THE SOVIET WOMAN.

Evening Star, Issue 19781, 3 February 1928, Page 4

THE SOVIET WOMAN.

The Aloscow Teachers’ Union will have no doubt that it is leading the times. It is reported to have decided that children should not he allowed to play with dolls, as those represented a bourgeois idea of family life, developed lovo of household duties, and aw:ikencd the love of motherhood. The report might be incredible if we had only the woid for it of a Riga correspondent—Riga is a long way from Aloscow —hut it is directly attributed to the columns of ‘The Soviet Woman,' described as a new Bolshevist publication, which is subscribed to (presumably subsidised) b\- the Commissariat of Education “to increase culture among Soviet women.” Information Irom such a source, upon such a subject, should bo beyond suspicion. And the veto after all is not entirely original. Wo remember the offence of that unhappy girl graduate in Princess Ida’s famous college for women who was detected drawing pictures of a perambulator, and, horror of horrors, a double perambulator! Princess Ida’s young ladies were drilled to feel their superiority to, and their independence of, the miserable tyrant Alan. The Soviet’s new social system has no intention of encouraging a war between the sexes, but not even the latest iconoclasts in America could exceed its scorn for marriage as that lias been traditionally recognised. Its new latvs have been n good deal misrepresented. The so-called “ nationalisation of women ” never was national, or more than very strictly local and temporary. But the laws, inspired by a philosophy which prides itself on being crudely materialist, go a long way for the destruction of any sanctity and all the age-honored sentiments that might attach to marriage. To have One wife at Natcliez-under-the-hill And another one here in Pike is still recognised as an impropriety in America. In Russia, apparently, there is nothing whatever to prevent it, so long as the adventurous man can support both and their families, It has been described by a completely noncensorious American writer as “a kind of redress for depriving him of his political rights.” The whole object of the Bolshevist marriage legislation has been to make marriage as little as possible of a tie, except so far as maintenance is concerned. The code which was proclaimed in 1918 discouraged church marriages, but it required that they should ho registered by the State. Divorce, however, was made as easy as possible. If both parties desired it for any reason, and there w'ere no children, it was accorded as a matter of course. The divorce laws were made equal for both sexes; the responsibility of father and mother for the upkeep of their children was made equal, so far as the law could achieve it; and the equality was recognised of legitimate and illegitimate children. A law’ passed just a year ago has considerably widened these liberties. Because it was unjust that the male partner to an unregistered marriage should he immune from any financial obligations that could bo enforced by law, the same recognition was given to “de facto” marriages, when they were demonstrably such, in respect of "those obligations as to registered ones. Some advantages, such as exemption from the draft and the voting privilege for women, still attach to the registered marriage. Conservatism still makes obstacles, even in Russia, for the most out-and-out “reformers.” Abortion, however, is not only -not discouraged; it is made, in special circumstances, an activity of the State. The latest code wms denounced in some quarters as an encouragement of polygamy. But the women delegates, in the final committee by which it was passed, voted unanimously for it. The Aloscow Teachers’ Union, in its scorn of motherhood and of housewifely duties as ambitions for women, probably goes a little further than all hut the most extreme “ reformers,” even in Bolshevy. The fruit of its ideas could only be the same as that which Sir Austin Eoverel noted as proceeding from the “wild oats” theory—“ a pretty thin crop in the third generation.”