Goldman Wendy. Women, the state and revolution: Soviet family policy and social life. 1917-1936

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. — 368 p. — ISBN10: 0521458161; ISBN13: 978-0521458160 — (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Book 90)When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they believed that under socialism the family would "wither-away." They envisioned a society in which communal dining halls, daycare centers, and public laundries would replace the unpaid labor of women in the home. Yet by 1936 legislation designed to liberate women from their legal and economic dependence had given way to increasingly conservative solutions aimed at strengthening traditional family ties and women's reproductive role. This book explains the reversal, focusing on how women, peasants, and orphans responded to Bolshevik attempts to remake the family, and how their opinions and experiences in turn were used by the state to meet its own needs.List of tablesThe origins of the Bolshevik vision: Love unfettered, women free
The first retreat: Besprizornost' and socialized child rearing
Law and life collide: Free union and the wage earning population
Stirring the sea of peasant stagnation
Pruning the "bourgeois thicket": Drafting a new Family Code
Sexual freedom or social chaos: The debate on the 1926 Code
Controlling reproduction: Women versus the state
Recasting the vision: The resurrection of the familyConclusion Stalin's oxymorons: Socialist state, law, and family