Women and Work in Russia, 1880-1930

A Study in Continuity Through Change

Jane Mcdermid, Anna Hillyar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138179608
• eBook ISBN: 9781317888970
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This study considers the impact of industrialisation, revolution and world war on women's working lives in Russia. Unlike existing studies this new text looks at women from all social classes. In the process the authors reveal how the stereotypical portrayal of Russian women's work as a struggle of endurance and sacrifice distorts and oversimplifies the reality of their experience between 1880 and 1930.

CHAPTER ONE

To Labour, to Bear and to Endure: The Lot of the Russian Woman Worker?

The Russian girl is not a woman in the European sense, not an individual: she is merely a would-be bride.¹

This judgement, made by the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky in the early 1840s, was repeated in the late 1850s by another critic, Nikolai Dobroliubov, who commented that to give a woman a serious education would have meant recognising her right of personality, which would have gone against all the traditions upon which Russia, that ‘realm of darkness’, was based.² The enduring impression of Russian womanhood is one of abject passivity and selflessness within a patriarchal peasant system which survived urbanisation, industrialisation, war and revolution. It suggests not only continuity in female subordination between the tsarist autocracy and communist dictatorship, but a common female condition, despite vast social, cultural and economic differences between Russian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their shared destiny was marriage, which entailed exchanging one male authority figure, the father, for another, the husband. Yet the majority of Russian women were also expected to contribute to the household economy through working both inside and outside the home, in the fields, in workshops, in other people’s houses, and in factories. They had done so before the push for industrialisation in the late nineteenth century, indeed even before serfdom was abolished in 1861.

Most women continued to work after marriage. Indeed, what shocked British travellers to Russia in this period was the shared workload between female and male peasants, and that the latter looked for strength rather than beauty in a wife. Western visitors assumed that economic modernisation would improve the lot of Russian women, and bring them more into line with what was regarded as the superior situation of women in Britain. The isolation of the village was being eroded by improvements in transport and communications. There was also the development of a rural intelligentsia and the growth of a hereditary urban working class. Yet peasant women seemed reluctant to embrace ‘progress’, and village traditions proved remarkably resilient. Indeed, to foreign visitors the Russian town did not seem radically different, socially or culturally, from the countryside.³

Nineteenth-century Russia was an overwhelmingly peasant country. Until 1861 the political, social and economic structure had been based on serfdom, which had tied the peasants to the land. Such a feudal system weakened Russia’s status as a great power in the context of the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of its rivals. For Russia to keep up with the Western powers, serfdom had to be abolished. The economic changes which followed the abolition of serfdom in 1861 included the impoverishment of many peasant families left with insufficient land. This placed even more importance on the contribution women could make to the household economy. At the other end of the social scale, the loss of their serfs so impoverished many gentry families that by the end of the 1860s contemporaries observed that ‘a female proletariat’ had arrived on the scene: not the women from the peasantry who, at least until the end of the century, were needed even more on the farm, but the women from the gentry which had ‘lost’ its serfs, the spinster aunts and sisters, the divorcees and widows, no longer living in and supported by the extended patriarchal family, but forced to fend for themselves.⁴ The situation had indeed changed since Dobroliubov’s time. Publications from the 1860s to the end of the century identified education as a solution to the problems facing upper-class women. As a foreign observer noted:

Every year the necessity of providing some kind of higher education for women became more and more pressing, as an ever-increasing number of women belonging to the gentry were driven by the effects of Emancipation [of the serfs] to seek education as providing a means of self-support.⁵

Hence work was a large part of the lives of the majority of Russian women, and the type of work was determined not simply by what was expected of their sex, but by the social, cultural and demographic impact of changes in the economy. Until the late nineteenth century, the urban population had expanded and contracted through the seasonal migration of mainly male peasants. The demands of industrialisation from the 1890s, however, called for a stable labour force and at least a minority of skilled workers, again predominantly male. Revolutionaries, who at least until the 1905 revolution had to operate illegally, concentrated their efforts on the latter. Through propaganda circles and a desire for self-improvement, a corps of politically conscious workers grew. It was a small and overwhelmingly male minority. Peasant women who went to work in the towns were more restricted than their male counterparts in terms both of jobs open to them, and opportunities for training and education. Yet the very move to the town indicated that the female migrant was exceptional among peasant women. The fact that she was more likely than men to loosen or cut her ties to the village also indicated that she was more urbanised than many of the unskilled male migrants. Hence, before going on to a detailed examination of what work women did, this chapter will consider the impact on gender roles of a process of economic modernisation which did not entail a complete break with the village.

Women, work and family

The recorded reminiscences of a 56-year-old female factory worker, A.D. Batova, published in 1934 were intended to encapsulate the process of industrialisation and political upheaval in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by many lower-class women, culminating in the improvements brought about by Stalin’s transformation of the economy.⁶ Batova had worked in a particular textile factory in Moscow for nearly 40 years. Born into a poor peasant family of 12 children, all of whom were illiterate, Batova was a farm labourer from the age of 10; in the winter, she made lace and knitted, payment for which was in kind (soap). At the age of 14, she went to a textile factory in a nearby village. By law, she should have been 16 to be hired, but her father had bribed the local priest with eggs and meat to change her birthdate. Within a few days, and without training, Batova was put to work at a conveyor belt, earning seven roubles a month. She lived outside the factory, sharing accommodation, in effect a space on the floor, with between 25 and 30 other workers, men and women.

The hours were long: Batova left for work at 3.30 a.m., and returned at 10 p.m. She went to the public baths, which were overcrowded, once a week; she had to wash her clothes outside, even in winter, because there was no running hot water and no laundries. Food was cooked by the landlady, and the staple diet was bread and kvass (a sour, fermented drink); tea was a rarity. When meat was available, each worker would buy a piece, wrapping it in a dirty cloth, which would be marked to distinguish it from the other portions. All would be placed in the same big pot, and once cooked the landlady would fish out the bag of meat from what was essentially cabbage soup and try to identify the owner: if the mark had worn off, there would be arguments. Like the other workers, Batova paid extra for the cooking of the meal: in her ‘spare’ time, she did some sewing or embroidery for the landlady. All had to eat out of the same pot as none of the workers possessed plates; indeed, all had to sleep with their spoon under the pillow, for fear of thieves, and when they went home they would give their spoon to the landlady for safekeeping.

When she was 17, Batova married a cabinet maker from Moscow. Instead of staying in the village as so many peasant wives did, Batova moved to Moscow, in the hope that life would be easier. At first, their accommodation was the space under her husband’s worktable in his workshop, and it was only before the birth of her first child that they managed to rent a windowless room at four roubles a month.⁷ By then, Batova was earning 15 roubles a month. She continued to work throughout her 13 pregnancies, leaving the factory only hours before each birth, giving birth at home with an old woman acting as midwife. Eight of her children survived into adulthood. Although a very religious person (and by implication conservative), Batova had nevertheless been affected by the political developments of the period, and participated in the 1905 revolution, helping to build barricades. Indeed, she had lost a child who was born prematurely after Batova tried to defend a nephew from cossacks’ whips. What, if any, action she took in 1917 is unrecorded, as is her experience of life in the 1920s, though the implication is that she continued in employment. Her religious faith survived the 1917 revolution, and was only shaken when she went to a meeting of the ‘godless’ campaign in 1920. In the early 1930s, Batova was still working at the same machinery in the Moscow factory as when she had first arrived, but she recognised that there had been changes. In her opinion, conditions were much better: she worked seven hours a day instead of 15; foremen had to treat the women with respect; there was a factory canteen, and the pay was good (140 roubles a month). Indeed, Batova had been given an added responsibility: she had been made a ‘visitor’ of those absent workers claiming illness. She reported that she had found one woman at a drinking session, who was then sent to court. In Stalin’s Russia, Batova was helping to enforce work discipline, but she might also be seen in the traditional female role of moral guardian. It is tempting to portray women like Batova as downtrodden, ignorant and politically unconscious, potentially ideal subjects for a dictator such as Stalin. Indeed, the editor of the collection in which her memoir appeared argued that such women had only recently become politically aware.

Studies which consider lower-class women in the period from 1880 to 1930 tend to look at them en masse, with only occasional references to individuals. Even then, such individuals are generally politically active, so that they stand out from the crowd. Examples include the revolutionary workers Vera Karelina and Anna Boldyreva, who participated in the labour movement for around twenty years, setting up circles for women workers in the late 1880s, and continuing their political work into the 1905 revolution. Karelina organised women in Father Gapon’s assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers. Both women were elected to the Petersburg soviet, though Karelina had to withdraw through ill health. Boldyreva was still active in 1917. Their stories are valuable for showing that the female working class was not an amorphous mass, not simply powerless and passive victims of a profoundly patriarchal system. A focus only on the lives of politically active women such as Karelina and Boldyreva, however, tends to highlight their uniqueness.

Indeed, it could be argued that Batova’s experience was more typical. Most lower-class women, whether urban or rural, were not politically conscious, and tended to accept their situation. That acceptance, however, entailed a great deal of action, of movement, and of courage, and was punctuated by episodes of sometimes violent protest, as the bare narrative of Batova’s life reveals. Above all, it meant a lifetime of hard, ceaseless toil, interrupted only briefly (if frequently) by pregnancy. It was a life which was seen as a partnership with her husband, however unequal in terms of his patriarchal authority, of women’s low and unequal pay, of the demeaning treatment in the factory to which women were subjected simply because of their gender and assumed inferiority to men. While she did not discuss her views of marriage, her reminiscences show that in practice it was based on the commitment she shared with her husband to work for the economic survival of their family. In Batova’s memoir, it is a partnership portrayed in terms of what the wife contributed to the family, rather than the husband, who remains silent. Indeed the wife, however self-sacrificing and seemingly fatalistic in adversity, is central in her account.

Still, if Batova is ‘more’ representative of women workers’ experiences, she too is relatively unusual in the fact that she left the village on marriage to move with her husband to his work in Moscow. The general pattern was for migrant male workers to marry early and leave their wives in the village, often for years, as described by the metal worker Kanatchikov:

Among the pattern-makers there was one group whose appearance set them off from the rest – the pattern-maker peasants, whose ties with the village were still strong. They wore high boots, traditional cotton-print blouses girdled with a sash, had their hair cut ‘under a pot’, and wore beards that were rarely touched by a barber’s hand. Every pay day without fail they would send part of their money back to the village. They lived in crowded, dirty conditi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 To Labour, to Bear and to Endure: The Lot of the Russian Woman Worker?
• Part One: Society, Politics and the Economy, 1880–1914
• Part Two: From World War to the New Society, 1914–1930
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Maps: The Russian Empire, 1914
• Index