As under capitalism, patriarchy has played an important role in consolidating the class relations of Soviet society. Where women workers were concerned, Stalinism did two things. It brought masses of women into the non-peasant workforce and at the same time attempted to reinforce the family as a centre of authority and patriarchal attitudes. At the height of the campaign in 1936 to overturn Bolshevik family legislation and outlaw abortion, commentators openly identified the strengthening of family relations with the consolidation of the Stalinist order. This same hierarchy was replicated within the workplace. Millions of women entered social production, but were marginalized into the most unskilled and lowest-paid jobs. The two processes reinforced each other. Women became proletarianized, while their domestic burdens remained unabated or grew heavier. They retained almost total responsibility for looking after the home while doing a full day's labour. Their plight was made worse by the poverty of the country, itself exacerbated by the Stalinist elite's deliberate policy of underinvesting in consumer-goods industries, housing, education, and essential communal services like laundries and child care. It is generally assumed that the regime starved these areas of resources because of its near-pathological emphasis on the development of heavy industry. This may have been the conscious motivation behind the planners' decisions, but this policy served one other important function. It would have been extremely difficult to build up the nuclear family as an authoritarian structure if society had provided the resources to free women from much, if not most, of their domestic burden.