The New Soviet Woman Between Factory and Home: Urban Domesticity, Gender and Production, 1921-1941.

The project extends upon my interests I pursued in my undergraduate dissertation on abortion and pronatalist policies between 1917 and 1938 in Soviet Russia, surveying the lived experience of ordinary women in this period regarding their roles as mothers under the direction of the Soviet state. My dissertation examined the Soviet regime's attempts to reconstruct the life of a young mother as part of the state's drive to utilise a previously untapped source of labour in Soviet women. Additionally, it surveyed the state's attempt to restructure and modernise the normative role of women in order to reshape their everyday lives to suit the Soviet-style communist experiment. The PhD project will similarly reflect the state's cultural values and practical objectives regarding the daily lives of Soviet women within their domestic and socioeconomic roles. My research over the past eighteen months acquainted me with the key scholarship and primary sources on the topic, I became fascinated by the ongoing issue of the 'double burden' of Soviet mothers, that had been exacerbated by a state ideologically preoccupied with equality and equal duties for all, but in fact increasing the measure of women's productive and reproductive roles within the communist society and multiplying the troubles of the 'double burden'.
The PhD project will focus on early Soviet attitudes and policies towards female labour in urban areas to understand more precisely the origins of the 'double burden', this will enable the project to focus on the impact of changing norms, policies and practices on urban women's experiences of domestic life and work. 'Labour', or work, as a concept is fundamental in Marxism: labour is a source of value and determines an individual's social identity and self-worth (Frayssé, 2014). However, in the new Bolshevik state there was no real consensus on what constituted 'women's work', nor on the true value of female labour. This reflected the deeper state-level anxieties and confusions on the role and value of women domestically and in the labour force within a post-revolutionary society. The project will ask how Soviet officials, politicians, social scientists and feminist activists understood female labour, their varying conceptions and how they evaluated the female contribution to the economy; how perceptions of women's productive activities in the home and industry informed socioeconomic policy and practice; how women's roles in the factory and home evolved during the proposed decades of study; and how women experienced and negotiated these changes in their working lives. Lastly, the project will consider the ways in which women managed their time; their perceptions of gender inequality; the physical experience of labour; and interrelations between women's work, wages and their sense of status or self. The broad period of analysis in this project allows for the thesis to explore the debates on the nature and value of women's work among diverse interest groups in the mid-twenties; the impact of total socioeconomic mobilisation during industrialisation; and the Stalinist shift to 'conservative' attitudes and policies in the late 1930s.
This research will elucidate on vital themes in Russian and East European Area Studies, including the relationship between ideology and economic production, gender identities and relations, intersections between 'public' and 'private' life and the lived experiences of women. However, it will also contribute to the present-day discourse on the female experience of the workplace, especially those dominated (previously or presently) by men, and the redesigning of policies and practices to promote gender equality in domestic and work life.