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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.1 (2003) 91-92



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Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia. By Wendy Z. Goldman (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002) 294pp. $60.00 cloth $23.00 paper

Using "gates" in her new book as a metaphor for the state's efforts to shape and control the composition and behavior of the working class during the frenzied Stalin Revolution, Goldman argues persuasively that "the construction of the Soviet working class cannot be understood apart from the deployment and contribution of women" (279), who by the mid-1930s composed roughly 40 percent of the country's industrial workforce. In making a compelling case for the importance of gender to understand the Soviet 1930s, Goldman draws on central state and party archives and makes judicious use of the Soviet press. She demonstrates the intended and unforeseen consequences of the state's telescoped industrial process, which unfolded against a backdrop of forced collectivization of agriculture, widespread migration, nagging shortages in the cities, and related social ills.

The book begins with a survey of women's roles in Soviet industry between 1917 and 1929, a period in which working women suffered inordinately from unemployment, which the party represented as the consequence of their largely unskilled status, not of male discrimination. As it turned out, economic necessity and needs of state, rather than working-class feminism directed by Zhenotdel, the party's women's department, liquidated in 1930, challenged the party's thinking—and changed the status of women workers. As a labor shortage intensified in 1930, 2.3 million new workers poured into the workforce and, in 1931, another 6.3 million. Many of them were women: Inflation and a fall in wages drove urban women into the factories so that families could make ends meet, thereby enabling the state to accumulate capital for further investment and to assuage its fear of the consequence of peasants flooding the cities.

The author next offers a close reading of the heretofore-unstudied "Five-Year Plan for Female Labor." Although the report was never implemented, the state nevertheless achieved the document's aim of regendering the Soviet economy from above by integrating women into [End Page 91] the workforce through segregation. Traditionally female industries became entirely so, and women moved into designated professions in male industries. Deep cultural prejudices against women influenced these developments, as did Moscow's inability to impose its will in the provinces.

Yet change came. Peasants made up the majority of new workers in 1930 and 1931 but not during the second five-year plan, when the party implemented a recruitment policy that favored urban women (who would not tax limited housing and other resources) over more demanding (and potentially unreliable) peasants. This strategy coincided with the introduction of draconian labor laws and passport policies in 1932 designed to close the gates of the working class once again. As a result, women became the sole source of incoming workers in 1932 and 1933.

Goldman writes convincingly, but hers is more a detailed political history of industrialization and of state policy between 1930 and 1932 than the "first social history of Soviet women workers in the 1930s" (i). Although the opinions of female party activists resound clearly, the voices of ordinary women laborers remain surprisingly muted. Hunger drove them into the workplace, and the party opened the gates because it needed their labor. However, the author's conclusion that unlike men, women "never accepted the gender hierarchy of the factory as 'natural'" is questionable (229). Embedded in a larger cultural universe that enables and constrains, women's attitudes are the complement to, not the opposite of, male prejudice.

 



Donald J. Raleigh
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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