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theses

This dissertation examines domestic service during the first two decades of the Soviet regime as a symbol of revolutionary transformation, as gendered politics of labor, and as experience. In spite of the strong association between domestic service and exploitation, the Soviet regime did not ban or shun paid domestic labor; it turned domestic service into a laboratory of revolutionary politics, to ultimately embrace it as an essential part of socialist economy. At the center of the study lies the trope of the kitchen maid that will rule the state – a misquote from Lenin that turned into a call for transformation addressed to “victims of tsarist oppression,” particularly women. During the first decade after the revolution, transformation implied gaining proletarian consciousness. Domestic servants were to overcome their servile mentality and become workers by developing awareness of their labor rights, engaging in union activities and inscribing themselves into the revolutionary narrative. With the onset of the industrialization campaign in the late 1920s, domestic workers were to be transformed once again, this time to join the ranks of industrial workers. The state mobilized domestic workers along with housewives into production, and it nurtured an expectation that paid domestic labor would disappear in the near socialist future. However, once the foundations of socialism were announced to have been laid in 1934, paid domestic labor was proclaimed an important part of socialist economy. Domestic workers were to become skillful and reliable executors of state goals in the home: raising Soviet children, attending to socialist households, and providing workers with rest. At the same time, the older, emancipatory rhetoric of a domestic worker reinventing herself as a production worker retained strong resonances in popular culture. The ambiguous position of domestic service in the Soviet Union stemmed from the contradiction between the rhetoric of women’s emancipation and the gendered vision of labor that defined housework as women’s work. Beyond charting the history of domestic service in the Soviet Union, this dissertation seeks to question widespread assumptions about the inherent connection between modern domestic service and capitalism, and contribute to a global conversation about the place of paid domestic labor under socialism.

ETD_7828

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Alissa Klots

doi:10.7282/T3XP77D9

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.