In the mid-1960s, the women of the villages of the Baltics, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine still followed the rhythms of nature’s year, rising before winter dawns to tend the cows, shepherding the ewes and lambs through the hesitant spring, spending summer and fall planting and harvesting. The work was hard and the amenities few because the Soviet government, like its tsarist predecessors, put the peasants last in its priorities. In the 1970s most country folk still did not have central heating or indoor toilets, their stores were poorly stocked, their schools were short of books, and few of their children were in daycare. Progressive change was occurring. Medical care and maternity leave improved, as did wages and pensions. The gulf between city and village continued to narrow, as improved transportation and communication brought the city closer than ever before. Now many women could travel to the larger world or bring it to their villages by turning on the radio. The result was the largest migration of women out of the countryside in Russian history and continuing changes in the attitudes of those who remained in the villages.
EDUCATION AND PARTICIPATION IN THE PAID-LABOR FORCE
Schooling for rural girls expanded in the countryside after World War II. In 1959, only 23 percent of village women had attended secondary school. By 1979, 44 percent of them, and well over 90 percent of those younger than thirty, had. Sixteen percent had studied at an institution of higher education. For the first time in Russian history, many wives in the rural population of the European USSR were better educated than their husbands.23
Better education did not lead to better jobs. The percentages of women among heavy-equipment operators fell in the post-war period despite the government’s continuing efforts to enlist female tractor drivers. There were more female agronomists, biologists, doctors, journalists, and teachers in rural areas than ever before, but women made up a smaller percentage of white-collar workers in the country than in the cities. They never regained the presence in collective-farm leadership that they had achieved during World War II. By 1960 they held 6 percent of top management jobs, a figure that did not change thereafter. Khrushchev sharply summed up the situation at an agricultural conference in Kiev in 1961: “It turns out that it’s the men who do the managing and the women who do the work.”24
Women who were not willing to accept this situation left the countryside for the cities in the post-war years, and by so doing reversed the historic pattern of men migrating and women staying behind. According to the 1970 census, the rural population aged fifteen to thirty in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union was 52 percent male and 48 percent female, at a time when women made up 54 percent of the total Soviet population. Most of the migrants were young, for they had the best job prospects. They did not go because the villages had thrown them out, as did widows in the late nineteenth century. Nor were most of them following men who had already left. Instead they went on their own or with girlfriends, and many apparently went with the blessings of their parents. “Her father and I have spent our whole lives in muck and filth,” declared the mother of one of these young women. “Let Zina do some other work.” Once in the cities the youngest and least well educated peasants found jobs as live-in babysitters, the post-war equivalent of domestic servants. Those with more skills took blue-or white-collar jobs.25
FAMILY LIFE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
In the post-war years, many traditional beliefs and practices died away. Public opinion surveys in the 1960s reported that most peasants believed that people should marry for love and companionship, not economic security. They were also willing to countenance abortion, so by the 1970s there was very little difference in family size between urban and rural people of the European ethnic groups. Because peasants now believed that mothers should devote considerable time to looking after their children and because mechanization had lightened the workload, peasants no longer turned toddlers over to eight-year-old nannies. Nor did they give birth at home, attended by peasant midwives. By 1970 most rural women in the European regions of the Soviet Union delivered their children in medical facilities and maternal and child mortality had declined significantly.26
Patriarchy’s influence was waning too. Rural women of the European nationalities reported to interviewers in the 1960s and 1970s that they enjoyed a greater voice in family decision-making and more respect from their husbands than their mothers had, an improvement they attributed to their being better educated. Another sign of their growing confidence and independence was the fact that they were far more willing to leave bad marriages than their mothers’ generation. The rural divorce rate doubled among the European nationalities in the 1970s, and the majority of those suing for divorce were women. It was still difficult to be a single woman in the countryside, and only one-quarter of peasant marriages ended in divorce, as compared to half of urban ones.27 This disparity notwithstanding, the increase in divorces in the countryside indicated that more women than ever before believed that they no longer had to remain in unhappy marriages.