Prologue

Summary

The chapter traces attitudes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxists toward paid domestic labor and domestic servants. Discursively connecting domestic service with slavery and serfdom, European and Russian radical thinkers saw it as antimodern. Following this line of thinking, the Bolsheviks emphasized the nonproductive nature of servants’ labor and placed them outside of “the modern proletariat.” Only after the active participation of domestic servants in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 did the party began to engage with what was then the largest female occupational group outside of agriculture. The chapter demonstrates that the Bolsheviks had given little thought to the place of paid domestic labor in the new society, anticipating its disappearance. Yet, it also shows that the key elements of the Bolsheviks’ approach to domestic service were present in their prerevolutionary thinking: ambiguity about the class status of servants, paternalistic attitudes toward them as the most backward members of the proletariat, and, most importantly, the vision of society in which housework was women’s work, whether it was paid or unpaid.