Abstract
As under capitalism, patriarchy played an important role in consolidating the class relations of Soviet society. Millions of women entered social production, but were marginalised into the most unskilled and lowest-paid jobs. Women became proletarianised, while their domestic burdens remained unabated or grew heavier. They retained almost total responsibility for looking after the home while doing a full day’s labour. In all aspects women were relegated to a subordinate position within Soviet society, a position simultaneously reproduced within the home and at work. It is common to refer to this as women’s double burden, but this terminology is misleading because it implies that these are discrete phenomena, the one merely an accretion to the other. They are not. Rather, women’s positions at work and in the home mutually determined one another. Their subordinate status in the home profoundly affected the attitudes of male workers and managers, so that discrimination against women in jobs and pay seemed completely natural. Conversely, the perpetuation of women in lowpaid, unskilled and heavy manual labour reinforced male prejudice (and women’s own aspirations) about women’s ability to do skilled work or to assume positions of authority, be it in society, the workplace or the household.
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Notes
This chapter is a condensed version of ‘The Position of Women Workers’, Ch. 7 of D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: the Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge, 1992). This extract focuses on women’s industrial employment. For further information on the issues raised here, and for women’s domestic labour, see the full-length chapter. 2 In 1965 there were approximately 37.7 million female workers and clerical employees employed in all sections of the economy, excluding the collective farms. Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR za 60 let (Moscow, 1977), p. 469. 3 S. L. Senyavskii, Rost rabochego klassa SSSR (1951–1965gg.) (Moscow, 1966), p. 223. The one exception was Kirghizia, where, in 1959, 38.5 per cent of native workers were women, whereas women were only 36.4 per cent of all workers. 4 In 1965 trade (which Soviet statistics usually included in the productive sector), services, health, education and other non-productive areas employed 23.8 million people. According to V. I. Starodub, ‘Tekhnicheskii progress i trud zhenshchin’ (Candidate Dissertation, Leningrad, 1966), p. 65, in 1964, 74 per cent of workers and clerical employees in these branches were women. This comes to 17.6 million, or 47 per cent of all women workers and clerical employees (excluding collective farms). Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR za 60 let, pp. 463, 469. Both the size of the nonproductive sector and the importance of women within it grew rapidly over the course of the Khrushchev period. Excluding trade and public catering, it accounted for 15.9 per cent of total employment (including kolkhozy) in 1958, and 20 per cent in 1965. If we include trade and public catering, the 1965 figure rises to 25 per cent. In 1961 ‘only’ 70 per cent of workers and clerical employees in this sphere were women, versus 74 per cent in 1964. Starodub, op. cit., p. 65; Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR za 60 let, pp. 459–60. 5 Itogi vsesoyuznoi perepisi (Moscow, 1962), pp. 98–9. 6 The figures for Sverdlovsk oblast’ are from M. A. Korobitsyna, ‘Zhenskii trud v sisteme obshchestvennogo truda pri sotsializme’ (Candidate Dissertation, Sverdlovsk, 1966), p. 41. The All-Union data come from the following. The figure for textiles is calculated from Table 2.1. In 1960 there were 886,000 workers in Soviet iron and steel; in 1961, 29 per cent of iron and steel workers were women, from which we can estimate a total of 257,000 women, or 2.5 per cent of all women industrial workers. Trud v SSSR: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1968), pp. 84–5; Zhenshchiny i deti v SSSR (Moscow, 1969), p. 107. 7 Itogi vsesoyuznoi perepisi, p. 167. 8 V. B. Mikhailyuk, Ispol’zovanie zhenskogo truda v narodnom khozyaistve (Moscow, 1970), pp. 67–8. 9 N. A. Sakharova, ‘Zhenskie rezervy trudovykh resursov gorodov i rabochikh poselkov Ukrainskoi SSR’ (Candidate Dissertation, Kiev, 1962), pp. 98–101. The year for these data is not given, but they are probably from the 1959 population census. Elsewhere she gives figures from the Occupational Census of August 1959, showing women to be a slightly higher share of some trades: 47 per cent of machine tool operators (including 17 per cent of metal turners), 28 per cent of milling machine operators, and 11 per cent of electricians. Ibid., p. 92.
Korobitsyna, op. cit., pp. 42, 44.
Ibid., pp. 50–1. In light industry the fate of women tool-setters followed a peculiar pattern. In the food industry, where women were a majority of workers, women were 3.9 per cent of tool-setters and tuners in 1959, this rose to 7.0 per cent in 1962, and yet by 1965 there were no women in this trade at all. It was the same in light industry, where the share of women tool-setters jumped from 16.6 per cent in 1959, to a surprising 26.5 per cent in 1962, then falling to 11.7 per cent in 1965. Ibid., p. 50.
This was certainly the trend in engineering, where between 1948 and 1959 the number of tool-setters increased 2.3 times, while the share of women in this trade remained extremely small. Mikhailyuk, op. cit., p. 67.
Korobitsyna, op. cit., p. 48. The share of women on fully automated jobs in iron and steel actually rose in this period, so that by 1965 they were more than half of workers in this category. Yet this accounted for so few jobs in the industry that these women still made up less than 1 per cent of all female steel workers. This same process occurred in non-ferrous metals. S. V. Brova, ‘Sotsial’nye problemy zhenskogo truda v promyshlennosti. Po materialam sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii ne predpriyatiyakh Sverdlovskoi i Chelyabinskoi oblastei’ (Candidate Dissertation, Sverdlovsk, 1968), pp. 108, 110–11. At the same time women were excluded from virtually all skilled trades in Ukrainian iron and steel (where in 1959 they made up 31 per cent of all workers) which did not involve especially heavy or dangerous work: welders, tool-setters, moulders, lathe operators and metal turners (Sakharova, op. cit., p. 103).
According to Mikhailyuk, op. cit., p. 83, for the whole of the USSR 150,000 women were displaced from ore mining, but many were re-employed on heavy physical labour.
Brova, op. cit., pp. 108, 110–11. Although the data for Sverdlovsk oblast’ are the most complete, this trend for women to be marginalised into heavy manual jobs was practically universal. In the engineering industry in 1965, for example, women were 39 per cent of workers, yet they were 55 per cent of manual carters and transport workers and 73 per cent of manual ancillaries. In Leningrad industry in 1962, women made up three-quarters of manual workers on loading and hauling, and 86 per cent of manual ancillary workers. Starodub, op. cit., pp. 60–61.
Brova, op. cit., p. 115; Starodub, op. cit., pp. 63–4, citing Rabotnitsa, no. 7, 1966, p. 10.
A survey of auxiliary jobs in light industry gives the following proportions of auxiliary workers whose jobs were totally unmechanised: loaders — 6 out of 7; controllers — 4 out of 5; factory cleaners — 15 out of 16; transporters — 7 out of 10; packers — 3 out of 4. N. P. Maloletova, ‘Rabochie legkoi promyshlennosti SSSR v 1945–1965gg. (chislennost’ i sostave)’ (Candidate Dissertation, Moscow, 1970), p. 240.
Trud i razvitie lichnosti (Leningrad, 1965), pp. 82–4, 86, 94–5.
Brova, Abstract, p. 10. One of the additional attractions of construction was that it had no night shifts and offered many of its workers accommodation in dormitories. N. M. Shishkan, Trud zhenshchin v usloviyakh razvitogo sotsialisrna (Kishinev, 1976), p. 116.
R. M. Sagimbaeva, ‘Problemy ispol’zovaniya resursov zhenskogo truda (na materialakh Kazakhskoi SSR)’ (Candidate Dissertation, Moscow, 1968), p. 17.
Korobitsyna, op. cit, p. 49.
Starodub, op. cit, pp. 55–6, 111.
Ibid., pp. 149–50. Women industrial workers were not the only ones having to cope with these kinds of conditions. A great deal of work in services was also hard and boring (for example, cleaners, dish washers, pot scrubbers). Ibid., pp. 111–12.
Ibid., pp. 51–2.
Ibid., p. 51.
‘Analysis of the age composition of working women in a number of trades shows that a huge number of them over 40 years old are no longer able to carry on working in their own trade and have to transfer to other, lighter, but lower-paid jobs.’ Ibid., p. 52. In support of her claim, Starodub (pp. 118–19) cites the examples of enterprises in light industry and engineering where improved conditions — particularly noise levels and lighting — were matched by increases in labour productivity.
Ural’skii rabochii, 27 October 1962.
Rabochii klass i tekhnicheskii progress. Issledovanie izmenenii v sotsial’noi strukture rabochego klassa (Moscow, 1965), p. 131; E. Z. Danilova, Sotsial’nye problemy truda zhenshchiny-rabotnitsy (Moscow, 1968), p. 24.
Ibid., p. 25.
Rabochii klass i tekhnicheskii progress, pp. 131–2; N. G. Valentinova, ‘0 psikhicheskikh osobennostyakh lichnosti rabochego, svyazannykh s soderzhaniem truda’, in Sotsiologiya v SSSR, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1965), p. 110; A. G. Zdravomyslov and V. A. Yadov, ‘Vliyanie razlichii v soderzhanii i kharaktere truda na otnoshenie k trudu’, in Opyt i metodika konkretnykh sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii (Moscow, 1965), pp. 188–9.
Danilova, op. cit., pp. 26–7; N. P. Kalinina, Usloviya truda i osnovnye napravleniya ikh uluchsheniya na predpriyatiyakh tekstil’noi promyshlennosti (Moscow, 1969) pp. 12–13;. Starodub, op. cit., pp. 114–17. In one shop of Leningrad’s Kirov textile combine carders tending three machines covered 4 kilometres an hour (ibid., p. 115).
G. N. Cherkasov, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie problemy intensivnosti truda v SSSR (Moscow, 1966), p. 204.
Kalinina, op. cit., p. 20.
Danilova, op. cit., pp. 28–9; Starodub, op. cit., pp. 199–201. This prompted Starodub to call for women in textiles and related branches of light industry to receive the same amount of additional leave time as did workers in iron and steel, non-ferrous metallurgy, and other industries with heavy and hazardous conditions.
Kalinina, op. cit., pp. 10–11, 22–4.
V. I. Starodub, ‘Tekhnicheskii progress — uslovie rasshireniya sfery primeneniya truda zhenshchin’, in Nauchnye zapiski (Leningradskii Finansovo-ekonomicheskii Institut im. N. A. Voznesenskogo), vypusk 27 (1965), p. 225.
Kalinina, op. cit., pp. 13–14.
Moskovskaya pravda, 10 August 1956; Rabochii krai, 23 January 1962, 3 April 1962.
Kalinina, op. cit., pp. 63–4; Statistika byudzhetov vremeni trudyashchikhsya (Moscow, 1967), p. 108. At the Bryansk worsted combine the accident rate on night shifts was 30–50 per cent higher than on day shifts (Kalinina, op. cit., p. 64).
Puti likvidatsii tekuchesti kadrov v promyshlennosti SSSR (Moscow, 1965), p. 84. In an attempt to cut the amount of night work in textiles the regime introduced the so-called ‘Ivanovo Schedule’ in the early 1960s. This was supposed to cut night shifts from seven per month to two.
Kalinina, op. cit., pp. 39–40.
Ibid., pp. 27–8; Rabochii krai, 2 April 1964.
Starodub, Dissertation, pp. 115, 134.
V. Beechey, ‘The Sexual Division of Labour and the Labour Process: a Critical Assessment of Braverman’, in S. Wood (ed.), The Degradation of Work? Skill, Deskilling and the Labour Process (London, 1982), p. 67.
Zhenshchiny i deti v SSSR (1969), p. 86.
Beechey, op. cit., p. 70.
In a number of industrial regions skilled male workers earned sufficiently high wages that women could contribute more to the household budget if they stayed home and tended the private plot than if they took up a low-paying job. Filtzer, op, cit., p. 64.
Starodub, Dissertation, p. 93.
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Filtzer, D. (2004). Women Workers in the Khrushchev Era. In: Ilič, M., Reid, S.E., Attwood, L. (eds) Women in the Khrushchev Era. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523432_3
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