The Soviet Revolution appears in the book chiefly as a promise and a test of women’s emancipation, not as a narrated sequence of revolutionary events. Its imagined social order joins equal education and employment to reproductive autonomy and shared social responsibility for children. Yet the promise does not settle the question of equality: the book insists that economic transformation must also change the moral, social, and cultural conditions through which women are made into women.

The Revolution’s Promise

The revolution is invoked as a model of a world in which women and men would be educated alike, work under the same conditions, and receive the same wages. Erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, while sex would no longer be treated as a remunerated service. Women would be expected to earn their own livelihood rather than depend on men, and marriage would rest on a free commitment that either spouse could end.

This proposed equality also depends on reproductive autonomy. Motherhood would be freely chosen, with birth control and abortion permitted; mothers and children would have equal rights, and society would pay maternity leave and assume responsibility for children without taking them from their parents. The proposal therefore connects women’s independence not only to access to paid work but to the social organization of care and the consequences of pregnancy.

Material Conditions and Reproductive Labor

The promise answers a history in which women’s reproductive role and productive work have been set against one another. The account argues that the burdens of pregnancy depend on social arrangements: they become overwhelming when pregnancies are numerous and women must raise children without help, but can be eased when women control whether to have children and society provides support and child care. The issue is not simply women’s capacity to work; it is who bears the continuing labor of reproduction and domestic life.

The contrast is visible in the depiction of rural women in France. A peasant woman may share her husband’s responsibilities and property, yet her work extends from fields and animal care to cooking, washing, mending, pregnancy, and child care. Her day begins at dawn and leaves little time for her health or leisure. The example makes concrete why formal access to work cannot by itself produce equality: women may participate in production while remaining responsible for an additional, largely unshared working day at home.

The book likewise distinguishes technological possibility from social emancipation. Modern machines can reduce the importance of muscular differences, and pregnancy and child care can be made less burdensome by social support. But these developments do not automatically change who controls resources or who performs domestic labor. The proposed revolutionary settlement addresses those arrangements directly; its significance lies in treating care and reproductive choice as collective questions rather than private burdens assigned to women.

The Limits of Economic Change

The Revolution’s promise is not presented as an accomplished reality. The book states that the new consequences of women’s economic development had been realized nowhere—not in the Soviet Union, France, or the United States. A changed economic position is described as the primordial factor in women’s development, but equality requires the moral, social, and cultural changes that must follow from it. Until those changes take hold, women remain divided between inherited expectations and a changing present.

This argument also resists reducing women’s emancipation to becoming workers. Women’s reproductive function matters both to social life and to individual life, and gestation cannot simply be treated as another job or service. The book further argues that abolishing the family or attaching women directly to the state would not necessarily free them: examples such as Sparta and the Nazi regime show, in its account, that state-directed arrangements can leave women oppressed by men. A just socialist ethic must therefore pursue justice without suppressing liberty or replacing individual freedom with a new compulsory arrangement.

Equality as a Collective Transformation

The broader existential argument clarifies why the revolutionary promise remains incomplete. Every person is an autonomous freedom who realizes existence through projects and movement toward an open future. Women share that capacity, but are placed in a world where men define them as the Other and constrain their ability to act as independent subjects. The problem is therefore not only unequal wages or legal rights; it is the social organization that turns women’s freedom toward dependence and repetition.

Childhood formation is one of the mechanisms that would have to change. The gulf between girls and boys, the book argues, is deliberately produced from early infancy, and a girl raised like a boy in an unequal society would still be marked as an exception. A genuinely different outcome would require collective change: girls would need the same demands and honors, severity and freedom, studies and games, and promised futures as boys, among adults who recognize women and men as equals. The Revolution’s lasting significance in the argument is thus both its concrete program of shared rights and care, and the larger challenge it poses: equality must be built into the conditions of life from the beginning, not proclaimed in law or economic policy alone.