Women and the Service Sector

Abstract

In the chapters on the time budgets of Soviet households and the more detailed discussion of leisure, the data repeatedly showed that for women, time may be the scarcest commodity. The existence of the double burden (dvoinaia nagruzka) in the Soviet context has a curious configuration. Women are considered the equals of men in terms of their participation in the labour force and in many ways this reflects an enlightened view of the rights and capacities of both sexes to be fulfilled as workers. It is the realisation of the revolutionary goal that women should be equal participants in ‘social production’. But we have demonstrated that women have dual employment in the labour force and at home. It might also be added that there are ways in which life has become more complex for Soviet women than it was 50 years ago. We have seen that women are primarily responsible for supervising children’s homework and going to parent—teacher conferences.¹ In an educationally acquisitive society this is not a task taken lightly. In addition, the typical Soviet family has an increasing amount of leisure time and in 80 per cent of the families the woman takes chief responsibility for organising the family’s free time.² The extraordinary number of hours women work, playing two roles, is not simply determined by traditional roles assigned through the centuries by biology and acculturation.