Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women’s Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor

Based on vast archival material, Klots’s book offers an insightful analysis of how the Soviet state struggled with the issue of domestic service even as it pledged to do away with inequality and exploitation. The Bolsheviks’ hope that factory kitchens and state daycares would make housemaids redundant never materialized, and as Stalin’s forced industrialization required women to join the workforce, the need for household services grew even more acute. Soviets had to reconceptualize the function of domestic workers as a contribution to the socialist economy to solve the incongruity of the persistence of servants in a communist society: the justification they landed on was that by freeing up the labor of their more qualified compatriots, domestic workers were in fact participating in building socialism. During the early Soviet decades, the state taught housemaids to read and write and made sure trade unions protected their rights. Yet a domestic worker’s status remained inferior, and younger housemaids often aspired to do factory work instead. Klots takes her research into the 1960s, when the number of domestic workers significantly declined, with living and education standards in the countryside improving and fewer rural women willing to work as housemaids. The Soviet state was not nearly as concerned about gender equality as it was about class equality, and the assumption that household chores were a woman’s job never changed.