In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurs in France, Britain, Germany, and the United States created new retail venues and mer? chandising 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 sales women 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 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 iden? tified 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 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 citizens continued to struggle to find basic goods and foodstuffs. In the drive to establish social? ist 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 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 fe? male personnel?were idealized as paragons of the new 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 policy and discourse vis-avis 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
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May 17, 2023
Derek Wall 
Open Access