Peer-reviewed
Between National Tradition and Western Modernization Soviet Woman and Representations of Socialist Gender Equality as a “Third Way” for Developing Countries, 1956-1964
This article analyzes Soviet Woman, the main publication of the Komitet Sovetskikh Zhenshchin (Committee of Soviet Women), during the 1950s and 1960s. Approaching it as a medium of international outreach, the article illustrates how the magazine reflected official Soviet strategies toward developing countries and propagated “peaceful coexistence.” Specifically, it delineates the ways in which Soviet Woman presented Soviet women (especially those in the “Soviet East”) as models of female emancipation so as to persuade women in the Third World of the potential of socialism to effect social and economic progress, and to sustain national liberation. Assessing also reception among readers of its messages about advancement, international friendship, and solidarity, it concludes that Soviet Woman provided women in decolonizing countries an alternative to a return to traditional modes or a shift to western ones by demonstrating the possibilities that the Soviet system held for realizing gender equality and modernization
Article, 2019
Slavic Review, 78, 20191001, 758
2019