ABSTRACT
The situation of women in the USSR is paradoxical: despite the country's ideological and legal commitment to full equality, women clearly suffer a de facto lower status. To gain some understanding of this special situation, one has to reach back to pre- revolutionary times and then review the present-day peculiarities point by point. Russian women were deprived of voting rights at all levels, from a voice in the peasant mir to a vote in the consultative assemblies of the early twentieth century. Divorces were next to impossible to obtain, and children of divorce "belonged" almost automatically to their fathers. Equal pay for equal work is the rule, but women are far from occupying equal positions with men and consequently, on the average, receive lower salaries. Thus in medicine women prevail among lower-paid general practitioners, while men predominate in surgery. In agriculture, women constitute the bulk of manual laborers, while men tend to be tractor drivers, brigadiers, and technicians.
