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Soviet Union [USSR] Roles in Marriage
Most married women in the Soviet Union worked outside the home
in addition to fulfilling their roles of wife, mother, and
homemaker. As in other industrialized countries, women had
difficulty reconciling the demands of career and home.
At home, Soviet women spent more than twice as much time on
housework as men--an average of twenty-eight hours a week as
opposed to twelve--and women resented this. Before marriage, the
average woman was said to have had forty-two hours a week of free
time, but after marriage this number was cut in half. Not
surprisingly, Soviet research has shown that marital happiness was
directly connected to the extent a husband shared in domestic work.
Husbands and wives from the elite tended to share decisions and
housework to a greater extent than those from other social strata.
In blue-collar and agricultural families, the husband was
considered head of the household, although the wife held the purse
strings.
Nationality appeared to be less of an influence on marital
roles than social status and place of residence. By the mid-1970s,
even most Muslim husbands were willing to share in some housework
with their wives; the higher the socioeconomic status of the
family, the more the husband shared the work. In Muslim families
and in other nationality groups where the patriarchal system has
remained strong, the husband was regarded as the head of the family
and made most of the major family decisions. Among younger and
better educated Muslims, however, and in the European part of the
Soviet Union, the husband and wife shared in the decision making,
a practice that may have resulted from the wife's increasing
contribution to family income.
Data as of May 1989
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