In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, the Soviet Union is a crucial test of whether economic and political revolution can produce women’s freedom. It appears first as evidence that women’s emancipation can advance through collective transformation, then as a warning that formal equality and women’s participation in public life do not by themselves undo domestic subordination. The same state that promised equal rights and social support later restricted abortion and divorce in response to population needs, leaving women workers and housekeepers at once.

Revolution and the promise of emancipation

Beauvoir situates Soviet women’s political advance within a longer history of Russian activism. At the end of the nineteenth century, women students from the intelligentsia joined revolutionary action, often treating their personal claims as part of a broader struggle. In 1878, Vera Zasulich shot police chief Trepov. During the Russo-Japanese War, women took over work in many fields as men were absent, and the Russian Union for Women’s Rights pressed for political equality. Women’s-rights advocates in the first Duma organized a parliamentary group, but it lacked power; Beauvoir presents revolution, rather than parliamentary petition alone, as the force that made workers’ emancipation possible.

Women were active participants in the upheavals leading to the new order. They took part in the mass political strikes of 1905 and mounted the barricades. On March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, women demonstrated in St. Petersburg demanding bread, peace, and the return of their husbands, only days before the revolution. They also participated in the October insurrection. From 1918 to 1920, women played important economic and military roles in the Soviet Union’s fight against invading forces. In Beauvoir’s account, these episodes show women acting within revolutionary history, not merely receiving rights afterward.

Lenin connected women’s liberation to the liberation of workers and extended women political and economic equality. The 1936 constitution stated that women enjoyed the same rights as men in economic, official, cultural, public, and political life. Communist International principles went further in outlining social equality both before the law and in daily life, changes to marital rights and family law, recognition of maternity as a social function, and collective responsibility for children’s care and education. They also called for opposition to ideologies and traditions that made women subordinate.

Work, political representation, and war

Beauvoir describes striking evidence of women’s public participation. A report on the 1939 elections counted 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. Nearly ten million women belonged to trade unions, and women made up 40 percent of the Soviet Union’s workers and employees. Many women also became prominent among Stakhanovite workers.

Their economic contribution extended into industries conventionally treated as male. In the war years, women supplied a large workforce in metallurgy, mining, timber rafting, and railways. They also distinguished themselves as pilots and parachutists and formed partisan armies. These details give substance to the claim of emancipation through production: paid and public work could give women economic standing and a role in collective life, rather than confining their contribution to the home.

Yet Beauvoir does not treat employment as a complete answer. Her broader argument is that reproductive duties and domestic work shape women’s possibilities alongside their wage labor. In the Soviet case, the question of family life became difficult precisely because women’s public participation had expanded. Policies intended to relieve domestic burdens included maternity leave, childcare centers, and kindergartens. The account also refers to respect for free unions, liberalized divorce, and legalized abortion as measures that had, for a time, supported women’s freedom in relation to men.

Family policy and the reversal of reform

The early effort to loosen family constraints did not remain the state’s settled policy. Beauvoir notes that Soviet family policy changed repeatedly as authorities sought to balance production with the need to increase the population. In this later setting, the family became the elementary social unit, and women were expected to combine worker and housekeeper roles. Public employment therefore coexisted with the continued assignment of domestic responsibility to women.

The reversal was especially clear in reproductive and marital law. The 1936 law and a further law of June 7, 1941, banned abortion and nearly suppressed divorce; adultery was condemned by prevailing moral standards. Beauvoir describes sexual morality as exceptionally strict. The state thus restricted choices that had earlier been associated with women’s liberty, while maintaining their participation in political and economic life. Soviet women occupied a distinct position: subordinated to the state like other workers and bound to the home, yet able to enter political life and to gain the dignity attached to productive work.

This contrast is central to Beauvoir’s criticism of a purely economic account of emancipation. She argues elsewhere that equal employment or the abolition of private family arrangements cannot automatically resolve women’s reproductive situation or the sexual and personal relations through which subordination is maintained. The Soviet experience supplies her with a concrete caution: a state may organize women’s labor and recognize their public status while limiting their autonomy over motherhood and marriage. The institution of the family, moreover, can preserve male dominance even when women are directly attached to the state rather than to an individual husband.

An unfinished model of equality

The Soviet Union also serves as the imagined model for a more fully equal social order. Beauvoir describes a world in which women receive the same education as men, work under the same conditions for the same wages, and have the means to support themselves. Sexual freedom would not make sex a paid service; marriage would rest on a free commitment that either partner could end; motherhood would be freely chosen through access to birth control and abortion. Society would fund maternity leave and assume responsibility for the care of mothers and children, without separating children from their parents.

But Beauvoir distinguishes that proposed future from the historical reality she surveys. In her conclusion, she observes that the consequences required to turn economic change into moral, social, and cultural equality had been fully realized nowhere—not in the Soviet Union, France, or the United States. Changing economic circumstances was essential, but it could not alone erase the effects of women’s earlier upbringing or the gendered expectations carried into adult life. The Soviet Union therefore remains neither a simple success story nor a dismissed experiment: it demonstrates the scale of change collective action can make possible, and the limits of rights that can be narrowed when the state’s priorities shift from women’s autonomy to production and repopulation.