[In the following essay, Elshtain describes Soviet Women as a fascinating and illuminating view of Soviet life.]

Marx didn't have a whole lot to say about women. One passage from his essay, “Private Property and Communism,” acquired a totemistic status among Marxist feminists. Marx argued rather murkily that the nature of a society's relationships between males and females demonstrates the “extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man's whole level of development.” That can take you as far as you want to go, mostly in all sorts of utopian directions along the lines of creating a social world in which human essences have become natural and sex differences are dissolved into some generic humanness.

Engels took up the challenge of women and, he claimed, stated what Marx himself would have said had he gotten around to saying it. His text, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, became the rallying focus of subsequent Marxist feminisms. An apt subtitle for Engel's effort would have been, “Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Proletarian?” He decided she could be; indeed, already was, by drawing an analogy between reproduction and production and finding in the relations between the sexes the ur-class relation. In order to be truly liberated, women must first become real proletarians—wage slaves—and thus part of the universal class. Once the laws of history have worked themselves out, production for private profit ended, class antagonisms melted away, and reproductive functions taken over or subsumed by the sphere of production or society in toto, then, and only then pure sex-love will reign supreme. People actually believed this, but contemporary Soviet women are not among the gullible, as Francine Gray's fascinating new book reveals.

Whom one meets in the pages of Soviet Women are angry, exhausted men and women pretty much at the end of their tethers. Forget the new Soviet man; forget the new Soviet woman. What one finds—and anyone who has visited the Soviet Union can verify Gray's depictions with the evidence of her own eyes and ears—are human beings under terrific pressure from old habits and continuing traumas, state-induced. Gray hits the reader immediately with powerful images: to Western feminists the Soviet Union may be a patriarchy. To Russian women, it is a world in which women dominate and in which women suffer.

On the one hand, one encounters a culture in which men are incessantly put down, mocked and scorned by women. Teachers tend to favor girls “because their behavior is more closely modeled on the Soviet system of social values—on communitarian obedience, orderliness, altruism, dutifulness,” according to one of Gray's respondents, Maria Osorina, a Leningrad psychologist and analyst of “The Powerful Woman Syndrome” in the Soviet Union. Even as Soviet men were killed off by the millions in World War Two and felt most powerfully the full force of the State's decrees against a public life and anything resembling an independent politics (it was overwhelmingly men who were convicted under the Soviet “parasitism” laws, that is, failure to work at a state-sanctioned job), women ruled over a domestic sphere to which they could retreat.

Soviet writer Tatyana Tolstaya has noted: “Home, hearth, household, children, birth, family ties, the close relationship of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters: the attention to all details, control over everything, power, at times extending to tyranny—all this is Russian woman, who both frightens and attracts, enchants and oppresses. To imagine that Russian women are subservient to men and that they must therefore struggle psychologically or otherwise to assert their individuality vis-à-vis men, is, at the very least, naive.” Women, by contrast to men, ruled over their domestic kingdoms and “never suffered an equal sense of helplessness.” According to Gray, “the overwhelming majority of even the most progressive Soviet intellectuals,” including, or especially, the women, have “only hostile feelings toward the concept of a ‘women's movement.’” They are trying to figure out how to shore up the men; how to deal with such dismal realities as the fact that, despite the desperate need for solid responsible role models, young men with university degrees in pedagogy are uniformly rejected for work in children's homes—“always by the decision of a female bureaucrat”—because men are not “needed” for such jobs. Of the five thousand children's homes in the Soviet Union, only one has a male director. Unsurprising, then, is Gray's conclusion: “After dozens of evenings spent with distraught, henpecked men and with a dismaying abundance of superwomen, I reached the conclusion that the Soviet Union might be as much in need of a men's movement as of a women's movement.”

There is, however an “on the other hand,” and it goes like this. Despite the formidable willfulness of Soviet women, their domination of domesticity, including household finances, and their reign over emotional relations, life for Soviet women is hard. Very hard; indeed, almost unbelievably grim by Western standards. The Soviet Union has the highest abortion rate in the world: the average Soviet woman will have seven abortions in her lifetime. There are between five and eight abortions for every live birth. Health care is abysmal. The Soviet Union ranks fiftieth in infant mortality. Gray found that women have “little or nothing to say about the conduct of their labor.” She heard one horror story after another from Soviet women about “the terrors of their birthing experience.” One Xenia Velembovskaya told Gray, “The brutality of our maternity wards is the best contraceptive method we have; very few of us ever want to go through it again.” Gray's visits to Soviet maternity wards confirmed what she was told. With shockingly few exceptions, maternity wards were shabby, dirty, understaffed. Infants routinely come home with staphylococcus infections from aseptic births in deteriorated hospitals.

Children's health continues to suffer in overcrowded, dingy day-care institutions. Stories abound of day-care workers adulterating children's rations so they can make off with milk and meat; “of centers so understaffed that their supervisors keep windows open throughout the coldest days, deliberately inducing respiratory infections in order that more children might stay home.” One of the most radical actions a Soviet woman can take is to stay home with her children. “Defying the system by sitting home, refusing to be the prolifically versatile national heroine, dropping out of jobs and day-care programs: Housewife with many children as radical dissenter—that, I mused at the visit's end, would strike many American women as a most curious model.” There is more. ‘Liberated’ into the world of wage labor, women are ninety-eight percent of the nation's janitors and street cleaners, ninety percent of conveyor-belt operators, thirty-three percent of railroad workers, and over sixty percent of highway construction and warehouse crews. Much of it is heavy, often damaging physical labor. It is low-paid—nearly half of Soviet women are employed in unskilled manual labor or low-skilled industrial work. And half of their salaries go for food. Even those in skilled jobs—lots of women are teachers and doctors—find the work low-paying and lacking in prestige. Small wonder that the notion of an “equal right to carry hundred-pound sacks of grain or bricks” rings hollow and invites only bitter disdain from Soviet women. Add to lousy pay and long hours “the nightmares of Soviet women's daily life”—and Gray details the food shortages, the “eternal queues,” the constantly ill children, the dearth “of the most basic household implements or services” and passive, sullen husbands—and you have a vision of dystopia.

There remains, of course, the famous Russian hospitality; the generosity (often enough) to visitors; the humor to persevere however rotten things get, and you find a picture of tough human beings in a tough way of life. The Soviet women who have commented on Gray's book say it hits the mark, uncannily, sympathetically. Tolstaya writes that Gray “did not force herself on Russian women with ready-made, one-size-fits-all stereotypes; she didn't wave preconceived formulas for the reorganizing of Russian women's lives at them and didn't exclaim, ‘Horrors! Shame!’ as have—in all sincerity—many of her more simple-minded compatriots.” Bravo, then, for this brave and touching volume which all but the most ideologically unwavering (in other words, simple-minded) will find illuminating: a testament to the human spirit in all its most noble and unsavory aspects.