Employment and Politics

Abstract

The persistence and continuity in the priority assigned to women’s employment can be understood in the light of (1) ideological factors — the Marxist theory of women’s emancipation; (2) economic factors- industrialisation in the 1930s and the accompanying demand for female labour; and (3) specific demographic circumstances — a significant excess of females in the population as a consequence of wars and civil troubles. Engels’s advocacy of ‘the re-introduction of the entire female sex into public industry’ has been put into practice almost completely. There is now nearly universal employment of women in the USSR. Women constitute 51 per cent of the labour force in the state sector (see Table 10.1) and 52 per cent of those working on collective farms. They also do most of the work performed on the private plots of farm households (Matthews, 1972: 175–6).