Women, Children and Families after 1917

The Revolution and Women’s Liberation

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was accompanied by the most radical transformation of family law in any major country up to that point. Within months of seizing power, the new Soviet state had legalised divorce on demand, established civil marriage, granted women full legal equality with men, decriminalised homosexuality, and legalised abortion (in 1920). The state withdrew from the regulation of personal life in ways that no Western democracy had yet contemplated.

The ideological basis for these changes was the Marxist analysis of the bourgeois family as an institution of economic dependence and sexual oppression. Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), had argued that the monogamous family was fundamentally an institution for the transmission of property from father to son — and that under socialism, as private property was abolished, the family would “wither away.” The early Soviet state was attempting to put this theory into practice.

Legal Equality and Its Limits

The legal changes were genuinely radical. The 1918 Family Code established that women had equal rights in marriage, equal access to divorce, equal rights over children, and the right to retain their own surnames and property. Illegitimacy — the legal category that had punished children born outside marriage — was abolished. Church marriages lost all legal recognition; only civil registration counted.

But legal equality and social reality diverged sharply. Russia in 1917 was predominantly peasant, patriarchal and Orthodox. The village women who constituted the majority of Soviet women had little knowledge of their new legal rights and limited means to exercise them. Rural women continued to live under the authority of husbands and mothers-in-law in households where the new law barely penetrated.

In the cities, the situation was more complex. Urban working-class women had entered the workforce in large numbers during the war and continued to do so under the Soviets. The state set up communal kitchens, crèches and laundries to socialise domestic labour and free women for paid work. In practice, these facilities were chronically underfunded and insufficient — and the “double burden” of paid work plus domestic labour fell on women regardless.

The Zhenotdel

The Communist Party’s Women’s Department — the Zhenotdel — was established in 1919 to organise working-class and peasant women and draw them into political life. It ran literacy programmes, published women’s newspapers, trained women as local officials, and campaigned against domestic violence and child marriage. In Central Asia, it conducted a particularly radical campaign — the hujum — against the veil and seclusion of Muslim women, with consequences that were as traumatic as they were liberatory for many of those involved.

The Zhenotdel was abolished by Stalin in 1930, officially because the “woman question” had been solved. In reality, the reversal of many Bolshevik family policies in the 1930s — the recriminalisation of abortion in 1936, the introduction of financial incentives for large families, the renewed emphasis on the stable two-parent family — reflected Stalin’s need for population growth and social stability rather than the continued pursuit of liberation.

Why It Matters Now

The early Soviet experiment in family law raises enduring questions about the relationship between legal reform and social change. The Bolsheviks discovered that changing the law is relatively easy; changing the social and economic conditions that determine how people actually live is far harder. The Soviet experiment also illustrates the tension between women’s liberation as an end in itself and women’s liberation as a means to other ends — in this case, building socialism and expanding the workforce. When those ends diverged, it was liberation that was sacrificed.

Key Figures

• Alexandra Kollontai — The most prominent Bolshevik feminist theorist, who argued for free love, the socialisation of childcare, and women’s complete economic independence. Her ideas were increasingly marginalised under Stalin.
• Inessa Armand — First head of the Zhenotdel and close associate of Lenin, who died of cholera in 1920 before she could see the full consequences of the policies she had championed.
• Nadezhda Krupskaya — Lenin’s wife and a leading figure in Soviet education policy, who represented a more cautious approach to women’s liberation focused on education rather than sexual freedom.

Timeline

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