Chapter 4 - The New Soviet Domestic Worker

Summary

The union’s educational campaign was meant to reshape domestics to fit them into the proletarian mold. The union encouraged domestic workers to develop themselves through reading and writing, as well as participation in socialist leisure activities and revolutionary memory initiatives. This chapter demonstrates that ideas about class and gender fundamentally shaped the project of turning domestic servants of the old days into the “New Soviet Domestic Workers,” empowering them, but simultaneously limiting their agency. Domestic servants were subjected to the top-down cultural enlightenment program of the labor union because they were viewed not only as the least developed among the proletarians, due to their peasant background and their gender, but also as being in the closest proximity to their petty bourgeois employers. The labor union’s disciplinary approach, however, provided space for domestic workers to engage creatively with the official discourse and use it to claim a place in revolutionary society.