Women, the State and Revolution

"...a valuable investigation of issues central to the Soviet regime's claim for seven decades of liberating women and fostering freer, more equal relations between the sexes...The book should be read by all serious students of the Soviet period." Choice "Goldman's hard-hitting book traces the reversal of the Bolshevik prerevolutionary vision 'based on four primary precepts: free union, women's emancipation through wage labor, the socialization of housework, and the withering away of the family.' Goldman writes entertainingly without compromising her scholarship." Women East-West "...an admirable examination of the tension between reality and ideal in family policy in the first two decades of the Soviet state...the wealth of detail and extent of analysis make this a useful book for historians of family, family policy and of the early Soviet Union." Susannah Lockwood Smith, WHOM Newsletter "In her intelligent and sympathetic book, Wendy Goldman studies the reaction of the Bolsheviks to what they saw as the 'conservatism' of Russian women, for whom neither migration nor employment had changed their traditional dependence on husband and family...contribute[s] in novel ways to thinking about an old, but fundamental aspect of the Revolution, namely, the extent of the continuity and change across the 1917 divide...should convince sceptics that a study of gender differences can deepen our understanding of the relation between social and political change in general." S. A. Smith, Times Literary Supplement