After the official transition to socialism in the mid-1930s, the state continued to rely on urban women’s labor outside the home. With socialization of household tasks still a distant dream, domestic service was reimagined as an integral part of the socialist economy, signaling a major change in the understanding of housework’s place in Soviet society. The domestic worker became a reliable house manager, responsible for the maintenance of the Soviet housing stock, a dedicated nanny who raised Soviet children, and a professional caregiver who indirectly contributed to her employers’ productivity by taking care of their needs at home. Yet, the recognition of domestic workers as equal builders of socialism only solidified the gendered hierarchy of labor. Urban men and women working outside the home had the privilege of transferring the responsibility for housework to peasant migrants or women from other marginalized categories. As a result, many Soviet citizens continued to view domestic labor as degrading.

This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.