Women and the family under Stalin

Question 1

What did the social problems and family break-ups that followed the 1918 Family Code lead to?

Answer 1

The Great Retreat (1936)

Question 2

What did the Great Retreat aim to do?

Answer 2

Restore the importance of the traditional family and the status of marriage

Question 3

What policies were introduced as part of the Great Retreat?

Answer 3

• Made abortion illegal
• Made divorce harder to obtain (the price for divorce increased from 4 to 50 roubles + court)

Question 4

What was Stalin’s key aim?

Answer 4

Stalin’s key aim was to increase birth rates and cut divorce rates

Question 5

Stalin’s key aim was to increase birth rates and cut divorce rates. To achieve this, significant legal changes were introduced in 1936 - what were these?

Answer 5

• Abortion was criminalised unless the life of the pregnant woman was in danger
• Contraception was banned
• Male homosexuality was criminalised. Consensual sex between men was punishable by five years in a labour camp
• Lesbianism was treated as a “disease”. Lesbian women could be subject to hypnotherapy in an attempt to “cure” them of their “unnatural” desires
• Sex outside of marriage was stigmatised. Collective farm managers carried out “medical virginity checks” on young women to enforce sexual abstinence
• Divorce was made expensive and difficult to obtain. A first divorce cost approximately one week’s wages; subsequent divorces were more expensive

Question 6

Following divorce, fathers were required to pay a minimum of…

Answer 6

1/3 of their income to their former wives to support their children and 60 per cent of their salary if they left 3 or more children

Question 7

What would happen if a child got introuble?

Answer 7

Their parents would have to pay a fine

Question 8

What per cent of University engineering majors were women by 1940?

Answer 8

40 per cent

Question 9

What did the Family Edict of 1944 do?

Answer 9

• Gave the honorary title of mother heroine to women who could produce the most babies
• Extended maternity leave
• Increased family allowances even to unmarried mothers

Question 10

Fighting for the motherland - By 1945, how many women served in combat roles?

Answer 10

800,000 women

Question 11

Stalin adopted ____ policies

Answer 11

pronatalist

Question 12

Stalin adopted a pronatalist policy of offering financial incentives for women to have children - provide evidence to support this claim

Answer 12

Women with seven children received 2000 roubles a year for five years. This figure increased to 5000 roubles for mothers with eleven children. These policies were backed up by a media campaign which exposed unfaithful men. For example, the trades union newspaper “Trud” regularly carried stories about men who abandoned themselves to lives of “wildness, degeneracy and baseness”

Question 13

In addition to working on collective farms or in Soviet industry, women were expected to perform essential family labour - provide evidence for this claim

Answer 13

On average, women spent five times longer on their domestic responsibilities than men during the 1930s