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Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia

As the first densely researched and vividly argued social history of Soviet women workers in the 1930s, Goldman’s monograph fills a long-standing gap in the existing historiography. Until the early 1990s, due to the lack of access to archives in the former Soviet Union, researchers were completely dependent on published sources, such as journals, newspapers, memoirs, and monographs. In these circumstances, too often researchers reiterated the Soviet image of themselves as the creators of the first planned economy in history. The totalitarian school of history credited the Stalinist state with possessing an uncanny degree of efficiency, as well the power to enforce compliance from every level of party and state organizations. Thus Soviet scholarship claimed that by the 1930s the state had solved the 'woman problem', by instituting wideranging affirmative action policies. As a result Soviet women were highly educated, fully employed, and enjoyed unprecedented professional success in every field of human endeavour.(1) Western scholarship argued to the contrary that when the Bolsheviks abolished the Zhenotdel in 1930, it signaled the repudiation of all feminism whether of the Marxist or liberal variety. While women were employed in industry and agriculture in unprecedented numbers, they were relegated to inferior positions, and rarely advanced to positions of power in either the Soviet government or the Party. At the same time retrograde social policies were instituted such as the ban on abortions, and the valorization of the role of woman as the mainstay of the nuclear family. They were responsible for both the professional success of the husband and the socialist upbringing of the children. Soviet women were yoked to a double shift that spelled the end to all feminist dreams and utopias.(2)