ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how professionals believed domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning should be organised in a developed socialist society. By the 1970s, the optimism of the previous decades, which foresaw the full-scale socialisation of all byt processes, had faded. Experts increasingly acknowledged that a fully-socialised service industry was unattainable in the imminent future. Women continued to spend excessive amounts of time on household chores, and easing this burden for working women remained a central Party objective in the new stage of socialism. Professionals envisioned two primary paths forward to address this issue: the ‘cooperative’ and the ‘consumerist’ paradigms. Both perspectives endorsed choice and individual agency in the consumption of byt. The last section of this chapter addresses the Party’s attempts to alleviate the Soviet woman’s ‘double burden’ – her dual responsibilities in the workplace and in the domestic sphere. This question played an important role in considerations of familial relations under developed socialism.
