Antonina Aleksandrovna Berezhnaia

One of the more revolutionary aspects of Soviet communism was that it promised to liberate men and women from the sexist shackles of bourgeois middle-class mentality. In large part, this was because "building socialism" required so much work that the Communist Party refused to bar someone's advance solely on the grounds of gender. Consequently, many Soviet women became engineers, doctors, and government officials at a time when very few women in the West could attain such positions.

Antonina Aleksandrovna Berezhnaia was the chief refractory engineer for the steel mills in the Central Urals region. In this selection, she is interviewed by Anastasia PosadskayaVanderbeck about her experiences as a woman engineer in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The interview reveals that, although she was met with hostility by some of the men who reported to her...