Chapter 8 - The Meanings of Privilege

Summary

Whereas in the rest of Europe World War II brought about the rapid decline in residential domestic service, the Soviet Union saw a significant growth of the domestic service sector. Even though many Soviet citizens felt uneasy about the class inequality that was at the heart of domestic service, there were no public discussions of the issue during the last decade of Stalin’s rule. Only after Stalin’s death did the country’s new leader Nikita Khrushchev allow for more open conversations about social problems. In these debates, domestic service became a vehicle to discuss class inequality in Soviet society. Gender inequality, however, was never questioned. On the contrary, the debates around paid domestic labor only reinforced the notion that was fundamental to gender inequality in the Soviet Union: that housework was women’s work. The failure to question the gendered division of labor in the home demonstrated the limits of the Bolsheviks’ program of women’s emancipation during a crucial period when the regime sought to reimagine socialism.