Women and the Family Under Stalin Flashcards
What did the social problems and family break-ups that followed the 1918 Family Code lead to?
The Great Retreat (1936)
What did the Great Retreat aim to do?
Restore the importance of the traditional family and the status of marriage
What policies were introduced as part of the Great Retreat?
- Made abortion illegal
- Made divorce harder to obtain (the price for divorce increased from 4 to 50 roubles + court)
What was Stalin’s key aim?
To increase birth rates and cut divorce rates
Significant legal changes were introduced in 1936 - what were these?
- 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
Following divorce, what were fathers required to pay a minimum of?
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
What would happen if a child got in trouble?
Their parents would have to pay a fine
What per cent of University engineering majors were women by 1940?
40 per cent
What did the Family Edict of 1944 do?
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
Fighting for the motherland - how many women served in combat roles by 1945?
800K women
What kind of policies did Stalin adopt?
Pronatalist
What pronatalist policy did Stalin adopt?
Stalin adopted a pronatalist policy of offering financial incentives for women to have children
Stalin adopted a pronatalist policy of offering financial incentives for women to have children - provide evidence to support this claim
Women with seven children received 2000 roubles a year for five years. This figure increased to 5000 roubles for mothers with eleven children.
What was the pronatalist policy Stalin implemented backed up by?
A media campaign which exposed unfaithful men
What is an example of the pronatalist media campaign?
The trades union newspaper “Trud” regularly carried stories about men who abandoned themselves to lives of “wildness, degeneracy and baseness”
