EDUCATION AND PARTICIPATION IN THE PAID‑LABOR FORCE

The post‑war decades saw many significant improvements in Soviet women’s lives. Among the most important were those in education. There were differences from region to region and between various ethnic groups, but by the 1970s the majority of Soviet women had at least a high‑school education, and females made up half of all students in higher education.¹⁰ This was a substantial accomplishment in a society where, sixty years earlier, most women had been unable to sign their names.

Women’s work in these decades changed as well. By the 1960s, the majority of Soviet people were living in urban areas, in part because of a huge migration of peasant women out of the countryside. Most of these women went to work in blue‑collar jobs, replacing urban women who moved into white‑collar jobs. By the mid‑1960s, women were 75 percent of employees in the civil service, educational, medical, and retail sectors, and 45 percent of industrial workers. Women all over the European world in the second half of the twentieth century were making the same choice, because white‑collar work, although often as poorly paid as blue‑collar, was less grueling, brought higher status, and was easier to combine with family responsibilities. Factory work for Soviet women was made still more difficult by the fact that, as in the Stalin period, automation came first to industries with a predominantly male work force and to jobs held mostly by men.¹¹

Women’s presence in managerial and administrative positions and in the professions increased steadily, putting the Soviet Union far ahead of Western European and North American nations. In 1974, for example, 70 percent of Soviet physicians were women, compared to 7 percent of American ones.¹² Thousands of Soviet women worked as architects, judges, lawyers, scientists, and university professors. Similar advances were made by women in the Eastern Bloc and in China, the communist governments of which had imported the Soviet program of women’s emancipation. The disparity between the capitalist democracies and the socialist nations began to diminish in the late 1970s as second‑wave feminism broke down discriminatory practices and inspired young women to enter the professions, but it did not disappear.

The gender hierarchy of the Soviet workforce established in the Stalin years persisted. It too was adopted by the Eastern European client states, and so women across the region, who enjoyed such a significant edge over Western women in gaining access to the professions, still bumped up against a “glass ceiling.” Male engineers and architects headed the big construction projects while female ones made the blueprints. The majority of judges were women, while the more prestigious position of prosecutor went to men. Women dominated sectors of the economy–the arts, education, food processing and sales, medicine, textile and clothing manufacture– that were poorly funded and therefore poorly paid. Furthermore, the demands of the double shift meant that married women in the Eastern Bloc did not have time to upgrade their job qualifications by taking training programs or correspondence courses. They also chose jobs that would be less demanding of their time; such jobs, as in the West, were lower‑ranking and lower‑paying. As a consequence, in the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet women earned 60 to 70 percent of what men earned, a disparity little changed since the 1920s. It should be noted that the same gender gap in wages prevailed in the West in these decades. In the United States in 1965, women were earning 59 percent of men’s wages.¹³

The glass ceiling was still lower in the ruling communist parties of Eastern Europe. Female membership in the Soviet party stood at 26.5 percent (4.5 million women) in 1981. Most of these women worked in local committees running community outreach activities, a role similar to that played by female members of political parties in the Western democracies. Such work had been assigned to communist women for so long that it carried the stigma of being women’s work and was therefore a professional dead end. Between 2 and 4 percent of the members of the party’s Central Committee, which consisted of the most important national and provincial leaders, were female in the post‑war decades. Most of these women were tokens appointed to demonstrate the party’s bona fides on women’s issues.¹⁴ Elena Furtseva, who had worked her way up in the Moscow party organization, was one of very few exceptions.