The new proletarians: Women industrial workers and the state in postwar Poland, 1945--1957

This dissertation is a study of women workers in the textile and coal mining industries in Poland, 1945-1957. It examines the diverse experiences of women as well as the state's construction of a female proletariat and the changing policies regarding the equality of the sexes in the context of postwar reconstruction, stalinist industrialization, and eventual de-stalinization. Despite communist regimes' rejections of "natural laws" in favor of social engineering, the communist leaders in Poland did not shy away from using the concept of "natural" difference between the sexes to justify its policies. The notion of sexual difference as fixed and located in the physical body was integral to the postwar workplace, where a woman's place continued to be defined by her biological function.; This work provides a unique perspective on state socialism in a non-Soviet environment, where local traditions and political culture became components of an experiment in socialist modernity. My analysis focuses on two different textile factories in central and eastern Poland, and on the coal mines of Upper Silesia, to illustrate how application of state policy unfolded on the local level. My findings suggest that the state's directives were not always implemented on the local level. Instead, male managers, skilled workers, and local communities exercised a significant degree of control over gender relations on the shop floor. The case of women coal miners in Upper Silesia, for example, shows that the stalinist experiment to open up skilled and semi-skilled jobs in heavy industry to women generated considerable resistance on the part of male workers, who insisted on preserving their dominant position in the hierarchy of skills. During de-stalinization in 1955-1957, the party-state, using female reproductive function as a justification, removed women from most of these positions. Reform-minded intellectuals and politicians depicted stalinist employment policies as an assault on "natural" gender roles. They endorsed maternal identity for women and the significance of sexual difference as an inherent part of a healthy socialist system free of stalinist distortions.