FEMALE UNEMPLOYMENT AND PARTY CHOICES

The limits of the Communist Party’s commitment to women’s emancipation became apparent in the early 1920s, when its leaders tried to restore the shattered economy and integrate hundreds of thousands of former soldiers into the peacetime workforce. They ordered factory and office managers to run their operations more efficiently, which many interpreted as permission to replace female workers hired during the war with men returned from the army. At the same time, the government trimmed the civil service, putting still more women out of work, and cut funding for health care and other social services. Women who were laid off remained unemployed longer than men, because fewer of them had the job skills that were in high demand and also because managers preferred to hire men who, they believed, were more qualified and deserving. By 1923, women made up 70 percent of the unemployed in the Russian and Ukrainian republics of the Soviet Union; they remained the majority of those seeking work for the rest of the decade.⁵⁴

Male workers replaced female ones across Europe after World War I and World War II as well, because women were seen as temporary employees who should yield their places to male breadwinners when the emergency passed. And yet, it seems odd that the Soviet government, which preached that women had to be in the paid‑labor force in order to be emancipated, threw them out of work in the 1920s, then made their lives still more difficult by cutting benefits. This cruel inconsistency occurred because the country’s destitution limited the government’s options and because communists differed among themselves about how to achieve women’s emancipation, and indeed about what emancipation entailed.

The party leaders believed that their primary objective was the creation of a modernized, socialized economy, one that was highly productive and fair in its distribution of goods and services. Emancipation of women, the elimination of religious and ethnic bigotry, communal living, and all the other communist projects of liberation were important and could be promoted by government laws and programs. Their achievement, however, depended on economic reconstruction. Social services would have to receive less attention if, in the judgment of the decision‑makers, those programs took resources away from industrialization. So the government, committed to providing daycare for all children, then funded only a handful of centers.

The priorities set during the NEP years were also influenced by gender assumptions that party leaders were loath to acknowledge. These men believed, with good reason, that their political base lay among the men of the working class, and so they put a priority on hiring men. Behind this political decision was an assumption, rarely voiced but widely held, that men would be the leaders of the new society. Women could contribute and should be given opportunities. They deserved the emancipation promised them by an enlightened, benevolent male leadership. But they would have to be patient.

We should note that such attitudes were widespread among many liberationist groups in the twentieth century. Organizations as different from one another as the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Zambian United Independence Party encouraged women’s participation in support roles under male leadership. Those parties that achieved ruling power did not recruit women to the top leadership, although many, especially the communist ones, promoted women’s rights and expanded educational and employment opportunities. It was also common for women to hold higher offices in these organizations before the parties came to power than afterward. Being beleaguered, needing the help of everyone willing to lend a hand, seems to promote fidelity to principle and weakens gender norms. Having power has opposite effects.⁵⁵

For all their shortcomings, Lenin, Trotsky, and other first‑generation party leaders were far more committed to women’s emancipation than many younger, lower‑ranking communists. Throughout the NEP years and thereafter, the men who led the provincial and local levels of the party, government, and economy sabotaged policies designed to promote gender equality by employing the stalling techniques developed by peasants and bureaucrats alike under the tsarist system. When the central government issued orders not to lay off any more women, which it did repeatedly in the NEP years, factory managers ignored the directives. Trade unions declared their resolve to set up training programs for women, then did nothing. Moscow lacked the power and the will to enforce its instructions, and so the few attempts made to counter female unemployment in the 1920s withered on the vine.⁵⁶

THE ZHENOTDEL

The party leadership did support the Zhenotdel. Kollontai, leader of the department from 1920 to 1922, refused to refrain from criticizing policies she disagreed with, and so was fired in the winter of 1922. Her successors were more circumspect and successful. By the mid‑1920s they had built the department into a network of thousands of operatives, most of them young women from the middling and working classes. Through periodicals, internship programs, and a network of local, regional, and national meetings, the zhenotdel communicated the party’s message of women’s emancipation to tens of thousands. In 1926–27, for example, 620,000 women attended zhenotdel conferences.⁵⁷

Zhenotdel workers served as advocates for women as well. They worked with staff from government agencies dealing with issues of particular concern to women, such as adult education, health care, and job training. They publicized the failures of local leaders to follow orders that would benefit women and the social evils that fell most heavily on women, such as unemployment, prostitution, alcoholism, and wife‑beating. They conducted a wide‑ranging discussion of gender norms that remains very current today. One typical series of articles in the Bolshevik magazine Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker) in 1926 asked the question, “Can a woman be a steelworker?” The answer was a resolute “Yes!” Zhenotdel spokespeople asserted that women should train for any job they were physically capable of doing. They also called for an ambitious program of affirmative action, arguing that issues of greatest consequence to working women would not be addressed until women served on trade union boards and in factory management, and until the government established training courses that would qualify women for the better‑paying jobs. They discussed how women could manage their family responsibilities and their jobs. They considered ways to transform conjugal love, so that husbands would treat wives as equals.

ALEXANDRA ARTIUKHINA (1889–1969)

The Zhenotdel’s most effective leader was Alexandra Artiukhina, a textile worker from central Russia. She grew up in a family of activists: her mother was a member of the textile workers’ union; her uncle was a Socialist Revolutionary. Artiukhina herself joined the union in 1907 and the Social Democrats in 1910. She soon became a Bolshevik feminist, and in 1914 was an editor of Rabotnitsa. In 1917 she helped revive it, and in 1923, after working with her husband away from Moscow, she moved to the capital and joined the Zhenotdel. In 1925 she was appointed its head.

Under Artiukhina’s leadership the department extended its operations across the Soviet Union. Artiukhina herself became a forceful spokesperson for Zhenotdel feminism. For example, she opposed the production of electrical appliances in 1930, because she thought such things would chain women to housework. “It is better,” she declared, “to suffer now with the old dishrags, flat irons, and frying pans, in order to have the means and strength to throw into the construction of socialized institutions–cafeterias, nurseries, kindergartens, and laundries.” Artiukhina also argued for affirmative action programs that would promote women to the leadership of the party, the economy, and academe.⁵⁸

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF FEMALE ACTIVISM IN THE 1920s

Artiukhina was an extraordinary woman in charge of an extraordinary organization. For the first time in history, a ruling political party was sponsoring a thorough critique of patriarchy and encouraging women to challenge gender customs. The party leadership’s commitment to women’s emancipation, its shortcomings notwithstanding, was very progressive, particularly in the context of 1920s Europe. The women in northern, Protestant Europe had gained the vote by the early 1920s; those in Catholic countries and most of the Balkans were still waiting for it. Civic and legal inequality and discriminatory educational and employment policies persisted everywhere. Furthermore, Western feminist movements had shrunk, as their leaders cast around for new issues to focus on and a wave of political conservatism swept the continent.

Soviet Russia was at the forefront of women’s emancipation in the 1920s because of the Communist Party leadership’s willingness to implement the Social Democratic program drawn up in Germany in the 1890s. That willingness in turn was as much a product of Russian history as of communist ideology. The tsars had put changing women’s situation on the reform agenda, the intelligentsia had kept it there, and female activists–professionals, feminists, and factory workers–had carved out spaces for women in the public world. During NEP, the intelligentsia continued to discuss the woman question. Architects, economists, educators, sociologists, and other professionals, many of them women, documented discrimination in the workplace and the hours women spent on housework, researched evolving sexual mores, considered ways to combat sexism in the classroom, and advocated policy‑making that took women’s needs into account. Female professionals worked on women’s issues in the ministries in charge of education, health care, and social welfare. Women also continued to serve in the professions. Among these women were many feminists from the pre‑revolutionary era, including the physicians Pokrovskaia, Shabanova, and Shishkina‑Iavein.⁵⁹ The work of all these women had the support of the Communist Party leadership, because the men had imbibed intelligentsia ideas about the importance of women’s emancipation before the Revolution and because there were female activists within the party and the intelligentsia lobbying them, doing the research, and creating many of the programs.

The weaknesses of both the Zhenotdel and the intelligentsia activists were rooted in Russia’s past as well. They, like the feminists of the pre‑revolutionary years, were dealing with an autocratic government, and they achieved what they did because they persuaded powerful men to back them. The most well‑placed of these women were the communists, who were obligated to take orders from the leadership and propagate the party line. They could not accuse the leadership of making choices that hurt women. Instead, they criticized low‑ranking officials for not carrying out orders or workers and peasants for being sexist. These charges, being generally true, did not ruffle the feathers of the Zhenotdel’s bosses, but did remind them that the party’s promises remained only partly fulfilled.

Zhenotdel leaders were particularly dependent on the men at the top because they had so little support lower down in the party. Communists in regional and local organizations thought the department was spreading feminist ideas and taking money out of their budgets that they could put to better uses. Some female communists agreed, arguing that women party members should work with male communists to develop socialism, which would emancipate women. Communists who felt this way refused to support Zhenotdel projects and transferred Zhenotdel workers to other assignments. Artiukhina and her colleagues, therefore, had to rely on the central party leaders just to keep the department alive.

Building support beyond party ranks was also difficult. Young people in the cities were receptive because the urban environment remained, as it had been before 1914, the place where traditions were weakest. The peasants were more resistant, and although the Zhenotdel had greater success with rural women in the 1920s than it had had during the civil war years, working in the countryside remained a daunting task. Many peasants, particularly male and female elders, were hostile not only to the Zhenotdel but to communists in general, whom they perceived as exploiters who seized grain without paying for it and dragooned men into the army. Such peasants took their antipathies out on the young Zhenotdel workers who ventured among them. Like the midwives who had gone to the countryside in the nineteenth century, the women of the Zhenotdel were often shunned, verbally abused, and driven from the villages.

THE UNVEILING CAMPAIGN

The most violent confrontation between Zhenotdel workers and defenders of patriarchal traditions occurred in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan in the late 1920s. Zhenotdel leaders believed that the Muslim women of Central Asia–Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan–were the most oppressed women in the Soviet Union. The central party leadership agreed, and so, in the early 1920s, it authorized the Zhenotdel to reach out to Central Asian women by organizing clubs, literacy classes, manufacturing workshops, and cooperative stores staffed by and catering to women. It also outlawed such traditional practices as bride price, child marriage, marriage by capture (forcing a family to consent to a marriage by kidnapping the prospective bride), polygamy, and wife‑beating. Soviet marriage law, which emphasized the independence and equality of bride and groom, was to take the place of these customs.

These were radical changes, made all the more unsettling to Central Asian people because the communists’ tsarist predecessors had not meddled with local gender mores. Discussion of the woman question in the pre‑revolutionary period had been confined to the very small Central Asian intelligentsia, and it had been cautious, concerned mostly with the importance of educating girls. When the communists began talking about new family laws and the Zhenotdel began its work among women, therefore, many Central Asians were first astonished, then outraged. In 1925–26, party leaders in Turkmenistan mollified the public by making divorce more difficult to obtain and overlooking the payment of bride price. In nearby Uzbekistan, communists took a more principled, more confrontational course. In 1927, they instructed the Zhenotdel to persuade Uzbek women to take off their veils and they ordered party members to have their female family members lead by example.⁶⁰

By the time the Zhenotdel undertook its unveiling campaign, Europeans had a long history of attempting to change the family customs of the peoples they conquered. In the Americas, they had imposed their marriage laws on the natives. European women throughout the colonial world had instructed native women in the cult of domesticity and, after feminism developed, educated them and promoted their independence, as the Zhenotdel was trying to do in Central Asia. In the pre‑revolutionary decades, as we have seen, Russian women had done such work in Siberia and the Caucasus. These were not minor endeavors, of interest only to the women involved; they were part of the imperial project of undermining local cultures and those patriarchal privileges that the Europeans considered uncivilized.

The communists shared with the imperialists they despised a conception of themselves as liberators, who had the welfare of the native people at heart. Perhaps it was this perception that led party leaders in Uzbekistan to gravely underestimate the possibility of serious resistance to unveiling. Why would women not welcome the chance to cast aside their full‑length cotton robes, over which they wore horsehair veils that extended from the top of their heads to their waists? Since the veil had long been seen by Europeans and by Muslim reformers as the most visible sign of Muslim women’s oppression, Zhenotdel workers and party leaders believed getting women to remove it would also have great symbolic importance. So did reformers in nearby Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iran, who were also sponsoring unveiling campaigns in the 1920s.

The veils and heavy robes played a more complex part in the lives of Muslim women than the critics recognized. Rabia khanum Sultan‑Zade, an Azeri woman whose mother unveiled in the 1920s, summed up this complexity decades later when she said that the veil was “both a symbol of oppression and a symbol of protection, a tribute to custom and probably… a habit.” Uzbeks believed that it was sinful for women to go outside their homes uncovered, and women who broke this prohibition risked loss of reputation and violent retribution. Rather than walking the streets uncovered, they were supposed to spend most of their lives within the family compound, doing the bidding of the senior members of the family. When they became senior members themselves, they could order around younger women. A family’s honor depended on its women meeting these standards of female virtue. Encouraging women to unveil, therefore, was encouraging them to defy the authority of male and female elders and to shame the entire family. The communists knew this. Indeed, they were deliberately seeking to undermine the power of senior Uzbeks, particularly the propertied ones. They had already made major land reforms and were planning steps against the Muslim clergy when they launched the unveiling campaign.⁶¹

The campaign sparked a furious response from women as well as men. Matriarchs forbade their daughters to have anything to do with the Zhenotdel and ostracized families whose women had unveiled. Neighborhood women banded together to beat up offenders. Enraged Uzbek men, some of them lower‑ranking communists, were still more violent, assaulting, raping, and murdering at least two thousand Uzbek women and Uzbek and European Zhenotdel workers. Some of the corpses were mutilated. Clergy whipped up the frenzy by denouncing unveiled women as sinners, and people opposed to communist rule turned their fury on the defenseless. When it became clear that unveiling was very dangerous, most women who had unveiled covered up again.⁶²

The party leadership responded by toughening criminal penalties for attacks on women and by sending out the police. Most perpetrators escaped prosecution because witnesses would not come forward for fear of retaliation and because some local officials supported, even participated in, the assaults. Marianne Kamp has argued that violence against women diminished only in 1929 when the party launched the collectivization of agriculture, and resistance against the communists turned its focus on the agents of those policies.⁶³

THE END OF THE ZHENOTDEL

Despite its difficulties, the Zhenotdel played an important part in creating and institutionalizing the Soviet program of women’s emancipation. The department took its message to millions of women across the nation and became a major voice in the discussion of the woman question in the 1920s. It mobilized people to set up daycare centers and factory lunchrooms that relieved women’s domestic burdens. The Zhenotdel also was influential beyond the boundaries of the USSR, when communist parties elsewhere established women’s departments of their own. One of the first was the Chinese Communist Party, which created a women’s department within a few years of its founding in the 1920s. In the decades following World War II, communist women’s departments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America scored many of the same successes and struggled with many of the same problems as the Zhenotdel.

Ironically, most of these organizations were set up after the Zhenotdel had been abolished. In 1930, over heartfelt protests from Artiukhina and Zhenotdel workers across the country, the department’s work was transferred to Agitprop, the agitation and propaganda department of the Communist Party. The party leadership justified the closing of the Zhenotdel by declaring that women’s emancipation was so advanced in the Soviet Union that the department was no longer necessary. The truth was that the leaders had finally accepted the argument that the Zhenotdel was a waste of resources. The country was now embroiled in the First Five‑Year Plan, a massive effort to industrialize rapidly that had begun in 1928. Folding the Zhenotdel into Agitprop was one of several measures taken in 1930 to streamline the party’s organization so that it could better manage the challenges ahead. The Agitprop officials to whom work with women was entrusted allowed it to languish.

Zhenotdel activists did not disappear, however. Many continued to lobby, in their new jobs, for attention to women’s concerns. Artiukhina, who had once been a textile worker, became a national official of the textile workers’ union and remained a staunch advocate for working women. She and other Zhenotdel veterans also passed their ideals on to younger women. The main Zhenotdel publications, Krest’ianka and Rabotnitsa, continued as well to propagate the principles of women’s emancipation, Soviet style, and to publicize the difficulties in women’s lives. Consequently the Zhenotdel’s feminism remained alive throughout the Stalinist period.