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Essay on Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia
During the Soviet Union's intensive industrialization campaign in the 1930s, the composition and size of the working class was forever transformed due in part to women's entrance into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. By 1935, women made up 35 percent of all workers in industry; between 1929 and 1936, nearly 4 million women (1.7 million in industry) became waged workers; and in 1932 and 1933, men left the workforce as women continued to enter. Women's growing presence in the workforce resulted in a regendering of the Soviet economy, a transformation that, according to historian Wendy Z. Goldman, has persisted to the present day.
In her compelling study of gender and work under Stalinism, Goldman examines why, how, and in what types of employment women gained access to the life behind the "gates" in such notable numbers. I think Women at the Gates paints a complex picture of the industrialization process and changing nature of Russia's working class between the 1917 October Revolution and the end of the Second Five-Year Plan in 1937. Throughout the study, Goldman unpacks the multiple players in the significant transformations that took place. Not only state policymakers, union leaders, and industry managers, but also women workers--a group often overlooked in studies of labor--played an important role in these developments.
Using "gates as a metaphor for policy, or, more specifically, for the state's attempts to define and control the size, composition, and behavior of the working class," Goldman details the opening and closing of those gates to the workforce by state leaders, policymakers, women activists, and workers (278).Women at the Gates begins with an examination of the Communist Party's attempts at guarding the gates to the workforce through labor policies in an effort "to preserve the purity of the working class" in the 1920s.....
