Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Tanzania: Socialist Development Experiences

Abstract

The degree to which alterations in the relations of production that may be part of socialist development strategies affect the productive and reproductive activities of peasant women are examined. The discussion based on the experience of the Soviet Union China Cuba and Tanzania is concerned with the extent to which the productive structures determine the interplay between womens reproductive activities (those related to childbearing child care and family maintenance) and their role in social production (or in waged employment outside the household). All 4 of the societies have embarked on programs of collectivization. Their objective is to establish an agricultural sector independent of individual smallholdings to reduce private property and to socialize the means of production in order to establish the state farm the cooperative or the commune as the unit of production. The governments of Cuba China and the Soviet Union have both assumed that womens involvement in agricultural production is necessary for the success of their rural development programs and emphasized that womens entry into the waged labor force is an important precondition for improving womens position in society. In Tanzania women had always performed most of the field labor. At this time women make up a substantial proportion of the collective and private agricultural work force in all 4 societies. Policies that could reduce the time and energy peasant women expend in domestic labor have been introduced in all 4 societies. In the Soviet Union Cuba and China the government intention was to socialize domestic tasks by establishing public and community services. Their success in this area has varied. Community services available to women are inadequate to meet the demand and are unevenly distributed in favor of the cities. In Tanzania the socialization of public services has been of less concern. In each of these societies the peasant women have been expected to enter the waged labor force and to simultaneously continue to service and maintain the household. Inadequate resources have been set aside for reducing the reproductive and domestic responsibilities of individual peasant women in these countries. None of these societies has achieved a total alteration in the relations of production. A substantial private sector has survived in each. The experience of the Soviet Union China and Cuba demonstrates that ideological beliefs based on womens supposed inferiority and the sexual division of labor can survive radical changes in the relations of production and in the material circumstances of women. The primary problem confronting women in societies undergoing planned socialist development programs is that policies concerning women are often viewed as derivative from the broader socioeconomic and political strategies for change.