This book examines changes in official Soviet policy towards the labour protection of women workers, 1917-41. Important legislative enactments are analysed. In the 1920s emphasis was placed on the 'protection' of female labour by the agencies responsible for regulating women's role in industrial production. With the mass recruitment of women workers to the Soviet industrialisation drive by the early 1930s, labour protection issues were often ignored as women were encouraged to play a more 'equal' role in the production process.

Despite this, the protective labour laws were never fully implemented and were irregularly enforced. With the mass recruitment of women workers to the Soviet industrialisation drive by the early 1930s, the abolition of Narkomtrud in 1933 and the subordination of the trade unions, labour protection issues were often ignored as women were encouraged to play a more 'equal' role in the production process.

"A study sponsored by the Foreign Studies Group, Office of Economic and Manpower Studies, National Science Foundation, and prepared under the supervision of the Department of Economics, University of Maryland." Bibliography: p. 307-320.

This book brings together for the first time a collection of essays by western scholars about women in the Stalin era (1928-53). It explores both the realities of women's lived experience in the 1930s and 1940s, and the various forms in which womanhood and femininity were represented and constructed in these decades. Women in the Stalin Era challenges the scholarly neglect women's history has suffered at the hands, and pens, of Russian and western historians of the Stalin period.

Why did working-class women become the central labour force on assembly lines in the new consumer goods’ industries of the inter-war period? What was the long-term significance of this for the pattern of women’s work, both in paid employment and in the home? Originally published in 1990, Women Assemble fills a major gap in the history of women and work, and develops a theory of women’s class relations, and of course gender and class more generally, by means of an original case-study. Taken from a wide variety of sources, it uses a multidisciplinary approach and is brought to life by interviews with people who worked in assembly-line industries during the inter-war period. This extremely readable study is important to feminists, historians, and sociologists, as well as to all those concerned with issues of gender, class, and the labour process.