Authors

Discussion

In the 1920s, amid reports of party congresses, scenes from Soviet factory life, and discussions of the new byt, the mass illustrated periodical press for women featured numerous articles, poems, and stories about, and images of, women far beyond the Soviet Union. There already exists a rich scholarly literature on early Soviet culture, major changes in the social position of women, and its impact on the burgeoning socialist culture; my paper seeks to examine an underexplored aspect of early Soviet culture and the representation of women, to explore how material on “sisters” abroad was essential to the establishment of both the image of the new Soviet woman on the pages of mass publications, and to the hoped-for development of their readers.

My paper takes Rabonitsa, organ of the Zhenotdel and mass illustrated periodical for women workers and workers’ wives, as a case study for how this form of journal mobilized text and images from various genres to introduce its readers to a supposed international sisterhood and, in doing so, drew boundaries defining their position in the new world the socialist project promised.

Examining Rabotnitsa’s construction of “East” and “West” in the 1920s, I parse the place it carves out for Soviet women between these two imagined spaces: the “East” a supposedly “backwards” place, but where women were shown to be perhaps even more primed for revolutionary action; and the “West”, full of women workers engaged in proletarian struggle but oppressed by technologically advanced, fully industrialized capitalism. My paper explores in particular why the lives of women in the East – which in the journal covers a vast, and frequently vague, geographical area – are featured so centrally in a publication designed for urban women, and which was read predominantly in cities and towns in the Western part of the Soviet Union. Rabotnitsa’s division between “East” and “West” deploys contrasting images of suffering under, and resistance to, different forms of capitalism to inform the development of its female Soviet readers. I hope that my analysis of these representations will expand our understanding of Soviet approaches to the intersection of race, gender, and class. Certainly, mapping these spatio-temporal imaginaries is essential to understanding how Rabotnitsa’s readers were to conceptualize their place in the world.