Gender and politics in Soviet Russia: Working women under the new economic policy, 1918-1928. (Volumes I and II)

This dissertation examines the relationship between issues of gender and political practices in Soviet Russia in the years 1918 to 1928. It analyzes four main areas in the intersection of gender and politics: (1) the Bolshevik Party's uncritical adoption of the prerevolutionary "woman question" (i.e., the problem of women's secondary standing in society); (2) the role of unexamined gender stereotypes during the Civil War; (3) the introduction of the New Economic Policy, its effects on women's position in society and their responses to it; and (4) the conflict that emerged between the women's sections of the Communist Party and the trade unions over efforts to organize women workers and bring them into the public sphere.;Based primarily on the examination of periodical literature and archival materials from trade unions in urban Russia in the 1920s, this study explores the ways in which women's issues and questions of gender more broadly proved useful to the Bolsheviks in the production of new political values and in practical attempts to organize the working class.;This work suggests that the New Economic Policy, far from being the "lost alternative to Stalinism" that many historians have suggested, represented a difficult moment in Soviet history, one fraught with gender tensions. Women activists, in particular, experienced the political and economic practices of this period as a double bind. On the one hand, strict financial austerity meant cutbacks in organizational resources and programs for women, plus soaring female unemployment. On the other hand, women were now expected to place more emphasis than ever on organizing other women and persuading them to join the Communist Party.;In the end this work concludes that attempts to introduce "feminism from above" perpetuated rather than diminished many preexisting gender stereotypes and often made the female masses a pawn in political conflicts between various organs of the government and public sphere. Gender could not be divorced from politics. The woman question could not simply be "solved.".