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.