Cuba's Attack on Women's Second Shift 1974-1976

Abstract

As the first generation of Marxist theoreticians wrestled with the woman question, two men, Frederick Engels and V. I. Lenin, emphasized women's incorporation into social production and the transformation of domestic economy into large-scale socialist economy. It took a woman, Clara Zetkin, to bring up the obvious immediate way to emancipate women from their barbarous drudgery men's participation in household chores. A generation later and hemisphere away, Fidel Castro spurs on socialist Cuba1 to change both the objective factors of social organization of housework, of which Engels and Lenin spoke, and the subjective factors involving attitudes of men and women toward the division of labor. By 1974 much progress had been made in both areas; as women entered the work force in large numbers, social services catered to the needs of working mothers, and men became accustomed and even proud of women's accomplishments in the cane fields and factories. But persistent problems began to alarm Cuba's leaders. The biggest problem for women was the shift, or sobrecargo, familiar to women in many countries, whereby women carry their full eight-hour workday load and then return home to virtually all the domestic chores and child-rearing responsibilities. Cuba began perhaps the world's first direct assault on the second shift with the drafting of a Family Code in July, 1974. Among other items, the Code would require men to do half of the housework and share equally in education and care of the children.