The government was fully aware that women constituted a good portion …show more content…
The USSR’s optimal goal was to reach communism, and that meant that women had to be seen as equals. In the early years of the Soviet Union, Lenin regarded eliminating the burdens of running a household as the real emancipation of women. The author claims that it did come to be true, because of the strong opposition men had against it, but in the 1960s even though there was still opposition, the government sought to improve the conditions for women. The problem was that many regarded improvement for women as an act of aggression against the …show more content…
After the Revolution the government sought to abolish the family as an economic cell, but soon after the Soviet system continued the traditional, patriarchal exploitation of women and the family as the necessary means of controlling the citizens. The author makes it clear that indeed there has been changed for women within the USSR, but at the end the it was never the government’s intention to improve women’s role, instead a new form of patriarchy was established through the family aparatus.
If there was anything the USSR government was proud of was their supposed equality within their society. After all, Marxist ideology dictated that for a communist state to exists there shall be a classless society, where no one is better than anyone else. Authors Marjorie Wall Bingham and Susan Hill Gross, argue in their book Women in the USSR that there was never such thing as equality for women in the Soviet Union, and the government was aware of the double shift women had to endure in the