Research Catalog

Title

Women in Soviet society : equality, development, and social change / Gail Warshofsky Lapidus.

Author

Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky.

Publication

Berkeley : University of California Press, ©1978.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 381 pages; 25 cm

Summary

"From the earliest years of the Soviet regime, deliberate transformation of the role of women in economic, political, and family life aimed at incorporating female mobilization into a larger strategy of national development. Addressing a neglected problem in the literature on modernization, the author brings an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the motivations, mechanisms, and consequences of the official Soviet commitment to female liberation, and its implications for the role of women in Soviet society today. She argues that Soviet policy was shaped less by the individualistic and libertarian concerns of nineteenth-century feminism or Marxism than by a strategy of modernization in which the transformation of women's roles was perceived by the Soviet leadership as the means of tapping a major economic and political resource. Bringing together the available data, the author analyzes the scope and limits of sexual equality in the Soviet system, and at the same time places the Soviet pattern in a broader historical and comparative perspective."--Jacket.

Subject

• Börngen, ..
• Sovetskaja Associacija Meždunarodnogo Prava
• Women > Soviet Union > Social conditions
• Women's rights > Soviet Union
• Sex role
• sex role
• Sex role
• Women > Social conditions
• Women's rights
• Soziale Stellung
• Frau
• Soviet Union
• Sowjetunion

Genre/Form

History

Note

• Includes index.

Bibliography (note)

• Bibliography: p. 347-361.

Contents

• Introduction: -- The politics of equality and the Soviet model: -- Sexual equality and Soviet policy: the problem -- The concerns of this study -- Conceptual and methodological limitations.
• 1. The woman question in prerevolutionary Russia: changing perceptions and changing realities: -- Modernization and egalitarianism in Western Europe -- The woman question and the emergence of Russian feminism -- Russian radicalism and the liberation of women -- The awkward sex: Marxism, Leninism, and the woman question -- Bolshevism and feminism: the organization of women workers.
• 2. Toward sexual equality: revolutionary transformation and its limits, 1917-1930: -- Legal engineering: the establishment of new norms -- Political mobilization: the Zhenotdel and the party -- Revolutionary strategies and elite perspectives -- Sexual liberation and the family.
• 3. The Stalinist synthesis: economic mobilization and new patterns of authority: -- Social production: female employment and industrialization -- Domestic production: the role of the household in Soviet industrialization -- Family policy and the redefinition of female roles -- The Stalinist legacy and the reassessment of Stalinist priorities.
• 4. Enabling conditions of sexual equality: affirmative action, soviet-style: -- The regulation of women's employment: equality through protection -- The development of institutional child care -- The expansion of educational opportunities -- Sex-linked differences in educational orientations -- Women in higher and professional education.
• 5. Women and work: changing economic roles: -- Participation in the labor force -- Sectoral patterns of employment -- The vertical structures of occupations -- The impact of occupational stratification on earnings -- the social bases of occupational segregation.
• 6. Women and power: changing political roles: -- Female participation in the Soviets and local government -- Women in the Communist Party -- Women in the political elite -- The pattern of female political roles -- The political marginality of women: two explanations.
• 7. Women and the family: changing attitudes and behavior: -- Female liberation and family cohesion: contradictory imperatives in Soviet family policy -- Current trends in family behavior: marriage, divorce, and reproduction -- Family power structure and the sexual division of labor -- The articulation of work and family roles: a structural analysis.
• 8. Sex roles and public policy: the spectrum of reassessments and proposals: -- The recognition of contradictions in women's dual roles -- Demographic problems and public policy: women as a reproductive resource -- Labor utilization and public policy: women as a productive resource -- Masculine/feminine: a tendency analysis of conflicting sex-role norms.
• 9. Sexual equality and Soviet policy: toward a comparative perspective.

ISBN

• 0520028686
• 9780520028685
• 0520039386
• 9780520039384

LCCN

74016710

OCLC

• ocm04040532
• 4040532
• SCSB-129149

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library