WORKING‑CLASS WOMEN

Some peasant women joined the tide of men surging into the cities in the late nineteenth century. They headed out in small groups for places where they had friends who could help them find housing and jobs. This female migration grew from a trickle in the 1880s to a substantial flow by 1910. The percentage of women among the peasants living in Moscow increased from 40 percent in 1871 to 65 percent in 1902; the corresponding figures for St. Petersburg were 30 and 48 percent. In Warsaw, women constituted a slight majority of migrants.³¹ Need and opportunity drove these female pilgrims. Young women sought to work for a few seasons, then go home and marry. On the other hand, widows, most of whom left the villages because they could not survive there without their husbands, came to town intending to stay. There were also some married women, although a smaller percentage than elsewhere in Europe, who moved to the cities to join their husbands. It was commoner, as we have seen, for wives to remain in the countryside with their children.

DOMESTIC SERVANTS

Many of the female migrants became servants. Domestic service was the greatest employer of urban women all over industrializing Europe in the nineteenth century, because the rising incomes of middle‑class families enabled more people to hire household help and because housework was easy for a peasant newly arrived in the city to learn. In 1890 there were 87,777 women working as domestic servants in St. Petersburg, an increase of 59 percent since 1864. The number of men in domestic service had remained constant over those decades. In 1900, servants were a majority of the blue‑collar female labor force across the empire; the 1897 census recorded that 1,621,755 women were working as servants. This percentage fell slightly in the next decade, as better‑paying factory and service jobs opened up.³²

Most servants worked as the sole employees of families of moderate means who lived in apartments. Single‑family houses were common only in smaller cities or towns. In an era before electrical appliances and flush toilets, the maintenance of clean, comfortable homes required the combined energies of servant and female employer. For the servant, the pay was low, days off were rare, and some bosses were stingy with food. Few servants had rooms of their own; most slept in a corner of the kitchen or under the stairwell. “The ‘masters’ paid a pathetic pittance and demanded that they give them their whole souls,” wrote P. Lapteva, a servant in St. Petersburg in the early 1900s.³³ Most servants were also isolated from other workers, who might have provided support, and were in constant contact with employers who had the power to abuse them.

The souring of relations between servants and employees is documented by the fact that servants were more likely than other working women to be accused of theft by their employers. Perhaps employers blamed them unfairly when things went missing. Perhaps domestics who stole were more likely to get caught than were other kinds of workers. Servants were also subject to sexual exploitation by the families they worked for. At best, such contacts, when discovered, led to the servant’s being fired. At worst, a woman became pregnant before she was let go. Bearing the stigma of unwed motherhood, she would then find it difficult to get another position. Not surprisingly, female servants did what they could to end unwanted pregnancies. Of all the occupational groups in urban Russia, domestics had the highest rates of conviction for the crimes of infanticide and hiding the body of a newborn. They were also the women most likely to turn their babies over to foundling homes.³⁴

Luckier, more careful servants became valued employees, and, sometimes, deep affection developed between them and the families they served. If a woman was a trusted member of the family, she achieved secure employment, at least as long as she was able to do her job, and emotional connections to replace those she had left when she moved to the city. Her subordinate position may not have bothered her as much as it would have a woman from more privileged origins, for lower‑class women in late imperial Russia were treated as inferiors in whatever line of work they followed. Working for an upper‑class family was at least familiar; it was what the serfs had done for generations.

FACTORY WORKERS

Women were a large and growing presence in Russia’s industrial labor force in the late imperial period. In the 1880s, they were 22 percent of factory workers in the industrializing regions of central Russia. Their largest employer was the textile industry: 37 percent of its workers were female. Other industries with large proportions of female workers were papermaking (36 percent) and tobacco processing (47 percent). These percentages increased in the following decades. In 1914, 59 percent of textile workers were women. An estimated 662,620 women worked in all of Russia’s factories that year, making up 32 percent of the factory work force. Their numbers had increased 59 percent since 1901. By contrast, female workers were only 19 percent of the German industrial labor force in the 1910s, and American women would not reach 20 percent until 1920.³⁵

There were so many female factory workers in Russia because Russia was poor. The enduring struggle of the peasants to sustain their growing families drove many women to the factories. Managers, believing that women were more docile, soberer workers than men, were happy to employ them in work that they were physically strong enough to perform. Many believed that women were also better at tasks requiring fine manual dexterity, such as cigarette manufacturing, and at traditionally female work, such as sewing. They could also be paid less than men. Rose Glickman has estimated that in Russia, factory women’s wages were one‑half to two‑thirds of men’s, because they received lower wages even when they did the same work as men and because they were banned from holding more skilled, better paid jobs. All these exigencies and motives prevailed elsewhere in Europe, but in the more prosperous regions, rising wages for male workers enabled more married women to leave the paid‑labor force. Russian manufacturers also built factories in the countryside, particularly around Moscow, which made it possible for women to walk to work every day while continuing to live in their home villages. By 1900, roughly half of factory workers labored in these rural enterprises.³⁶

Everywhere, in country and city, wages and working conditions were among the worst in Europe. Shifts of thirteen hours, six days a week, with very short breaks to eat and to use the toilet, were common. Factories were poorly ventilated, filled with loud, dangerous machinery and harmful chemicals, and lacking adequate water supplies, toilet facilities, and medical care. Until 1903 few companies provided disability insurance; in that year the government required employers to fund such insurance, but permitted them wide latitude in the awarding of benefits. Pension plans were non‑existent, as was unemployment compensation. The availability of work fluctuated with the business cycle, and workers were fired at the whim of the bosses.

For its part, the government lacked the will to improve the situation. An 1885 law that outlawed night work for women and children is a case in point: the fines it imposed for violations were low; inspections to assess compliance were episodic; and management found ways around the regulations. The same combination of bad laws and worse enforcement undermined an 1897 law that limited the workday for adults to 111/2 hours. Consequently, youngsters aged twelve to fourteen routinely put in nine‑hour days in textile mills in the early twentieth century. And women, toiling twelve hours or more per shift, grew old before their time. L. Katenina, a physician who studied female factory workers in Kostroma province in 1913, reported, “A woman worker of fifty who has worked at the factory thirty or more years frequently looks ancient: she sees and hears poorly, her head trembles, her shoulders are sharply hunched over. She looks about seventy years old.”³⁷

Russian employers were much like those in nineteenth‑century Manchester or Pittsburgh. They had a huge pool of workers at their disposal and many unskilled jobs to fill, so they could keep wages low and workers dependent. The Russian government, like governments elsewhere, wrung its hands periodically over the workers’ hardships, but usually acted to support businessmen in the belief that building the economy was the prime imperative. When workers began to strike in the 1870s, and then organize unions in the 1880s, the government responded with force. By issuing regulations it did not enforce and stifling worker activism, the government guaranteed that the workers would eventually blame it, as well as the factory owners, for their miseries. That led to a combative, easily radicalized labor movement.

Working‑class women in Russia, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, were less willing than men to get involved in strikes or unions. To explain this quiescence, Russian revolutionaries and liberals, like their counterparts elsewhere, declared that women were “backward,” by which they meant that they were ignorant, religious, and conservative. The truth was more complicated. Working‑class women were at the bottom of the labor hierarchy. If they protested, they would be fired. If fired, they might be blacklisted, which meant that no other factory would hire them. Being permanently unemployed would leave them destitute. This was no groundless fear; in 1912 there were fifteen thousand female beggars in Moscow.³⁸ Moreover, many single women in the factory workforce saw their employment as a short‑term necessity that would end when they married. Why take risks when one was going to leave after a few months or years? As for married workers, they were too burdened by domestic responsibilities to have time for labor activism, and they were still more likely than single women to fear losing their jobs because they had children to support.

Women also avoided unions and strikes because men wanted them to. Many male workers did not even want women working in the factories, since their presence, it was believed–with some justification–brought down wages and cost men jobs. Leadership in the workplace and in the labor movement was seen by men, and many women, as a male prerogative. In the fall of 1905, female workers did join men in a massive general strike that engulfed Russia’s major cities, and a few women served on the St. Petersburg soviet, the strike coordinating committee. In the following years the government legalized unions, but this did not change gender arrangements. Even the overwhelmingly female textile workers’ union had male leadership. These attitudes prevailed everywhere in the industrializing world. As a consequence, even in the far more progressive United States of 1920, women, then 20 percent of the industrial labor force, were only 8 percent of union members.³⁹

SERVICE WORKERS

Service workers were the third largest category of blue‑collar female employees in urban Russia. They included laundresses, cooks, waitresses, charwomen, dressmakers, seamstresses, tailors, salespeople, and market vendors.⁴⁰ The laundresses, seamstresses, and dressmakers worked the longest hours under the most difficult conditions. Bathed in steam floating off vats of boiling water, laundresses stirred and lifted heavy loads of wet clothes. Garment‑makers bent over sewing machines or did hand sewing in poor light. Their work was seasonal, so they were often laid off for weeks at a time. Although the majority of women in these jobs were peasant migrants to the city, a growing number had been born in the cities–a sign of the growth of the urban working class.

Another sign of the times was the increasing number of saleswomen. Working in a shop became a prized occupation for working‑class women, because it was less grueling than factory or sweatshop jobs. It was also considered more prestigious: saleswomen were literate, they dressed well by comparison with factory workers, and they were taught the manners and tastes of their customers. Russia was later than France and Britain in hiring women as shop assistants; only 7 percent of its workers in that occupation in the early twentieth century were female. These women were more likely than factory workers to have been born in the city, and their wages, although only half those of male shop assistants, were higher than those of domestics and many unskilled factory workers.⁴¹

LIVING CONDITIONS

Living conditions for the urban poor were as bad as the working conditions. Construction of new housing lagged far behind the growing demand, so many people crowded together in fire‑trap, bug‑infested tenements and barracks. Others built shantytowns in the suburbs. Outdoor latrines served as toilets. Water for washing and cooking had to be bought from vendors or drawn from neighborhood wells, then hauled inside. Rents for even these dreadful accommodations ate up workers’ pay. Social services that might have eased the difficulties, such as affordable medical care and daycare for children, were virtually nonexistent. Highly underdeveloped also were sewer systems, garbage disposal, street lighting, fire and police departments, and urban transit. The government’s efforts to improve conditions were typically half‑hearted and ineffectual. And so the workers, especially the women, who were responsible for housework, developed coping skills for the cities. Polina Novikova grew up among such women, and, in her old age, she wrote about them.

POLINA NOVIKOVA (1896–at least 1974)

Novikova had been born in a village. Her father was a textile worker in Tver who, after some years, moved his family to the city. Polina’s mother became a textile worker too, as did Polina when she was twelve. Before that, she worked as a babysitter. Looking back many decades later on her childhood, Novikova remembered the barracks in which her family lived as a place of hardship and mutual support.

^{Workers standing in line at a soup kitchen in St. Petersburg, circa 1905. Among such people, Polina Novikova spent her childhood. Picture Collection of the New York Public Library.}

POLINA NOVIKOVA

Novikova described, years later, her work in the textile factories. To put her wages in context, it is useful to know that a 1908 study found that an unmarried worker living on her own needed a minimum of nineteen rubles a month to cover food and housing costs.¹

“The work in the factory was hard: long shifts, dust, heat, no time off. Women sometimes gave birth at the looms. Women often got sick from the exhausting work and the poor nutrition; they died early. Women workers rarely lived more than forty years. My first boss died from consumption.

I signed up at the Zaloginskii factory at twelve. I worked with other girls sorting rags and scraps in a damp, dark cellar. I received three rubles a month. At fifteen they assigned me to train at the loom, and at sixteen I became a textile worker. Textile workers at the Zaloginskii factory received eight to ten rubles a month. When a woman worker complained to the director about the low pay, he replied:

‘Where there’s a swamp, there’ll be frogs. Where there’s work, people wanting work will be a dime a dozen.’

After getting some experience, I moved to the Berg factory, where, working three looms, I received twelve to thirteen rubles a month.”

SOURCE: P. A. NOVIKOVA, “TRI SESTRY,” BEZ NYKH MY NE POBEDILI BY (MOSCOW: POLITIZ‑DAT, 1975), 44. TRANSLATED BY BARBARA CLEMENTS.

1. Glickman, Russian Factory Women , 115.

Two or three families huddled together in one room, divided from one another by cotton curtains. There were cradles over the beds; on the beds were dirty sheets, potatoes, washtubs–there wasn’t anywhere else to put them. There was one table for two families. While one family ate, the other one waited in the hall. Day and night there was stink, stuffy air; the bedbugs, the cockroaches, tormented us. We could only buy the cheapest cuts of meat once a month. We usually boiled plain cabbage soup or made “mess soup,” water with bread and onions crumbled up in it….

Despite such awful conditions, the workers valued the barracks. They… had central heating and a common kitchen with a big Russian stove, where you could cook anytime. When they left for the factory, the women workers would put a pot on the table [in the kitchen] with potatoes or cabbage soup. The cook would put it on the stove, for which each family paid her ten kopeks a month.⁴²

Novikova was not one of the submissive women workers; instead she spoke up about the ways foremen mistreated women workers. Before long, revolutionaries had invited her to their clandestine meetings in the woods, and she and her sister had thrown in their lot with them. After the Revolution, Novikova worked full‑time for the Communist Party, specializing at first in propagandizing female factory workers.

WORKING WOMEN’S HOUSEWORK

Housekeeping in the cities was less demanding than in the countryside, because women did not have to grow their own food and because they prepared very simple meals, such as the soups Novikova remembered. Women were in charge of laundry and cleaning as well, but as they had few clothes and lived in small spaces, this work was minimal. Many couples did not even cohabit after they married because housing was in short supply and also because employees had to live within walking distance of their work. Public transit, where it existed, was too expensive for the working poor.⁴³

The birth of children increased women’s domestic duties. Most employers granted no maternity leave, so female workers did as their peasant foremothers had done: they stayed on the job until the onset of labor and returned to work as soon as possible after giving birth. Some employers let women bring their babies to the factories and nurse them during breaks, but most did not. Mothers therefore entrusted their children to the care of neighbors, often neighboring children like Novikova. Women who could not make such arrangements left their children alone at home. This unavoidable neglect and the prevalence of diseases in the crowded, unsanitary cities produced mortality rates among poor children that were even higher than in the countryside. Childhood was also shockingly short. Novikova was one of millions of girls who began working as a babysitter when she was eight and then signed on at the factory when she was twelve.

Many female factory workers preferred to quit their jobs when they became mothers so that they could care for their children. In Russia the working class was so poor that only 20 percent of workers’ wives in the first decade of the twentieth century could afford to make that choice. Most of the women in this select group were married to metalworkers, printers, and other highly skilled, relatively well paid workers, but Barbara Engel has found that some wives of poorly paid workers were housewives as well.⁴⁴

Because they had more time to devote to domestic work than did working women, housewives made more comfortable homes for their families, prepared more nutritious meals, and reared healthier children. Many also worked part‑time to supplement the family income. Running a boarding house was particularly popular because women could combine cooking and washing for renters with the work they were already doing for their families. A famous example is writer Maxim Gorky’s grandmother, Akulina Kashirina, who took in boarders after the family’s dyeworks burned down. “My grandmother sewed and got the meals and dug in the garden, bustling about all day long like a huge top driven by invisible springs,” Gorky remembered. Housewives also made handcrafts or took in piecework such as gluing cigarette mouthpieces. Although this extra labor made for long days and earned very little, it helped sustain the family and enabled the wife to stay home.⁴⁵

FEMALE LAWBREAKERS

Some urban women turned to illegal activities to make life easier. Crime in urban Russia was gendered in a pattern common across Europe then and now: women committed fewer crimes than men and far fewer violent crimes. Most of the female lawbreakers in Russia were, not surprisingly, poor, and among those convicted of misdemeanors, many were single young people or widows. The most common offenses were theft, fencing stolen property, dodging taxes, and breaking government regulations, such as the domestic passport laws. Women rarely were accused of felonies such as armed robbery, assault, or murder. When they did turn violent, they kept the crime in the family, killing their husbands, other family members, or newborn infants. Women also fell afoul of laws particular to the Russian Empire. A woman could be charged with “resistance to authorities” if she yelled at tax collectors or police. She could be found guilty of participating in “uprisings” if she protested price increases at the shops or refused to disperse when police arrived to break up a neighborhood fight.⁴⁶

The illegal activity that engaged the most women in late imperial Russia was prostitution. This was the case across industrializing Europe, for the cities were full of recently arrived single women and men far from home. Tens of thousands of prostitutes were plying the trade in Russia by the first decade of the twentieth century. They worked in big and small cities, especially those with army or navy bases. Although prostitution was officially a crime, the government tolerated and regulated it. Other European governments were taking the same approach at the time, because they believed, as Europeans had for centuries, that prostitution provided an outlet for male lust, and thereby kept men from preying on “virtuous” women.

Russia modeled its policies on those of France. In two hundred cities across the empire, prostitutes were permitted to work if they registered with the police and lived in licensed brothels. The madams of these establishments, who had to be middle‑aged women, were charged with maintaining clean, crime‑free businesses. The brothels were inspected regularly and the workers were tested for disease. Those prostitutes found to be infected had to report to hospitals for treatment and quarantine. Because there was very little effort to treat diseased clients, because drug therapies were primitive, and because so many prostitutes operated outside the brothels, the system did not prevent the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea. Nor did it protect prostitutes from abuse by pimps, madams, and customers. Furthermore, Laurie Bernstein has found that even the brothel workers managed to escape supervision by the authorities.⁴⁷

Prostitution in Russia, as elsewhere, was a business of the poor. The well‑appointed establishments that catered to wealthy men and the elite prostitutes who enjoyed discreet lives of luxury were exceptional. Most prostitutes in the brothels and on the streets were young, illiterate peasant migrants to the cities. Their customers were mostly workers, soldiers, and sailors. Since the cities were full of men living away from their families, there was no shortage of customers.

Asked why they become sex workers, prostitutes in Russia gave the same answers as French or English ones. Some said that they had been lured into the trade by persuasive seducers. Others said that they took it up as a way to get through periods of unemployment, then went back to legal work when hiring there picked up again. Among the seasonal prostitutes there were married women who engaged in the trade with their husbands’ knowledge. Still others said that they found the work easier than hauling tubs of wet laundry or tending a thundering cotton loom. It also paid better, and the madams provided plenty of food, drink, and pretty clothes.

The longer women stayed in the demimonde of the brothel and back alley, the harder it was to leave, because of the stigma attached to prostitution. People in Russia believed that having sex for money was sinful and that the woman who sold herself was worse than the man who bought her services. This double standard, common across Europe, meant that prostitutes got little sympathy from other working‑class women. Occasionally, the general hostility would boil over into violent attacks on brothels by people in the neighborhood. Prostitutes themselves appear to have shared some of the disgust for their business. They had very high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction, as well as disease. In 1888, government statisticians reported that 60.5 percent of the prostitutes of St. Petersburg had venereal diseases.⁴⁸ When their physical attractions faded with age and infirmity, some prostitutes learned legal trades or found husbands; some may have returned to their villages or moved to other towns to start over. The less fortunate joined the beggars haunting church steps.

THE BENEFITS OF THE CITY

Poor women’s situation in the cities improved somewhat by the turn of the twentieth century. There were more public elementary schools and Sunday schools taught by volunteers; parents were more willing to let daughters attend them. An estimated 46 percent of urban females aged nine to forty‑nine were literate by 1897, as compared to 13 percent in the countryside. In 1911, girls made up 45 percent of students in primary schools in the urban areas; and in 1914, one‑third of female factory workers could read and write. These skills improved women’s job qualifications and enabled them to negotiate better the transactions of urban life.⁴⁹

Working‑class women were also having more fun in Russia’s cities. They read aloud to one another cheap novels featuring exotic adventure tales and steamy romances. They shared magazines and newspapers. They also enjoyed looking at expensive clothes on display in shop windows and finding treasures at second‑hand clothing stalls in the open‑air markets.⁵⁰ There were parks to stroll in, outdoor puppet shows, theaters, circuses, zoos, museums, and even, on the eve of World War I, movies.