“Labor as freedom, labor as burden”: on the early period of women’s professional employment in Russia

Abstract

This article discusses the emergence of the Russian working woman employed in skilled labor from the second half 19th century until the 1930s. In Russia, educated women entered the sphere of socially significant labor during the Great Reforms. The subsequent development largely explains the position of the working woman in modern Russia – hence the topicality of the present paper. Sources for this article are record-keeping documents of tsarist and Soviet institutions, statistical information, press materials as well as memoirs. Among the factors that influenced the formation of the Russian female working class in the pre-revolutionary period were a social movement for the development of female education, the emergence of special vocational schools for women, the Zemstvo reforms, industrialization and, eventually, World War I. The article shows changes in the nature of the employment of women after the 1917 Revolution. The authors document the rapid growth of women’s participation in all spheres of the USSR’s national economy in the 1930s, in particular health care, education, and work in the apparatus of state, party and economic bodies. As a result, during this period the professional traits of the three main types of Soviet female workers were formed: the woman-doctor, the woman-teacher and the womanfunctionary. At the same time, the authors come to the conclusion that Soviet rule brought no fundamental changes in the conditions of everyday life, so that the Soviet woman-intellectual turned out to be a “fighter of two fronts” − labor and domestic.