This article explores how gender dynamics influenced labour experiences of female political prisoners in Soviet camps, highlighting survival strategies.
Gendered order in the Soviet camp system shaped women inmates’ experiences of labour and factored in their survival. This article zooms in on the published memoirs of four women political prisoners who survived the Gulag and explores how they experienced and narrated carceral labour. It focuses on three types of labour taking place in the carceral setting – forced labour, care work and clandestine crafts – and investigates the gendered dynamics that surrounded each of these interrelated types of labour. Historically‐situated forms of women inmates’ constrained labour‐related agency, as the memoirs show, were diverse and not always limited to outright resistance or compliance.
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Zhanna Popova (2024) studied this question.
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