1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, Article 122

Article 122 of the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union states that women enjoy the same rights as men across economic, official, cultural, public, and political life. In Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion, it embodies the Soviet commitment to women’s formal equality while also exposing the distinction between rights proclaimed in law and equality achieved in everyday conditions.

Constitutional Guarantee

The article’s scope extends well beyond voting or legal status: it names economic, official, cultural, public, and political life as domains in which women are to enjoy the same rights as men. Its wording presents equality as a general principle of social participation, not a narrow concession confined to one sphere.

De Beauvoir places this constitutional guarantee within a broader program articulated by the Communist International. That program called for equality before the law and in daily life, changes to conjugal rights and family law, recognition of maternity as a social function, and social responsibility for children’s care and education. The article’s promise therefore belongs to a project that linked women’s public equality to changes in family arrangements and social provision.

Equality Through Work and Public Participation

The constitutional principle accompanied a large expansion of women’s participation in production. De Beauvoir notes that Soviet women received equal wages with male workers and took an active part in industry, gaining political and social importance through their economic role. The cited figures for the 1939 elections record 457,000 women deputies in regional, district, town, and village soviets, 1,480 in the higher soviets of the socialist republics, and 227 in the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Nearly ten million women belonged to unions, and women formed 40 percent of Soviet workers and employees.

Women’s contribution also reached occupations conventionally treated as masculine. De Beauvoir describes women working in metallurgy, mining, timber rafting, and railways, and notes their service as pilots, parachutists, and members of partisan forces during the war. These examples give the constitutional promise a concrete public dimension: equality meant not only a stated legal status but participation in work, political institutions, and wartime activity.

The Family and the Limits of Legal Rights

The article’s reach into public life did not automatically redistribute domestic responsibilities. Soviet measures described by De Beauvoir—including maternity leave, childcare centers, kindergartens, and the legalization of abortion—were intended to ease the burdens of motherhood and support women’s freedom. Yet the family remained an unresolved site of policy. The Soviet government’s earlier effort to loosen family constraints gave way, under the demands of repopulation, to a policy that again treated the family as the elementary social unit. Women consequently remained both workers and housekeepers.

De Beauvoir’s wider argument is that formal rights cannot, on their own, establish concrete equality. Social habits and economic arrangements may keep recognized rights from becoming effective in daily life; women’s work and political participation can expand while childcare and housework remain disproportionately theirs. The constitutional guarantee is therefore significant as a declaration of equal standing, but it is not proof that the inequalities attached to family life and social practice have disappeared.

Significance in De Beauvoir’s Argument

Article 122 serves as a test case for the difference between legal equality and lived emancipation. De Beauvoir acknowledges the scale of Soviet women’s entry into production and public institutions, while stressing that changes in law and employment coexist with continuing domestic obligations and shifting state priorities. The article’s broad promise is thus measured against the practical conditions that determine whether women can exercise their rights.

The provision also fits De Beauvoir’s criticism of explanations that reduce women’s condition to economic class or treat productive work as a complete solution. Women’s productive capacities matter, but reproductive life and family responsibilities remain socially consequential. Article 122 establishes an expansive formal standard; the account surrounding it asks whether institutions and everyday arrangements make that standard real.