TOIL, TERROR, AND TRIUMPHS

^1930–53

Joseph Stalin was one of the most successful tyrants of the twentieth century. His government built the Soviet industrial base, defeated the Axis armies, and pushed the Soviet Union into the ranks of the superpowers. Women were crucial to all these endeavors. They made up the majority of workers entering the labor force in the 1930s. One million of them fought in World War II, and millions more kept manufacturing going behind the lines. After the war they worked in the rebuilding effort. Women also did most of the housework and childrearing.

These decades saw the Soviet program of women’s emancipation reach the majority of Soviet women. Education grew rapidly, social services expanded, and the message that women were now men’s equals was insistently broadcast. Women moved into occupations previously closed to them and moved up within the sectors in which they had been working since the nineteenth century. Women’s activism–their participation in public institutions, particularly participation aimed at achieving social, political, or cultural change–continued, propelled by a new generation that took seriously the proclamations of women’s equality. Assertive women pushed past gender prejudice to claim a place in pioneering ventures in construction, frontier settlement, and aviation. As in the past, however, most women made lower wages than men and very few were promoted into the top ranks of the professions or the government. They were missing entirely from the highest ranks of the leadership.

Official gender values solidified in the 1930s as well. The regime propagated ideals of femininity that combined Bolshevik feminism with an updated cult of domesticity. Women were to be free and equal participants in the society, supportive wives, and nurturing mothers who taught their children to be model Soviet citizens. Some women from the younger generation found this vision empowering. Others, especially the old, tried to preserve what they had long believed in.

For most Soviet women, the 1930s were an ordeal. Those who lived in the cities coped with the perennial difficulties of low wages, unsafe working conditions, inadequate social services, shortages of consumer goods, and crowded housing. In the countryside, peasant women suffered the assault of collectivization and struggled to rebuild agriculture in its aftermath. Women in city and countryside also fell victim to the depredations of Stalin’s police. Then came the war. Men predominated among those killed by their own government and by the Axis powers, and the loss of so many of them intensified the hardship in women’s lives. It also made women’s work in the industrial construction of the 1930s, the maintenance of the economy during the war, and the reconstruction thereafter that much more crucial.

The Thirties