About
Nine hundred workers in seven factories were asked to keep a diary. Between 1965 and 1968, at iron and steel and machine-building plants in Dnepropetrovsk, an aluminium plant in Zaporozhye, flax works in Kostroma and the jute works in Odessa, 550 women and 350 men wrote down what they did with their hours. Leonid Gordon and Eduard Klopov then counted.
This is what the counting produced, and it is one of the few books of its kind whose argument can be checked. The methodology is stated openly and can be criticised: the sample was drawn in two stages, typical shops chosen with the help of management and the social organisations, then every tenth worker taken from a list, and the authors concede the first stage is not random while defending the second. They give a confidence statement, and they restrict their claims to the cities studied.
They belong to a real discipline with real ancestors, and they name them in the first footnote-Strumilin, whose time-budget work goes back to the 1920s, then Prudensky, Patrushev, Grushin and Kharchev. Soviet sociology of everyday life was not invented for export. It had been running for a decade and had a habit of finding things.
What it finds here is the double shift. The data show working women spending between two and two and a half times as much of their time on housework as men, with correspondingly less opportunity for everything else-and the authors publish the numbers rather than quarantining the problem abroad, as the companion volumes of the period did.
Translated by John and Kristine Bushnell.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
This is what the counting produced, and it is one of the few books of its kind whose argument can be checked. The methodology is stated openly and can be criticised: the sample was drawn in two stages, typical shops chosen with the help of management and the social organisations, then every tenth worker taken from a list, and the authors concede the first stage is not random while defending the second. They give a confidence statement, and they restrict their claims to the cities studied.
They belong to a real discipline with real ancestors, and they name them in the first footnote-Strumilin, whose time-budget work goes back to the 1920s, then Prudensky, Patrushev, Grushin and Kharchev. Soviet sociology of everyday life was not invented for export. It had been running for a decade and had a habit of finding things.
What it finds here is the double shift. The data show working women spending between two and two and a half times as much of their time on housework as men, with correspondingly less opportunity for everything else-and the authors publish the numbers rather than quarantining the problem abroad, as the companion volumes of the period did.
Translated by John and Kristine Bushnell.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.