Revolutionaries and rebellious radicals always resort to caricature when describing the biblical family. They seek to hide their radicalism around emotional, hyperbolic appeals for liberation from oppression. Here, one of the key architects of the Soviet state mocks the “family hearth” and household duties by minimizing its significance and comparing it to slavery (“galley labor”) in order to advance government education and socialism.

“The October revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to woman. The young government not only gave her all political and legal rights in equality with man, but, what is more important, did all that it could, and in any case incomparably more than any other government ever did, actually to secure her access to all forms of economic and cultural work....

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.”

Trotsky