The 'new Soviet person' the Bolsheviks were committed to creating was to be a qualitatively different type to that which existed under capitalism: a creature willing and eager to subordinate his or her own interests to those of society. Both men and women would play a full role in the construction of socialism, but the model of the 'new woman' had an additional feature - she also had to reproduce the population. Balancing work and family did not prove easy, especially against the background of shifting economic and demographic priorities, and periodic changes had to be made. This book explores the ways in which the 'new woman', in her various incarnations, was presented to female citizens from the 1920s to the end of the Stalin era in the pages of the popular women's magazines, Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) and Krest'yanka (The Peasant Woman).

Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922-53 (Studies in Russian & East European history & society) PDF

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