Industrialization and the Stalinist gender system: Women workers in the Soviet economy, 1928-1941

This study examines the gender dynamics of the Stalinist industrialization drive of the 1930's, and argues that the Communist party's pursuit of "socialism in one country" involved a significant reorganization of Soviet gender ideologies and sexual divisions of labor. The chronic labor shortages generated by the first Five Year Plan, like the American and British labor crises during World War II, led to mobilizational campaigns designed to recruit women into industrial jobs.;Although Bolshevik feminists worked to emancipate socialist women from household labor, the party's Five Year Plan for Women's Labor mobilized Soviet women into the wage-labor force without greatly reducing their private domestic work. Recruiting female workers in this manner allowed the Communist party to underwrite the social and economic costs of industrialization by intensifying women's work in the spheres of both productive and reproductive labor. This dissertation narrates the decisions and developments that created this "double burden" for Soviet women and analyzes the structural forces that led them to shoulder it.;Over the course of the 1930's, the party's policies concerning female labor, divorce, abortion, and social services such as child care gradually coalesced to create a regime of productive and reproductive labor which constructed gender roles largely according to what the party leadership perceived as the demands of the industrialization process. The influx of women into industry during the early 1930's allowed the industrialization process to continue as planned, but women's increased participation in productive labor soon led to dysfunctions in the reproduction of the labor force, as birth rates dropped and divorce, abortion, and labor turnover rates rose dramatically. By the mid-1930's, the party and industrial leaderships began to compensate with stricter labor discipline measures and "great retreat" policies which attempted to enforce women's labor in the sphere of generational reproduction by prohibiting abortion and making divorces more difficult to obtain.;A central dynamic in the "Stalinization" of Soviet society, the development of this new gender system was guided by party leaders' understanding of the "socialism in one country" doctrine, which permitted them to transform the organization of total social labor to the advantage of the industrialization program and the disadvantage of Soviet women.