Just Like Any Other Worker? Class and Gender in the Regulation of Domestic Service in the Early Soviet Period

Abstract

Abstract In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was the site of the first state-led effort to reimagine domestic servants as workers. Yet this effort is absent from the global history of domestic service. Analysis of Soviet discourse on paid domestic labor, as well as cases of domestics challenging their employers in courts and arbitration, reveals that assumptions about class and gender informed the implementation of labor laws. While the employment of domestics did not constitute exploitation in the Marxist sense, the practice was widely viewed as petty-bourgeois in the early years after the revolution. As a result, domestic workers were very likely to win cases against their employers. By the mid-1920s, however, the state became aware of the role domestic workers played in freeing up the labor of their employers. The recognition of housework as socially useful labor led to the reimagining of domestic service as a practice compatible with socialism. Employers were no longer seen as exploiters by default, making it much harder for domestic workers to win cases against them. However, this shift did not change preferential treatment of domestics in cases involving access to housing, as Soviet courts feared that homeless women would inevitably turn to prostitution.