scholars" is not a boast a comparable Western ministry could have made in 1978.
The volume is also, simply as a document, worth having. Compilations of Soviet labour and family law in English are rare, and this one prints the texts — the underground-work prohibitions, the weight limits, the pension schedules, the Supreme Court's instructions to the lower courts on marriage and family cases — where an English-language reader would otherwise have only commentary. Historians of Soviet social policy can use it as evidence whatever they think of its framing. That is worth saying before the framing is examined, because the framing is where the book fails.
The test this series applies is not whether the achievements were real but whether the law on the page describes the practice, and whether the categories the book uses could ever be turned on the state that wrote them. A collection of statutes is unusually good evidence on the second question, because what has been left out of an extract can be counted.
Begin with the collection's own chronology. This is a book of Soviet legislation on women's rights whose earliest instrument is a resolution of the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Labour of 4 March 1921 on permissible loads, and whose earliest substantive act is a 1931 decision on the working conditions of women tractor-drivers. The years 1917, 1918, 1920 and 1926 do not appear in its 216 pages. The decrees of December 1917 that abolished ecclesiastical marriage and made divorce available on demand; the Family Code of 1918; the decree of 1920 that made Soviet Russia the first state in the world to legalise abortion on request; the Code of 1926 — the legislation that actually earned the claim Lenin is quoted making, that in two years more had been done "to emancipate woman" than in 130 years by all the enlightened republics together — are absent from a collection compiled to prove that claim. Lenin's 1919 sentence is quoted; what he was describing is not printed. The book leaps from him to the five-year plans.
The reason for the gap is on page 43, and the book takes considerable care not to say so. Section II prints a decree "On Abolishing the Prohibition of Abortions," of 23 November 1955. It gives the repeal and not the thing repealed. The preamble is a small masterpiece of the passive voice: the state's measures to encourage maternity and "the constant growth of the consciousness and culture of women" now "make it possible at present to end the legislative prohibition of abortions." No date is given for that prohibition; no organ is named as having enacted it; the nineteen years it ran are not mentioned, nor are the deaths that made the repeal urgent, though the decree glances at them in noting the "great harm caused to the health of women by abortions performed outside of medical establishments and very often by unqualified persons." Look at the numbering. The extract as printed begins at clause 2. Clause 1 — the operative clause, which repealed the law of 27 June 1936 by name and date — is precisely what the editors cut. The prohibition enters this book only as a grammatical subject with no author, and leaves it repealed by a state that is never identified as the state that imposed it.
That law was answered when it was passed. Trotsky devoted a section of The Revolution Betrayed (1936) to it, and the passage is the direct reply to the book in your hands. He began where the collection begins, by conceding the achievement: "The October revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to woman," giving her legal equality and attempting, through creches, kindergartens, communal dining rooms and laundries, "a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters." Then he explained the retreat without excusing it. "Society proved too poor and little cultured"; the resources did not match the plans; "the actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of 'generalized want.'" But poverty explained only part of it, because the retreat went "infinitely farther than the iron economic necessity demands," and what carried it further was "the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations." He recorded the drafting of the abortion law, its brief pretence of public consultation, and its enactment: the discussion "was cut off as suddenly as it had been announced, and on June 27th the Central Executive Committee converted the shameful draft into a thrice shameful law." He named what the law had taken away — the right to abortion, "in conditions of want and family distress ... one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights" — and predicted who would be caught by it: "working women, servants, peasant wives, who find it hard to conceal their troubles," while the wives of the ruling stratum would go on doing what they found necessary. Two years later, in "Twenty Years of Stalinist Degeneration" (1938), reprinted in Fourth International in 1945, he compressed the whole argument into a sentence this collection could serve as an exhibit for: "The position of woman is the most graphic and telling indicator for evaluating a social regime and state policy." The bureaucracy, he wrote there, had begun "singing panegyrics to the family supper and the family laundry, that is the household slavery of woman," and had "restored criminal punishment for abortions, officially returning women to the status of pack animals."
That the prediction held is on the record in the same journal. In June 1945 Fourth International printed an interview with a Soviet citizen who reported plainly what the ban had produced: "The prohibition of abortions resulted in aggravating the material hardships and increasing the number of children. In addition, the growth of secret abortions led to higher mortality rates." The 1955 decree conceded as much in its own euphemism, ten years later.
The second erasure is larger, and this time the book prints its consequence without printing its cause. Section II gives the decree of 8 July 1944 under its full and generous title — on increased assistance to pregnant women, mothers of several children and unmarried mothers, on greater protection of mother and child, and on the establishment of the Mother-Heroine title, the Maternal Glory Order and the Maternity Medal. The extract opens on a sentence of pure emollience: "Care for children and mothers and for consolidation of the family has always been one of the most important tasks of the Soviet state." Then come the grants, the medals, the regulations for each class of decoration. Follow the numbering again: it runs 1, 2, 3, 4, then jumps to 9, then to 11. What has been cut from a decree presented as the charter of Soviet motherhood is the rest of the decree — the sharp rise in the tax on citizens with few children or none; the withdrawal of legal recognition from unregistered marriage; the conversion of divorce into a two-stage public court proceeding with fees; and, above all, the provision that an unmarried mother could no longer bring an action to establish the father's paternity or claim maintenance from him. The state allowance the book prints so approvingly was the substitute for the father. The collection reproduces the compensation and suppresses the deprivation it compensated for.
You can watch the seam from inside the book. Section III prints the Supreme Court's instructions of 4 December 1969 on the Fundamentals of marriage and family legislation, and there, in a paragraph of dry procedure, the courts are told they "may not accept declarations" on "the establishment of paternity in respect of children born before 1 October 1968." A later paragraph confirms the mirror image: a suit to establish paternity may be brought at any time in respect of a child born after that date. The 1968 Fundamentals restored what 1944 had taken, and restored it only going forward. Every child born to an unmarried mother in the Soviet Union between 1944 and October 1968 — the war years and the two decades after, when the men were dead and the sex ratio was catastrophic — was left permanently fatherless in law, with no claim on the father and no way of acquiring one. The rule is printed here. The reason for the rule is not.
The third thing to read carefully is what the book means by protection. Section IV, the longest in the collection, is genuinely a monument to labour regulation: night work and overtime barred for pregnant women and mothers of infants, transfer to lighter work at retained earnings, weight limits, sanitary rules. It is also a sustained legal machinery for sorting work by sex. Here is the 1957 decision "that it be considered necessary to discontinue the employment of women's labour on underground jobs," with its schedule of exceptions and its instruction to local Soviets to place the dismissed women in "communal services, trade, public catering, public utilities." Here is a list, approved in 1969 by four separate authorities, of "Jobs and Mechanisms Where Predominantly Female Labour Is Recommended" — seed grading, potato sorting, flax pulling, grapevine grafting. And here, in the schedule of diseases and physical defects which exclude women from strenuous manual work, is a clinical list that runs through cardiovascular disease, tuberculosis and neuroses and then, in the same enumeration and without a change of register, catalogues among the disqualifying conditions of the female organism "normal pregnancy."
The preface does not conceal the principle; it states it with satisfaction. The first of the four lines Soviet law has "invariably pursued" is "the consistent facilitation of working conditions for women, and providing them with relatively easier jobs," and the whole is summarised in a sentence worth setting beside Article 35: Soviet law "establishes a lower quantity of labour for women as compared with men, with equal pay." Real protection and permanent segregation are the same statutes read from two sides, and the book cannot see the second side, because the biological premise — the "anatomic and physiological features of the female organism" and "the social role of women as conditioned by such features" — is treated as settled fact rather than as the thing under argument.
Which brings up the silence that a 216-page collection on the rights of women makes most audible. There is not one clause in it about the division of labour in the home. The plan of 1917 had been to abolish that labour by socialising it; Trotsky's chapter is largely about why the attempt failed, and about how the collective farm, by forcing the family back on its private plot, came to "lay a double burden upon woman." By 1978 the second shift is no longer a problem to be legislated away but the fixed condition around which everything else is scheduled — hence the shortened hours, the priority holidays, the "relatively easier jobs," and the preface's own formulation of what Soviet law is for: it is "humane and democratic, helping woman to combine work in industry with child-bearing." Every provision in Section IV assumes that combining them is her task. Nothing anywhere in the volume asks it of anyone else.
The book's categories, finally, run in one direction only. Discrimination is real and named — in the capitalist countries, where women "are the first to suffer from recessions and crises," and where the Rome declaration locates the contradiction; International Women's Year is for "the abolition of discrimination against women in countries where it still exists." That last clause does the work of the whole volume. Compliance is likewise settled in advance: the ILO conventions printed in Section VI "are fully observed in the Soviet Union," and "Soviet legislation on the preferential rights of women is strictly observed." The evidence offered for observance is the legislation itself. Even the preface's own numbers describe an ascent that stops: half of those in legal work, half of people's assessors, then 40 per cent of lawyers, 32.2 per cent of people's judges, every fifth prosecutor and investigator — a pyramid whose apex is nowhere in the book, and which no Soviet reader in 1978 needed a foreign critic to complete for her.
The answer was given at the time, in the place the book was written for. When the UN's International Women's Year conference met in Mexico City in June 1975, Intercontinental Press covered it closely. Caroline Lund's report of 14 July 1975 credited the conference as "testimony to the growing influence of the international struggle for women's rights," noted that the World Plan of Action called for equal pay, for socially organised services to lighten work in the home, and — a demand that lands precisely on the decree of 1944 — for equal rights for unmarried mothers and their children, and recorded what the delegations of the workers' states did with the opportunity: they "did nothing to clarify the issue or to explain the stake of women in the fight for a socialist revolution," concentrating instead on attacking each other "and attempting to cover up for the gross inequality that women still face in those countries despite the great gains brought about the revolutions." A week earlier the same journal had printed, from Soviet women political prisoners, an appeal to the UN that opens with a sentence no compilation could answer: "1975, International Women's Year, began on December 12, 1974, in the camp for women political prisoners."
Soviet Legislation on Women's Rights should be read, then, as two documents bound together. It is a reliable record of a real body of law, much of it advanced, some of it still unmatched, which made the working lives of tens of millions of women materially better and which no honest account can wave away. And it is an exhibit in the case Trotsky opened in 1936: that a state may enact magnanimous law and stand on it as proof, while the same statutes carry the marks of everything it has taken back. The repeal is printed and the prohibition is not. The allowance is printed and the abolished paternity suit is not. The protection is printed and the segregation it enforces is not named. What the collection offers as its evidence is, read closely, the record of its own retreats — which is why it is worth reprinting, and why it cannot be believed on the question it was compiled to settle.