Exploring Soviet Women’s Magazines as Creators of the New Woman

Politics of representation of the social

In fact, though, the book explores not so much the role of these two ideological vehicles of the Soviet gender transformation (the author recognizes that determining the impact is impossible, taking into account the interaction of many influences and, one might add, simultaneous institutional changes), but the modes of femininity and gender order they promoted in accordance with the priorities of the political moment. Staying focused on the politics of representation of the social, the author considers three types of texts: feature articles, short stories and readers’ letters.

The book opens up with a very brief account of Marxist theorizing on family, sexuality and the „new woman“, as a starting point to Bolshevik practical policies in such charged areas as those related to gender. The huge task of achieving gender equality (that was declared as one of the political goals) demanded, just as contemporary feminists know only too well, a deconstruction of the existing social order. The decision-makers of the time embarked on dealing with such issues as women’s work versus family, state-supported childcare (the absence of which would have made women’s labour participation impossible), communal dining and communal housing (the practices present, in one form or another, in all projects of ameliorating the world, as kibutz in Israel or some religious or hippey communities constantly remind us), sexuality (marriage, divorce and unwanted pregnancy) and the body (beauty, fashion and femininity), the promotion of the new gender relations (those of equality) and even „variations“ of the new woman. The years between the end of Civil War and WWII did witness colossal ideological as well as institutional shifts: on the one hand, a tremendous glorification of women-workers and collective farmers and the creation of the mythology of the heroine of socialist labour. On the other, and this is something the author hardly mentions at all, real transformations of women’s roles: their unprecedented entrance into the workforce and professions (like that of a tractor driver), elimination of illiteracy and access to education and welfare, which removed divorce and single motherhood from the agenda of survival issues.

Communists saw women’s emancipation as a part of another and, as they thought, bigger project of the emancipation of the working class or as just „one dimension of a broader transformation of all economic, social and political institutions“. One can hardly contest this view, though we today, having the wealth of feminist theorizing, would suggest different reasons for why women’s emancipation project is really „broader“, than those living in the 1920-ies could think. This is just where the greatest theoretical and methodological problem with the book lies: the author seems to reprimand Marxists for not knowing what we know now: „…there were flaws in the Marxist writings… there was no real awareness of the complexities of the concepts of gender and gender difference, no discussion or debate around the issues which would come to dominate feminist theorizing on gender in the West…“ One can certainly blame Marxist theorists (to say nothing of practitioners) for a lot, but probably not for the absence of what at their time did not exist.

The unwillingness to judge facts within their historical contexts strikes the reader more than once, like, for example, when the author writes that „… the heavy physical labour imposed on women was ‚deplored by prerevolutionary fiction as a sign of Russia’s backwardness‘, while in the Stalin era it was ‚praised… as proof of socialist progress‘“. One can hardly see a contradiction here if one recognizes that what was blamed in prerevolutionary fiction was the exploitation of women, their slave labour for no pay; while in the inter-war period it was the entrance into the workforce and greater world and the possibility to be independent of the male partner that was glorified. Economical independence was seen as a precondition of gender equality (much in the same way as we think of the issue now), though, as the author correctly explains, almost no efforts were demanded of men in sharing household chores with women. State’s services (childcare, laundry, canteens etc.) that emerged were never adequate to free women from the double burden.

The book’s theoretical problems probably reach its most vivid form in the (short) paragraph on Central Asia, where „The so-called ‘women of the East’ were treated as chattels rather than human beings. They began life as the property of their fathers, until they were sold off for bride price to new masters, often when they were still only children. Thereafter they had to hide themselves from the sight of other men beneath full-length horse-hair veils… A man could have as many wives as he could afford, but if one of them was unfaithful to him he was entitled to kill her. Even when her husband died, a woman did not gain her freedom; she became the property of his nearest relative, along with livestock and other possessions“. This is the kind of oversimplified description that contemporary feminist anthropologists tend to classify as „colonizing discourse“, for it treats the woman of a non-Western culture as the exotic, the victim and the anomaly.

Women in the Great Patriotic War

The part on women in the Great Patriotic War (as the 1941–1945 period was called in the USSR) largely continues the line of accusations of the communist regime, with its opening passage that reads: „Despite the non-aggression pact which had been signed by the two countries in August 1939, Germany invaded Russia on 22 June 1941. To stimulate the population’s loyalty and its willingness to sacrifice itself for the country, the image of the Soviet woman took on a distinctly iconic form“. In that very war the country lost, by several estimations, one seventh of its population or between 27 and 40 MILLION lives, as the author herself recognizes, so the „population’s loyalty’ was about that very population’s right to live. It is probably at this moment that the reader’s growing suspicion that the book is more preoccupied than it could be with the idea that everything that communists did is bad because communists did it, turns into a strong conviction.

The lack of some great eye-opening generalizations

What does the book contribute to what we already know about women and gender in the period between October revolution and WWII? It provides the reader with the wealth of cultural evidence of that amazing time, but being more descriptive than analytical, fails to put that evidence into a theoretical context. One reads the book looking forward to some great eye-opening generalizations, for which the events described certainly call. To name just two: eliminating female illiteracy or public discourse on the kind of dress and make-up that would be appropriate for a liberated proletarian woman. The first one may draw a connection with the discussion of reading as a social act of which women were deprived and for which they had to be introduced into the public world of learning (the discussion probably starts with Virginia Wolf and certainly does not end with Helene Cixous); the other issue could find its place in a broader discussion of proletarian esthetics or „the feminist“ issue of the body. The examples of the theoretical opportunities missed could be numerous, while the book is useful for students of gender and/or Soviet history interested in the textual reference of the period. Those who look for theoretical interpretations of the material, as well as for the possible connections to discourses over social issues any contemporary nation has to face, should probably go elsewhere.