Masha Grab Your Gun: 1930s Images of Soviet Women and the Defense of Their Country (original) (raw)
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Plural. Culture. History. Society, 2023
The materials of Soviet newspapers are an important source for studying the policy of the regime regarding the service of women in the armed forces of the USSR. Based on the frequency of publication of these materials, the date of their publication, and the content, it is possible to make assumptions about the need for female personnel in the armed forces during a particular period of war, as well as to highlight and evaluate the government's propaganda concerning female soldiers in general. However, the thematic articles contained almost no specifics about the service of women in the armed forces of the USSR as a mass phenomenon-they did not provide data on the establishment of women's military units, general statistics on the presence of women in the Army, conscription data, etc. The totalitarian regime kept this information secret, unlike other members of the anti-Hitler coalition.
New Soviet Woman : The Post-World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad
The Russian Review, 2018
It was a difficult letter for Alice Richards to write. "Apparently you still do not know the personal news about me," she began, unfolding her troubles. Richards explained that her parents disapproved of her new marriage and her husband was struggling to change careers. In this tense environment, her son had a "nervous breakdown," and Richards suffered a miscarriage. She felt "shaken" and "found it hard to go on." She thought of getting a job to brighten her days, but prospects were grim for women who were married or over thirtyfive. The automobile plant near her home in California "makes it a policy not to employ women at all unless there is no man available for a particular job." 1 This letter, dated March 18, 1955, rings with the sincerity and candor of a note to an old friend. In fact, Richards wrote it to the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee (AKSZh), a propagandistic organization that published the magazine Soviet Woman (Sovetskaia zhenshchina). 2 Richards was one of its subscribers. Four members of the Committee responded to her with equal tenderness, sending "their love" and assuring her "everything will be alright." They thanked Richards for relaying "the kind of work women are doing in your country and the difficulties standing before them," and for the American magazines she had enclosed in her last letter. They promised to keep sending Soviet Woman and asked if she knew others who might want to subscribe or communicate with a Soviet pen-pal. 3 Since World War II AKSZh had built a vast network of correspondents and Thanks to the American Philosophical Society and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for funding this research.
Issue 17 - Autumn 2015 (Women in arms: from the Russian Empire to Post-Soviet States)
The Journal of Power Institutions in Post Soviet Societies, 2015
This article focuses on the tension between female soldiers' military duties and sex/romance in the ranks of the Red Army. Drawing on terminology used during the war, the author posits "girls" and "women" as two models of behavior -the former emphasizing soldierly duties, the later the realization of civilian norms. Female soldiers were placed in a highly ambiguous situation, in which the Komsomol, which had recruited large numbers of "girls" into the army, promoted sexual abstinence and feminine culturedness, while the Party and Army acquiesced to the desire of commanders to take lovers from among their subordinates. The article ends with a discussion of pregnancy and its implications.
Introduction: Gender in Russian and Soviet Military History
Russian Review, 2023
This cluster of articles explores the gendered history of the military in the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts during periods of imperial conquest, war, and their complex aftermaths. The cluster began at the 2021 ASEEES virtual convention, when the contributors joined the Zoom panel while their respective countries were in various stages of lockdown. Chronologically, the cluster stretches from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, with two articles on the Russian Empire and two covering the Soviet period. From the imperial borderlands of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century to the Nazi-occupied western frontiers of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, ideas about appropriate feminine and masculine behavior shaped the enactment of and reactions to violence. Veterans of the Russo-Japanese and Second World Wars drew on vocabularies of military masculinity to claim authority within their respective postwar societies. In this short introduction, we reflect on the relationship between gender history and military history and underline the importance of integrating the Russian/Soviet case into international historiographies of gender and war.