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How Did Stalin Change Russia's Attitude Towards Women

774 Words4 Pages

During the first Five-Year Plan Stalin made the Soviet Union go through a drastic change to modernise and industrialise, attempting to transform society and the economy into a successful and progressive state. With the many challenge that were met, women in the USSR became a vital part in society in order to achieve the targets of the plan. In theory the Bolsheviks believed in equality for women yet in practice emancipation had not yet succeeded.
This paper will discuss the state's attitude towards women's position in the Five-Year Plan and will argue that the state had an ambiguous attitude towards women. It started of as indifferent but due to economic challenges in the early 1930s attitude's changed. The change in the state's policy meant the incorporation of more women into labour that created opportunities for women's emancipation yet the state's motives had a different origin and were mainly egoistic in nature. It will then analyse the different changes that the state adopted in order to change attitude's to women in society which include …show more content…

It was considered that socialism would encourage women to partake in the labour force where they would gain independence and equivalence status with men.1 This utopian ideal existed throughout the 1920s but it was not a matter that was pressed on significantly at that time. Even when the Five-Year Plan started women were, to a certain extent, excluded or forgotten during the project.2 This is partly because the forced industrialisation had a particular focus on heavy industry. This was in the first place not a field of significant female employment and secondly, made that industry had a precedence over social issues. Moreover, the concentration on heavy industry caused a neglect in other areas of industry3 as well as society issues. Stalin and his party might have been interested in changing women's role in the Soviet Union but priority was given

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From 1928, when the plan started, to 1932 to its end, many factories, dams, power stations and even cities were being built. Despite there being harsh penalties implemented to workers for failure to meet their targets, there was still a significant increase in Russia’s industrial growth in a very short period of time. Just like the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, under Tsar Alexander II, in protest of Stalin’s policies, the peasants, in protest, refused to work harder than they needed too, causing them to destroy livestock and crops, which eventually lead to their unnecessary death. Stalin, just like the Tsarist autocratic regime, was not committed to collectivism but preferred capitalism in his ruling of the Soviet Union. This caused a lot of rebellion from the Kulaks who opposed collectivism.

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Many believed in the traditional idea that the workplace was for men only and used the refusal of recognition as a form of protest. Some women refused to go into the work force for this very reason. For those that did however, did so out of patriotism for the war and because of the lack of opportunity. There was a mix between the two. In the text, most women were there for lack of opportunity because they were high school dropouts.

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