Reading this article:
While women in capitalist countries were struggling for the most basic rights, such as the right to vote, the transitional workers’ state created by the Russian Revolution implemented measures to promote socialized housework. This was one of the fundamental pillars of the Bolsheviks’ policy for female emancipation aimed at ending women’s isolation in the home and promoting their inclusion in public and political life.1 This socialization policy was never fully realized because of the breakout of the civil war and severe economic crisis. The policy was later crushed by Stalinism, which promoted traditional gender roles.
I've read a couple posts on here recently that claim that "Stalinism" is an imaginary phenomenon made-up by people who think international blockades, outright military aggression, and the external sponsoring of internal destabilisation and plots never happen in the real world (VOTE!) and political violence has no place in politics and blah blah blah. But I know the Soviets got the first woman into space so I started to wonder if the gender roles from the article was accurate.
Is it true what the article said about gender roles, especially during Stalin's time?
The article is interesting, though, and it's topic can be roughly summed up with this paragraph:
Capitalism relegates women to unpaid reproductive labor, although today it would be more correct to say that for the vast majority of women, it overburdens them with it. Capitalism relies on these unpaid tasks for the reproduction of labor power, although no surplus value is extracted from this activity since it does not generate exchange value (i.e., it cannot be exchanged on the market). Reproductive labor is indispensable, although it does not generate value or surplus value. According to the logic of capital, it is thus unproductive labor.
It is factually true that after the early success of the Bolsheviks, the USSR under Stalin re-criminalized homosexuality, re-criminalized abortion, promoted traditional family reproduction (including awarding medals to women who bore seven or more children), and sought to define the new Soviet man and the new Soviet woman along lines that were a return to more traditional understandings of the family, as opposed to early Bolshevik desires to disestablish the bourgeois arrangement of the family unit.
The article mentions the economic crisis, and it is also a historical fact that the control of reproductive labour and sexual reproduction, and the assignment of rigid gender roles and family dynamics, go hand in hand with crises of capital. When there is economic downturn, there has been, historically, rises in traditional sentiment regarding gender, increases in restrictive policies regarding the autonomy of women's bodies, and a reduction in access to contraceptives and abortives. This is a mechanism to ensure the supply of labour, and can be seen in modern-day upsurges in abortion restriction, revocation of contraceptive education, and a renewal of attacks on gender and sexual deviance.
Whether this was a necessary turn, or an egregious backslide, will depend on the interpreter's understanding of the oppression of women, the dangers of capitalist reassertion over the USSR, and the ultimate failure of the USSR as a polity.