Women Workers in Late Imperial Russian Industry: Hiring Policy and Employer Attitudes on the Railways to 1914

Abstract

By defining ‘worker’ to include low-paid white-collar as well as blue-collar staff, and taking a broad definition of industry, this article reveals whereas factory managers increasingly hired blue-collar women during roughly 1895–1914, the situation with women's employment in the railway industry was very different. Railway policy was to restrict numbers tightly and prioritise literate women in certain low-paid mostly white-collar jobs for which men were hard to recruit. Railway policy-makers were influenced by not just enduring patriarchal attitudes, but also military demands together with financial concerns associated with pension rights and retrospective wage increases. At the same time, local labour shortages increasingly forced managers to seek exemptions to the hiring policy or even ignore the restrictions, especially in regions like Central Asia where qualified people of both genders were relatively scarce. The article concludes with some general questions. How typical by that time were the MPS as an employing ministry and state-owned railways as industrial employers? Did hiring policy in state-owned industrial enterprises differ significantly from the private industrial sector? What ishould be understood by the term ‘skilled worker’? And how important are white-collar workers as a category for analysing women's employment in late Tsarist Russia’s industrial economy?