Women, family life and education

What the specification asks for

“Changes in family life and employment and in the political position of women. Changes in education.” — examined through change and continuity. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

What the 1920s had established

The early Soviet state had the most radical family law in the world. The codes of 1918 and 1926 gave women full legal equality, made divorce available on the request of either party by postcard, legalised abortion in 1920 — the first country to do so — abolished illegitimacy as a legal category, and recognised de facto marriage. Alexandra Kollontai argued that domestic work should be socialised through communal kitchens and nurseries so that women could enter public life.

The results were not what was intended. Divorce rates rose very high, particularly in the cities; abandoned women and children became a visible social problem; the state could not afford the communal institutions; and by the early 1930s there were millions of homeless children, the besprizorniki, on the streets and railways.

The Great Retreat, 1936

The family law of 1936 reversed most of it. Abortion was banned except on narrow medical grounds. Divorce was made expensive, with escalating fees for each divorce and a requirement that both parties attend and that it be recorded in internal passports. Child support was enforced against absent fathers. Motherhood medals and payments were introduced for large families, and the family was declared a socialist institution.

The reasons were demographic and social rather than doctrinal: the birth rate had collapsed, the famine and the Terror had killed millions, war was expected, and the state needed a stable institution to raise children it could not afford to raise itself. Abortion had become the principal method of birth control in the cities and the state wanted the births.

The consequences included a rise in illegal abortion with substantial maternal mortality, and a birth rate that rose briefly and then fell again. The 1944 family law went further, removing legal recognition from de facto marriages and making divorce a court matter.

What women gained

Women entered the workforce on a scale unmatched anywhere. The female share of the industrial workforce rose from around a quarter in 1928 to over 40 per cent by 1940, and women were a large majority of doctors — around three quarters by 1950 — and a very large share of teachers and technical workers. Crèche places expanded enormously, though never enough.

Education transformed the position. Literacy among women rose from under half in the 1920s to the great majority by 1939; universal primary education was achieved and secondary education expanded rapidly; and the fee for higher education, introduced in 1940, was one of the few barriers. Education was rigidly traditional in method — uniforms, discipline, textbooks, examinations restored in the 1930s after the experimental 1920s — and it was universal.

Politically the position did not follow. Women were almost absent from the Politburo and rare in the Central Committee. Equality of employment and education arrived without equality of power, and the double burden of paid work and unchanged domestic responsibility was a standing complaint recorded in Soviet sources themselves.

The wartime and post-war position completes the theme and is where the contradiction becomes unmistakable. Women were a very large share of the industrial and agricultural workforce during the war and served in combat roles no other belligerent permitted — as pilots, snipers and tank crew — and after 1945 they were expected to return to the double burden while the state, alarmed by a demographic catastrophe in which around 27 million had died, introduced the Mother Heroine award and a tax on childlessness. Equality of labour and inequality of everything else is the pattern across the whole period.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

1920

The USSR becomes the first country to legalise abortion. Why this date: The starting point that makes 1936 a reversal rather than a policy.

1936

Abortion banned; divorce made expensive; motherhood rewarded. Why this date: The Great Retreat, and the date that makes the strand a change/continuity question.

1930s

Universal primary education achieved; examinations, uniforms and formal discipline restored. Why this date: Educational expansion and pedagogical conservatism arrive together.

1940

Female literacy has risen dramatically; women are a large share of medical and technical students. Why this date: The gain, stated with a measure, so the answer can weigh it against the loss.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• About 25 → over 40 per cent — The female share of the industrial workforce, 1928 to 1940.
• About three quarters — The proportion of Soviet doctors who were women by 1950. (Medicine was a comparatively low-status and low-paid profession in the USSR, which is part of the explanation.)
• 1936 to 1955 — The period during which abortion was banned.
• Millions — Homeless children in the early 1930s. (Estimates for the besprizorniki vary enormously; use the word rather than a false precision.)

The people to place

• Alexandra Kollontai — Commissar for Social Welfare and the leading theorist of women's liberation in the 1920s; ambassador abroad from 1923 and marginalised at home.
• Nadezhda Krupskaya — Lenin's widow; deputy commissar for education and a persistent, ineffective critic of the retreat.

How historians disagree

Attributed interpretations, never voiced — the AO4 seam.

• The 'Great Retreat' thesis: The 1930s abandoned the revolution's social radicalism and restored conservative institutions — the family, formal schooling, ranks, discipline — in the interests of stability and demographic recovery. Contested by Historians who argue that the 1920s policies had never been implemented outside the cities, that the retreat restored something that had barely been dismantled in the countryside, and that the continuity of women's entry into education and work is the more important change..

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: The USSR liberated women.

This: It gave them education, professions and paid work on an unmatched scale, and in 1936 it removed abortion, made divorce expensive and rewarded large families, while leaving domestic work entirely to them. Both are true and the strand exists because they are.

Not this: The 1936 laws were about ideology.

This: The drivers were demographic and social: a collapsed birth rate, millions of orphaned and homeless children, and an expected war. Ideology was adjusted to fit, which is itself worth saying.

Two things students merge

Blurred: Equality of employment and equality of position.

The distinction: Women entered every profession and remained almost absent from political leadership, and carried an unchanged domestic burden. 'Did the position of women improve' therefore has different answers depending on which is meant.

Blurred: The 1920s and the 1930s.

The distinction: The radical family law belongs to the 1920s and was largely reversed in 1936. Attributing 1920s legislation to Stalin's period, or the 1936 laws to Bolshevik doctrine, gets the change backwards.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer says that both movements had the same cause. The state needed women in the factories and needed children for the army, and it pursued both without regard to the contradiction — so what looks like an ideological inconsistency is a consistent subordination of everything to the plan and the coming war.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 1 (b) (8 marks — “Explain two effects of … on ….”); Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii) (16 marks — “'[A statement about the period.]' You may use the following in your answer: • [prompt] • [prompt]. You must also use information of your own. How far do you agree? Explain your answer.”).

What earns marks: Holding a gain and a loss in the same sentence with a date on each. The 1936 reversal against the 1940 employment and literacy figures is the whole answer in two clauses.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. Explain two changes in the position of women in the USSR in the years 1924–41. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
2. Explain two reasons for the family law changes of 1936. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
3. Describe two changes in Soviet education under Stalin. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
4. 'Life improved for women in the Soviet Union in the years 1924–41.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]
5. 'Soviet social policy in the 1930s abandoned the aims of the revolution.' How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]

Carry on through the option

• Previous lesson: Living and working conditions, town and countryside
• Next lesson: The persecution of ethnic minorities
• Key topic 4 · Life in the Soviet Union, 1924–41 · Dictatorship and conflict in the USSR, 1924–53 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of Dictatorship and conflict in the USSR: The leadership struggle, 1924–29 · Five-year Plans and collectivisation · Purges, show trials, the cult of Stalin and the revision of history · The Second World War and after, 1941–53