Dunia was one of those who in the first year of Revolution seized the manager's house for a day nursery so that her children might have space to grow.

Seizing private property is bad? A day nursery is more important than some manager losing his house.

This chapter was pretty powerful in how it showed the emancipation of women, what it took and what was achieved afterwards. Comparing the rights and expected lives of women in Tsarist Russia to what was achieved in the USSR its hard to believe this much progress was made in 2 decades. Yet, also compared to 100 years later how much has been lost as well.

Both parties are responsible for the care and support of children up to eighteen and for giving the other partner any needed temporary economic aid to establish the independent relation.

Families are much healthier with active parents especially when the caring of children is also engaged by fathers and not the case of a father constantly away with work and effectively a single mother , usually also working, left to care for children alone. The Cuban Family Code is recent times really puts an emphasis on this with modern awareness of that most families do not fall under the rigid format of a cisheterosexual nuclear family. Both parents regardless of who they are must be really should be caring for their children together.

The emancipation of women is not only the work of women Communists but of men Communists also

Men needing to also work in the role of social reproduction (i think thats the term) is real important for the emancipation of women as well as women entering the workplace as equals to men. The responsibilities of men and women needed to be shifted to be shared which really helped form a healthier society.

Casual attitudes toward marriage have been discouraged from the beginning; no one was more emphatic on this than Lenin.

Seeing stories from the 20s and 30s (even today) of people falling in love at first sight and running away to marry and it generally ending in a miserable relationship, divorce or scarily something worse; seeing something like this feels important. Marriage seems to be the conclusion of a highly developed positive relationship between 2 people, not the start to one.

Come! Let's read and discuss This Soviet World.

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This was another really fun chapter. I particularly liked the focus on how progress came slower in agriculture along with collectivization of agriculture, it helps us understand practically how ideas and mindsets change. I also really liked the anecdotes of how women used the Soviet system to defend themselves from malicious husbands, such as the group that took wives only to help them harvest, only for the wives to be able to divorce and take half the gains.

Some of the social views are a bit outdated, as usual, but for the time period this was enormously progressive.

Even those rights which they have attained are today under attack by fascism, which under the phrases of chivalry drives women back to the Middle Ages.

Another chapter that shows how history is repeating itself.

Also, reading this chapter i realised we have had a 100 years since the 1920s yet it doesn't feel like 100 years of progress has been made.

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Catching up, things have been a bit rough lately, so I'm hoping to read several chapters at once here.

Chapter 7 thoughts: Really tragic to see a "victory" of Socialism declared in 1936. It is interesting to see how obvious the Nazi plans for invasion were back then, hard to push the "They were Soviet allies" myth when any account from the time made it obvious what they were planning.

Chapter 8 thoughts: This chapter could practically be written about China in the modern day, their constant attempts to delay war with the US and maintain an uneasy peace, because that is still far better than war. Does make me wonder if it means US war on China really is inevitable. Also can't believe I missed a little dig at Trotsky there when I missed this chapter. And had Mao said it before this book was written, this chapter would absolutely use the quote "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Chapter 9 thoughts:

"One middle-aged man was inactive socially and this was a great shame to the group, which tried to locate some tasks to interest him. They finally elected him president of the Red Aid Branch; within a month he signed up a big membership and had an active circle going."

I just can't even imagine what it must have been like to work like a Soviet man, I'm unable to do almost any sort of work under capital, the stress (both physical and mental) would be enough to ensure I don't live long enough to be middle-aged myself. I struggle to get by, barely able to work at all in my chosen field because even under "ideal" circumstances under capital, I'm still so heavily alienated from my labour. I was hoping the second half of the book wouldn't be as depressing as the first half, but it probably will continue to make me wish for a different, better world. Just...everything about a workplace also being a community, and attached to the larger community of the whole country is just so unimaginable to me, so different from anything I've ever experienced, I'm shut off from the world, isolated, because trying to work under capital is a nightmare, and the only way I've managed to do it is to eke out an existence on the fringe. Sorry, this is supposed to be an analysis of the text, but it's just making me very introspective, probably because I'm reading so many chapters in a row tonight to catch up.

Chapter 10 thoughts: Wow. Interesting seeing the discussion of the "Holodomor" long before that myth cropped up. I've said it nearly every chapter but I do find it really fascinating how this book dispels so many anti-Soviet myths before the western powers had even conceived of them. The sheer contempt that the capitalists have for us is truly disgusting.

They have lost the dull, unresponsive stare of the peasant; they are more vivid, alert. “Formerly even the peasant with the best income lived like a pig,” said a Soviet farmer to me. “His only use for his surplus was to get drunk. Today he has a reading-room, a hospital, a school, a laboratory; he reads the newspapers and knows about the world.

I think this gets at the heart of why this book makes me so sad, this sheer difference in people's lives, the brightness and humanity that exists within all of us that capitalism just seeks to snuff out. I know plenty of people more well off than I, but even with the best income they still like like a pig themselves, just existing, not thriving, I know that "dull, unresponsive stare" well, I see it in the faces of almost everyone I meet. People just so beaten down by life that they can only think of ways to make their life pass by quicker.

And finally this chapter!

for new specific increases in women’s “rights.” They count their victories by the number of women who one by one attain high office (etc)

And already off to a great start, how little has changed in the almost century since this book was written. And this is certainly a fascinating chapter. If I had to guess, I'd say that "women's rights in the Soviet Union" is probably the biggest area that is deliberately kept hidden away from us peons working under capital today. And it's easy to see why, seeing that they were arguably much more progressive than we are today would probably challenge most people's preconceived notions about the Soviets the most, as most of us are taught to view the former USSR in a vague "like our system, but worse in every way." So showing that they were significantly better not just in terms that your modern capitalist worker finds too abstract like "worker's rights" but something a lot of people care about (or claim to), like women's rights would be extremely confronting. I've been on the fence about recommending this book to liberal friends, but after reading this chapter I certainly will be encouraging them to read it, they probably won't, but it's worth trying at least.

And I'm finally caught up with everyone else!

A tireless woman in New England recently told me that she had fought for thirty years to get “a decent inspection of women’s labor in our state” and that they would “probably lose it at the next election.”

Another citation from Strong's work that proves to be timeless once again. In the midst the current elimination of trans people by the American GOP, activists fought for basic recognition for transgender identities only to have it stomped on by electoral politics that declared trans issues too divisive and a hot button topic. Women's rights is now constantly under attack by reactionaries which will only intensify with the economic decay of the US. 

This chapter does bring back the archaic language used by Strong but it does well in service of portraying just how brutal women's oppression was in eastern Europe before the formation of the Soviet Union.

“The emancipation of women is not only the work of women Communists but of men Communists also, just as the fight for socialism is a mutual fight,” said Krupskaia, widow of Lenin. The Communists hold that the gains in women’s freedom made through centuries have been chiefly due to change in methods of production.

The image evoked by “mutual fight” explains how radical feminism (or better known as liberal feminism) failed in not focusing on the economic order which formed the oppressive hierarchies in the first place. Intersectionality is not just about inclusion but about highlighting the “mutual-ness” of struggle. 

Yet in every village and factory women still had to fight their way over the traditional habits of centuries, which lingered in their own souls and in the souls of men.

The great part about this chapter is that Strong not only goes over the resulting overhaul of women's rights in the USSR but also the internal, personal conflict to get there. She spends her time going over vignettes of several women who, despite the equality from above, had to carve out their own success. 

“They laughed at the first woman we elected to the village Soviet so much that she could do nothing; at the next election we put in six women and now it is we who laugh.” This was a typical statement.

The cathartic satisfaction in “This was a typical statement” is palpable. Stories of women in political office in the US are noted as being exceptional but the vast majority of seats are still taken by men. 

But my man spent his money on drink and I’ll buy him nothing. I’ve told him if he gets drunk again I’ll throw him out of the house and not even feed him. The farm will back me up, unless he quits drinking and loafing. I can get along without him in the collective farm.”

This story is echoed in Humberto Solás black and white film Lucía (1968) where the peasant version of Lucía after the Cuban Revolution suffers under the abuse of her machismo fiance. However, the other women of the collective farm are able to protect Lucía from his advances as well as the literacy brigades allowing her to learn how to read and write. The film ends on a melancholic note where Lucía eventually takes back her abusive husband, perhaps as a way to represent how the work to fully eliminate machismo and the patriarchy is still not over. 

When young folks in Tashkent schools spent vacations agitating for women’s freedom, one girl’s body was sent back in a cart. Accompanying the hacked pieces were the words: “This is your women’s freedom.”

In another locality of Central Asia, nine murders of women occurred before any were discovered by central authority; every attempt of a woman to get justice was met by local vengeance…

…

When one woman was murdered by her husband for this unveiling, a public trial was held in a great mass meeting; the murderer was swiftly condemned and executed.

Strong doesn't shy away from the brutal reality of women's oppression, especially in underdeveloped regions of the USSR where local cultures attempted to stay dominate. It's also not lost on me that the imagery of unveiling women, an imperialist trope in the US, takes on a revolutionary character as the unveiling coincided with the increased economic rights of those local women who always remained at the head of their own liberation. 

The US export of a white, liberal feminism to central Asia has done very little to actually improve the lives of brown women as the battle was not only cultural, but economic. The occupation of these nations by the US provided an ample rebuttal for the existing sexist power structures to challenge social revolution. The tragedy of the 2 decade long occupation of Afghanistan did not progress the rights of women and in fact only worsened it through the subjugation of the whole Afghani people that was only driven out by the Taliban coalition.  

The roar of the factory is in me.
It gives me rhythm,
It gives me energy,

Another aspect of Strong's depiction of the Soviet World is that labor is respected in a way that's simply absent in capitalist nations. On episode 191 the Citations Needed podcast (How Media's Use of 'The Economy' Flattens Class Conflict), the hosts and the guest go over the idea that different classes in society live in different economies. The working class in a capitalist society wants to avoid “the economy” being done to them while the capitalist class wants to weaponize the economy for more extraction. For the working class, selling their labor is as perilous as a predator needing to catch it's prey to not starve that day. In the Soviet world, people's labor is not competed for but organized in a way that benefits the community in a way that's plainly visible. 

Policeman Lily travels fearlessly through dark woods about the city to round up criminal gangs. On one occasion, when she was convoying a prisoner caught setting fire to turf fields, she was set upon in the woods by two of his accomplices and brought back to jail not one criminal but three.

This has to be the most enjoyable chapter to read, Strong's journalism comes out in full force here and she really makes you believe in the dynamic lives of these women, something in 1936, was nearly unheard of in capitalist nations.

The assumption behind the Soviet marriage code is the equal human dignity of both parties in deciding their intimate relations—a decision with which the state has no right to interfere…

…

“To compel a woman either to have or not to have children we would consider an infringement of human rights,” said Dr. Milashkevich. “If she decides to have them, the state gives every assistance…"

The legal framework behind marriage equality almost a century before a similar thing was decided by a unelected lawyer in the US. Plus, the right to an abortion delivered in the most uncomplicated terms that is purposefully not ratified in the US.

even to the point of expulsion, persons who cause social havoc through their sexual instability. But they consider concrete situations, not traditions.

Fuckboys not allowed in the USSR.

My thoughts summarized:

This has to be my favorite chapter of This Soviet World so far. If I were to share an excerpt of this work with others it would be this chapter. The way that Strong is able to connect the Soviet economic system to the revolution in the rights of women is remarkable for its optimism and pride. The journalistic fervor of Strong's writing helps reinforce that the women of the Soviet world chose their own fates and that the state only served as a rising economic tide.