Both US and Soviet drafters made the male-headed family the site of welfare

Evidence

The explicitly masculine subject ‘himself’ appears twice in the declaration, as the subject of social welfare (Article 25) and as the subject of the right to work (Article 23). Previous scholarship has tended to explain away what one historian calls this ‘oversight involving a worker and “his family”’ as an aberration from the universalist thrust of the declaration, whose social and economic rights could just as easily have been expressed in ‘neutral, nonsexist terminology’. Such explanations obscure the delegates’ shared commitment to the family as the primary site of welfare and social reproduction. The centrality of unwaged women’s labour to the Fordist settlement in the United States was matched by the Soviet Union’s dramatic reversal of post-revolutionary policies such as easier divorce, equal rights for women in marriage, and collective cafeterias and childcare centres designed to free women from housework. In stark contrast to the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai’s argument that ‘communism liberates woman from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier’, the Soviet delegates at Lake Success emphasised the ‘protection which the State must give the home’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 185

Categorization

• XREF: The Soviet reversal of Kollontai’s feminist policies parallels the reader’s knowledge of how revolutionary movements domesticated women’s liberation — connects to critiques of state socialism’s gender conservatism.
• SEED: Article idea: ‘the family as welfare infrastructure’ — how both capitalism and state socialism converged on making the unpaid nuclear family the primary site of social reproduction.