"Russian Blonde in Space": Soviet Women in the American Imagination, 1950-1965

Griswold, Robert L.

doi:10.1093/jsh/shr147

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 35 publications

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“…69 The Western press widely popularized an image of them as "graceless, shapeless, and sexless" in order "to discredit communist women and, more important, Communism itself." 70 Moreover, AKSZh staff was well aware from the pen-friendships it monitored that Soviet women were intrigued by Western styles and sometimes requested American fashion magazines. 71 One Muscovite who exchanged letters and clippings with a pen-pal in Boone, Iowa, wrote, "I must confess that I love to dress well.…”

Section: New Woman New Lookmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Soviet Woman: The Post‐World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad

Peri

2018

The Russian Review

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Soviet Woman, a magazine published by the Kremlin‐backed Soviet Women’s Anti‐Fascist Committee, was a rare form of Soviet propaganda aimed at domestic and international readers simultaneously. Founded just after World War II, Soviet Woman was published in French, English, German, and Russian. It was part of the Soviet Union’s bid to become a global hegemon by exporting socialism–including its gender ideals–to the major combatants of the war. This article unearths the magazine’s origins, rooted in the Anti‐Fascist Committee’s correspondence with British and American women. It analyzes Soviet Woman in the context of this letter exchange, and it compares the journal to concurrent issues of popular women’s magazines aimed only at domestic readers (Rabotnitsa in the Soviet Union; Woman’s Own and Women’s Weekly in Britain; Ladies Home Journal, Women’s Home Companion, and others in the United States). The article argues that the editorial staff of Soviet Woman drew extensively on letters and periodicals from the United States and Britain in crafting a new model of Soviet womanhood, one that supported the Soviet Union’s postwar agenda but met the concerns, expectations, and tastes of Anglo‐American readers. The staff effectively reformulated Soviet womanhood to share features of British and American women’s experiences, including: the desire to return to work despite postwar lay‐offs; their fashion trends and styles; and their tendency to associate the female sex with pacifism. This feminine ideal upheld in Soviet Woman was created in consultation with the USSR’s capitalist opponents. The article presents Soviet Woman as evidence of Soviet women’s diplomatic activities and of cultural borrowing across the Iron Curtain during the late Stalin years, an era characterized by isolationism and anti‐Western sentiment. It focuses on the first ten years of the magazine’s publication (1945–56) and ends with the Thaw, when Soviet readers voiced opposition to the Western‐inspired Soviet woman disseminated by the magazine.

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Section: New Woman New Lookmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Soviet Woman: The Post‐World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad

Peri

2018

The Russian Review

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Evolution of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: The Effects of the “Third” on the Interplay Between Cooperation and Competition

Volf¹

2021

Minerva

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The paper investigates the evolution of the first manned international space mission – a rendezvous and docking between a US and a Soviet spacecraft in 1975 known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). The aim is to reconsider the rationales behind the ASTP from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective in order to get a better understanding of the evolution of international cooperation in the highly competitive and strategic field of space technology. Based on archival sources from Moscow, it sheds some light on those factors that led to a change in the previous reluctance of Soviets to cooperate with the US in the manned spaceflight. From the theoretical point of view, it argues that the ASTP was as much a tool of competition as one of cooperation and resulted from an interplay between cooperative and competitive logics. To explain the turn towards cooperative practices, the article looks at the complex constellation of competitive relations that existed within the national and international context of space exploration and changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The decisive role in those changes was played by factors that can be subsumed under the notion of the so-called “third.”

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Mixed marriage and transnational marriage migration in the grip of political economy: Russian-Turkish Case

Denız

Özgür

2020

Turkish Studies

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"Russian Blonde in Space": Soviet Women in the American Imagination, 1950-1965

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

New Soviet Woman: The Post‐World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad

New Soviet Woman: The Post‐World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad

Evolution of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: The Effects of the “Third” on the Interplay Between Cooperation and Competition

Mixed marriage and transnational marriage migration in the grip of political economy: Russian-Turkish Case

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