THE question of women’s rights in the Soviet Union was resolved through a fundamental restructuring of the old society with the active participation of the women themselves. The Bolshevik Party founded by Lenin, which guided the October Revolution and consolidated the new social system, viewed the question of women’s rights as one of the most important social problems that the triumphant Revolution had to solve.

Alongside such major matters as ending the war and concluding peace, abolishing landownership and transferring the land to the peasants, establishing control over production and over the distribution of material wealth, the question of the social emancipation of women was also being decided.

The first Soviet Decrees on Peace and Land, which was signed by Lenin, were very much in the interests of women. The Decree on Land enabled a peasant woman to obtain as much land as a man. A whole series of further decrees were enacted containing special points affecting women. The decree establishing an eight-hour working day dated October 29 (November 11), 1917, prohibited the employment of women for night work. The social security regulations of November 14 (27) provided for maternity benefits payable eight weeks before the birth and eight weeks after it. The decree on pay established a minimum wage level irrespective of sex. The decree on rates of pay upheld the principle of equal remuneration for equal work for both men and women. December 18 (31), 1917, saw the adoption of a decree on civil marriage giving men and women equal rights in marriage and in the family. The first Constitution of the RSFSR (July 1918) institutionalised the equality of women and their political and civil rights.

The crowning legislative achievement for women workers was the 1918 maternity insurance programme designed and pushed by Alexandra Kollontai, the first People’s Commissar for Social Welfare and head of the Zhenotdel from 1920 to 1922. The law provided for a fully paid maternity leave of eight weeks, nursing breaks and factory rest facilities, free pre and post-natal care, and cash allowances. It was administered through a Commission for the Protection of Mothers and Infants—attached to the Health Commissariat—and headed by a Bolshevik doctor, Vera Lebedeva. With its networks of maternity clinics, consultation offices, feeding stations, nurseries, and mother and infant homes, this programme was perhaps the single most popular innovation of the Soviet regime among Russian women.

In 1920 the Soviet government issued a decree overturning criminal penalties for abortion—the first government in the world to do so:

“As long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People’s Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People’s Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women’s health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:

“I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where women are assured maximum safety in the operation.”

—“Decree of the People’s Commissariat of Health and social Welfare and the People’s Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russa.”

Summing up all that had been done by Soviet power immediately after its establishment, Lenin said: “In this field, not a single democratic party in the world, not even in the most advance bourgeois republic, has done in decades so much as a hundredth part of what we did in our very first year in power. We really razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality……But the more thoroughly we have cleared the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on but are not yet building.