BOOK LAUNCH | Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor
Alissa Klots (Pittsburgh)
- Beginning:
- Tuesday, 09 June 2026 13:15
Abstract:
Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Alissa Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.
Alissa Klots:
She is associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and a historian of the Soviet Union with the focus on gender, labor and aging. Her first book, Domestic Workers in The Soviet Union: Women’s Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor came out with Cambridge University Press in 2024. The book was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History by the American Historical Association and the Held Prize for the Best Book in Women’s and Gender Studies by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. It was also named one of the best books on Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics of 2024 by Foreign Affairs. Her most recent publication, “A Heart-to-Heart Conversation: Debating the Limits of Adolescent Friendship, Love, and Courtship in 1960s Russia” was published by the Journal of the History of Sexuality in the fall of 2025. She is currently a Humboldt Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, working on her second monograph, preliminary titled The Restless Generation: Soviet Retirees and the Meanings of Active Old Age, 1950s-1970s. She is also co-editing a volume Growing Old in the Modern World: A Global History for Routledge and contributing a chapter on the history of marriage age in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for the Oxford Handbook on Age and Aging.
Cooperation:
Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies
Venue:
GS OSESUR, Landshuter Straße 4, 93047 Regensburg, Room 017 (ground floor)