Soviet "Civic-Minded Women" in the 1930s: Gender, Class, and Industrialization in a Socialist Society

During the mid-1930s, the wives of Soviet industrial managers, engineers, and technicians began organizing into volunteer groups devoted to improving the living and working conditions at the factories where their husbands worked. Soviet historians generally have treated these obshchestvennitsy (civic-minded women, or female activists) as evidence of the social stratification that occurred during the Stalin era. But analysis of the socioeconomic context in which these women emerged suggests that this women's "movement" played an important part in resolving a variety of "reproductive crises" which had arisen as a result of the rapid industrialization campaign of the 1930s. By emphasizing the "culturedness," or "refinement" (kul'turnost'), of these elite wives, the Soviet regime assigned the obshchestvennitsy a hegemonic role in defining the socialist culture of the future. This "civilizing" function of the wives' movement parallels philanthropic activities of bourgeois women during similar crises associated with industrialization of European nations and the United States.