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Gender Confusion in the Stalin Era: ‘Completely New People’, or Traditional Wives and Mothers?

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Creating the New Soviet Woman

Part of the book series: Studies in Russian and East European History and Society ((SREEHS))

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Abstract

As we saw earlier, Kollontai had envisaged the creation of a new type of woman under socialism, one who challenged the traditional model of femininity; she would be independent, full of confidence, aware of her own worth, a person in her own right. With Stalin in power, however, the ‘new woman’ was a more complex and contradictory creature. On the one hand she was still hailed as a new, improved being, with Stalin himself proclaiming that: ‘We did not have such women in the past… These are completely new people.’1 Yet she was now expected to combine her new qualities and functions with many of the old norms of female behaviour. This chapter will highlight the contradictory image of women which emerged in the women’s magazines in the 1930s.

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Notes

  1. Stalin’s pronouncement on female ‘heroes of labour’ appears (with no heading) in Rabotnitsa, no. 4, 1938, p. 22.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, UK

    Lynne Attwood (Senior Lecturer in Russian Studies)

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  1. Lynne Attwood
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© 1999 Lynne Attwood

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Attwood, L. (1999). Gender Confusion in the Stalin Era: ‘Completely New People’, or Traditional Wives and Mothers?. In: Creating the New Soviet Woman. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333981825_11

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