1936

In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, 1936 is a historical marker in the changing political regulation of reproduction: abortion had been recognized in the Soviet Union for a brief period before being prohibited that year. Its significance extends beyond a legal date. The example belongs to an argument that women’s freedom depends not only on formal status or access to work, but also on who controls fertility and who bears the continuing labor of pregnancy, childcare, and household life.

Reproductive Policy and Historical Change

De Beauvoir places the Soviet prohibition within a broader history in which fertility control shifts between individuals and states. Even where law and religion restrict abortion, she observes, the practice continues widely; in France, she estimates 800,000 to one million abortions a year, a number comparable to births, with married women forming two-thirds of those seeking them. She sets this reality beside the brief recognition of abortion in the Soviet Union before 1936, showing that official policy can change while the underlying pressure to regulate reproduction persists.

The comparison is part of a wider account of reproductive change. Advances in obstetrics, the spread of anesthetic methods, and artificial insemination appear alongside birth control and abortion as developments that could allow women to reduce pregnancies and integrate them more deliberately into their lives. For De Beauvoir, such changes matter because they can loosen the connection between women’s bodies and a life organized around repeated childbearing—not because technology alone guarantees emancipation.

Work, Reproduction, and Unequal Time

The argument connects reproductive freedom to women’s participation in production. De Beauvoir describes the historical burden of fertility as one reason women were confined to domestic labor and excluded from shaping the world. When pregnancies are numerous and childcare falls chiefly to women, reproductive duties limit the time and energy available for paid work. When women can control the number and timing of pregnancies, and when society provides support during pregnancy and childcare, those burdens can be lighter and more compatible with work.

This relationship remains unequal even in a period of expanding women’s employment. De Beauvoir notes that in France in 1906, 42 percent of working-age women were employed across agriculture, industry, commerce, offices, and the professions; the First World War labor crisis widened the movement. Yet employment does not by itself redistribute domestic responsibility. In her account of French peasant women, work in fields and gardens is added to cooking, cleaning, pregnancy, and childcare. Their long daily round leaves little time for health or leisure, while male members of the household retain social opportunities beyond the farm.

Rights and the Conditions of Freedom

The 1936 marker also belongs to De Beauvoir’s distinction between formal emancipation and freedom made concrete. She argues that the Soviet Union’s changing family policies expose a limitation in treating women simply as workers: the state must balance production with the need for population, and eliminating or reorganizing the family does not automatically end male domination. A socialist transformation, in her view, cannot settle women’s situation by assigning reproductive life to the state or reducing pregnancy to a service.

Her measure of emancipation is therefore broader than employment or legal recognition. Women need the material possibility of acting on their freedom, including control over reproduction and a less unequal distribution of family labor. Without those conditions, the right to work can coexist with heavier demands on women than on their spouses, and the promise of independence remains incomplete.

The Wider Argument About Freedom

These historical examples support De Beauvoir’s existentialist account of women’s situation. Every person is capable of pursuing projects and surpassing an imposed present, but women are often placed in a position where their activity is restricted to maintaining life and repeating domestic tasks. The contrast is temporal as well as economic: work that opens onto projects and a future is set against obligations that recur without producing lasting release from them.

The year 1936 thus signifies neither a final emancipation nor a self-sufficient explanation of Soviet policy. It helps locate reproductive law within a continuing conflict over women’s capacity to shape their own lives. De Beauvoir’s larger conclusion is that freedom requires more than altered institutions in the abstract: it requires social arrangements in which women can participate in production, exercise control over reproduction, and pursue an open future without carrying domestic and maternal burdens alone.