Domestic Service in the Soviet Union
Domestic Service in the Soviet Union
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This innovative study is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Alissa Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.
- Harnesses a wide range of primary sources to create the first history of domestic service in the Soviet Union
- Demonstrates how ideas of gender in the Soviet Union shaped perceptions of labor
- Offers insights into the power and limitations of state laws to regulate paid domestic labor
Reviews & endorsements
'Klots's book offers an insightful analysis of how the Soviet state struggled with the issue of domestic service even as it pledged to do away with inequality and exploitation.' Maria Lipman, Foreign Affairs
'wonderful and illuminating' Wendy Z. Goldman, The Russian Review
'In this beautiful and emotional travelogue, gratitude and wonder alternate with alarm and exasperation.' Maria Lipman, Foreign Affairs
'… Alissa Klots's book represents a landmark contribution to Soviet historiography, opening new analytical pathways for examining live-in domestic labor.' Tamar Qeburia, H-Soz-Kult
Product details
June 2025Paperback
9781009467162
317 pages
230 × 152 × 17 mm
0.446kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: a kitchen maid to rule the state
- Prologue: domestic service and the Bolsheviks before 1917
- Part I. Servants into Workers, 1920s:
- 1. From exploitation to socially useful labor: the early soviet discourse on domestic service
- 2. Just like any other worker? Class, gender, and labor rights
- 3. Kitchen maids in the school of communism: union work and political mobilization
- 4. The new soviet domestic worker: the enlightenment campaign and domestic workers' subjectivity
- Part II. In The Land of Victorious Socialism, 1930–1950s:
- 5. The turn to production: domestic workers and the first five-year plan
- 6. Serving in a socialist home: paid domestic labor and etatization of the home
- 7. Like one of the family: domestic service as a site of intimate negotiations
- 8. The meanings of privilege: domestic workers in postwar society
- Conclusion
- Bibliography.
