Soviet Union (673c2110)

The Soviet Union serves in The Second Sex as both a proposed answer to women’s economic dependence and a warning against treating socialization of production as sufficient for liberation. The book credits socialist theory with linking women’s subordination to economic arrangements, yet stresses that a state can expand women’s work while retaining patriarchal control over reproduction, family policy, and intimate life.

Economic emancipation and its limits

The book presents the Soviet Union as a place where the resistance of capitalist paternalism had, according to Soviet claims, already been broken down. In this account, technological development and women’s participation in large-scale production could weaken the economic dependence associated with domestic confinement. Socialism promised a society of equal workers, but the text qualifies that promise: women’s circumstances cannot be reduced to their capacity for paid labor, because reproductive life and sexual relations remain consequential dimensions of their situation.

That qualification also challenges a purely economic explanation of women’s oppression. The book argues that abolishing the family in theory does not necessarily free women in practice. The Soviet Union’s repeated changes to family policy, it says, reflected efforts to balance production needs against the need to increase the population. These shifts expose a conflict between women’s individual lives and state priorities: policy may treat family arrangements as instruments for economic or demographic goals without resolving the unequal burden women bear.

Family policy and reproductive control

The Soviet Union is cited as having legalized abortion for a period before the 1936 ban. The book places this reversal within a broader criticism of governments that restrict women’s choices about pregnancy. It argues that a state need not directly compel childbirth to make motherhood effectively compulsory: it can narrow women’s options through laws and customs, including restrictions on contraception and abortion, and by making marriage the expected route through life.

In the book’s argument, Soviet policy had revived older paternalistic ideas about marriage. It also describes a recent speech urging Soviet women to attend to their clothing, wear makeup, and be flirtatious in order to retain their husbands and stimulate their desire. The example matters because it shows the state addressing women not only as workers but also as wives and erotic partners, placing responsibility on them to sustain heterosexual marriage. A political system that claims equality in production could therefore preserve gendered expectations in domestic and sexual life.

Women’s labor and the unequal burden of reproduction

The book connects women’s access to employment with the material conditions of pregnancy and childcare. It observes that modern machines can reduce the importance of differences in muscular strength, and that reproductive duties become less burdensome when women can control the number of pregnancies and receive social support during pregnancy and in childcare. But technical capacity alone does not guarantee equality: the social arrangements surrounding reproduction determine whether work can be combined with family responsibilities.

Its account of Soviet family-policy reversals reinforces this point. The state’s competing concerns with production and population growth make the organization of reproduction a political issue, while leaving the concrete costs of pregnancy and care unevenly distributed. The book insists that gestation cannot simply be treated as a job or public service, because it involves a woman’s time, energy, and personal values. Women’s equality therefore requires more than employment; it requires attention to the conditions under which reproduction and care are organized.

A test of socialist equality

The comparison with Sparta and Nazi Germany sharpens the book’s warning: even when women are attached directly to the state, they may remain oppressed by men. The Soviet example thus complicates any assumption that the state’s control over production, or the formal abolition of class distinctions, automatically dissolves male authority. A socialist ethic worthy of the name would have to pursue justice without suppressing individual freedom or treating women’s lives as resources to be managed.

The Soviet Union’s place in the argument is consequently double. It represents the possibility that economic transformation can open routes toward women’s emancipation, but its changing family policies and renewed marital prescriptions show how quickly that promise can be constrained by demographic aims and patriarchal norms. The book’s measure of liberation is not simply whether women work; it is whether they can shape their own lives without being confined to the roles of worker, wife, mother, or object of male desire.