Manufactured Egalitarianism July 8, 2008

In his 1935 book, Seven League Boots, adventurer Richard Halliburton gives us a sobering account of state-enforced equality between the sexes. The following is his description of women in Bolshevik society gleaned from personal observation as well as an interview with Mrs. Lenin (Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya).

From a condition of almost Oriental enslavement and ignorance before World War I, the masses of Russian women under Communism have leaped overnight to the other extreme. Now they have absolute equality with men every respect—economically, legally, politically. In no way are women set apart, protected, or favored. There is no longer a “Mrs.” Or a “Miss”—only “Comrade” and “Citizen.” They are given the same work and the same wage as men. They must struggle for life on exactly the same footing as men, fighting with their own fists.

 

Half the work in the vast new industrial plants is done by women, in the machine shops, the automobile and tractor factories, the mines. Women build the military tanks, the airplanes, the artillery, the locomotives.

 

In one electric-motor factory I visited, the manager apologized for having so few women workers—only thirty-five percent. In this plant, as elsewhere, they were wearing men’s clothes, boots, caps. They were as grimy, as greasy, as the men—and as hard.

           

Moscow is building a new skyscraper hotel and a new subway. And the “sand hogs,” the rock miners, the steel fitters, are as likely to be women as men. Squat and red, they shovel gravel eight h ours on a stretch into the concrete mixers, run the steam derricks, excavate foundations with picks and dynamite.

 

A new street is being paved. There is hardly a man is sight. The rock-crushing and the asphalt-spreading are done by gangs of women. And the final steam roller is run by a girl wearing overalls.

 

Women have seized not only the heavy industries as their province. The professions have fallen too. Seventy-five percent of all students in medical schools in Russia today are women. That means that soon three-fourths of Russia’s doctors will be women; likewise three-fourths of the dentists. In the state bank ninety percent of the clerks, tellers, vice-presidents, directors, are women. So are half the lawyers in the country.

…

In Soviet Russia every man could be exterminated, and the women, in so far as their economic independence goes, would never know it.

…

But what about home, I asked Mme. Lenin.

 

 

There aren’t any, such as we know them. The babies are in government day nurseries, the children in government schools. The mother works all day in the new subway shoveling government gravel, the father all night making government shoes. Most likely they’ll all be fed in government kitchens. They live in one room allotted by the government.

 

Among Soviet women the marriage ceremony has become so casual a gesture that it’s often dispensed with altogether. There is no distinction between married mothers and unmarried mothers. For there is no such thing as illegitimacy.

…

Perhaps Russian women are happier, now that they have all the privileges of men, and none of the privileges of women.