The union’s educational campaign was meant to reshape domestics to fit them into the proletarian mold. The union encouraged domestic workers to develop themselves through reading and writing, as well as participation in socialist leisure activities and revolutionary memory initiatives. This chapter demonstrates that ideas about class and gender fundamentally shaped the project of turning domestic servants of the old days into the “New Soviet Domestic Workers,” empowering them, but simultaneously limiting their agency. Domestic servants were subjected to the top-down cultural enlightenment program of the labor union because they were viewed not only as the least developed among the proletarians, due to their peasant background and their gender, but also as being in the closest proximity to their petty bourgeois employers. The labor union’s disciplinary approach, however, provided space for domestic workers to engage creatively with the official discourse and use it to claim a place in revolutionary society.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the recognition of the societal value of domestic service affected some aspects of domestic workers’ rights but not others. It analyzes debates around the 1926 law on domestic service and the effects it had on the domestic workers’ ability to resolve conflicts with employers in court or mediation. Domestic workers’ labor rights were limited by the new law to make their labor more accessible to employers: written labor agreements were no longer mandatory and there was no compensation for overtime work. Yet, the state was reluctant to limit domestic workers’ access to their employers housing after termination of contract because female homelessness was closely associated with prostitution. The new law put domestic workers at a disadvantage compared to other workers, which, together with continuing valorization of “productive” labor, made domestics seek employment opportunities outside domestic service. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the effects labor laws have on paid domestic labor and testifies to the importance of government regulations and protection.

The low status of domestic service in the Soviet hierarchy of labor undermined efforts to politicize domestic workers through union mobilization. The appeal of “productive” work inspired domestics to use their activism as springboard for careers outside of domestic service rather than for organizing their peers. Domestics’ reluctance to engage with the union only confirmed the long-standing suspicion that domestic service fostered “lackey’s souls” rather than conscious proletarian selves. This chapter provides insight into the problem of marginalized workers that have largely been excluded from organized labor. While the difficulty in organizing domestic workers is often negatively affected by their vulnerability and dependency on employers, the low status of housework in the gendered hierarchy of labor poses a different challenge as it conditions household workers to invest in changing careers rather than strengthening their labor organization.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift in the understanding of domestic service from a problematic institution intrinsically connected to inequality and exploitation to an acceptable practice in the 1920s. These early conversations revealed the two main tensions in the understanding of paid domestic labor after the revolution. The first involved class. While quick to reimagine domestic servants as domestic workers, the Bolsheviks struggled to articulate a coherent position on the class affiliation of their employers. Even though employment of household workers did not constitute exploitation in the strictly Marxist sense, the practice had a distinctly petty-bourgeois character in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. The second tension had to do with gender. The Bolsheviks had no resources to fulfil their vision of socialized housework but still sought to mobilize urban women for work outside the home and for political life. Rather than encouraging redistribution of labor in the home, the state saw employment of female migrant peasants with no professional qualifications in Soviet homes as an acceptable solution to the problem of housework.