Legitimizing Soviet trade: gender and the feminization of the retail workforce in the Soviet 1930s

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurs in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States created new retail venues and merchandising techniques that facilitated the growth of modern consumer society. As the commercial landscape was transformed, women gained prominence not only as consumers, but also as retail employees, and by the 1920s they constituted the majority of salesclerks. Initially contemporaries worried about saleswomen whom they saw as susceptible to materialistic temptations and vice in the face of advances by male customers, coworkers, and storeowners. Concerns began to fade, however, as retail trade and consumption were refigured as vehicles for the propagation of bourgeois and national values and taste. Saleswomen were reimagined as respectable and even talented employees who mobilized their "feminine knowledge" and maternal nature to promote sales. The woman salesclerk, along with the woman shopper, came to epitomize mass consumption and modernity. (1)

In the Soviet Union women became a significant part of the retail labor force only in the 1930s. Like their Western counterparts, they were touted as having particular womanly attributes that could further retail trade and they were identified with modernity. Unlike them, however, their employment did not signify the success of capitalist consumerism. Rather it denoted the dawning of a new socialist era of rapid industrialization and the development of a specific form of "Soviet trade." In 1931 the Communist leadership initiated a campaign to develop Soviet trade in an effort to create an explicitly non-capitalist system of modern retailing. It pursued this campaign throughout the 1930s, even as famine decimated the rural populace in 1932-3 and Soviet citizens continued to struggle to find basic goods and foodstuffs. In the drive to establish "socialist" retailing, the woman retail employee came to symbolize the transformation and legitimization of the state-controlled retail system. Described in the press and at trade organizations' meetings as a "great force," women retail workers received widespread acclamation for their achievements. (2) The state rewarded them with financial bonuses, vacations, the Badge of Honor, and even the Order of Lenin, the highest Soviet award. (3) It recognized tens of thousands of women in retailing as labor heroes: exemplary workers (otlichnitsy), shock workers, and Stakhanovites. (4) "Women's stores"--shops staffed primarily or exclusively by female personnel--were idealized as paragons of the new Soviet trade and praised for their successful commodity turnover, "ideal cleanliness," "accurate" display of goods, and excellent customer service. (5)

This essay examines the changes in official Soviet policy and discourse vis-a-vis women retail workers, looking at recruitment efforts and their limits as well as the new meanings ascribed to women's retail work. Although scholars have begun to explore the phenomenon of women's wage labor in the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, none has investigated the role of women workers in the retail sector. (6) This analysis explores the feminization of the retail workforce as a window on the Soviet regime's efforts to mobilize retail trade and women in new ways in the 1930s. It argues that the feminization of the retail workforce resulted in more than an influx of women workers; it turned out to be critical to the regime's campaign to remake retail trade. As the trade campaign got under way and the female workforce grew, authorities rationalized women's employment by constructing a new woman retail worker who carried out "revolutionary, Bolshevik work." (7) They identified "feminine" qualities with excellence in retailing and the "new" trade practices promulgated in the campaign for Soviet trade. Highly valued attributes of the idealized new trade that reportedly distinguished it from both capitalist trade and the already existing state-controlled system became coded as "feminine." The feminization of the retail workforce therefore contributed to the gendering of Soviet trade. In addition, the new retail system that emerged in the 1930s was officially legitimized, at least in part, because of its feminine face. (8)

The new woman retail worker served as a site for the regime's concerns about the feasibility of and hopes for a socialist transformation that would create a functional non-capitalist retail system. Recasting the woman employee allowed authorities to begin to resolve anxieties about the possibility of defining a distinctively socialist form of retailing. Significantly, the construction of the new woman retail worker and the feminization of the retail sector had important implications not only for the incipient "socialist" trade system but also for the Soviet project as a whole. Because the feminization of the retail workforce was accompanied by a new discourse of women's retail work that involved the reimagining of the feminine and the domestic, it bolstered a broader transformation in the 1930s of official understandings of women's roles and womanly characteristics. It contributed to the Communist leadership's efforts to attribute new importance to women as well as to the feminine and domestic in the crusade to build Soviet socialism.