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Abstract
In both the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, femininity and beauty were traits often attributed to the ideal working mother portrayed and promoted in state media. But with greater exposure to global beauty ideals in the post-communist era, the sexualized and beautified female body acquired a social value that was independent of its role in the reproductive process. In this paper, I analyse changes in the way care for the female body was represented in two Russian women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (1970s–1990s). Over this period, the ideal of the working mother figures less prominently and there is an increasing focus on the ways that women-consumers ought to work on their individual body-projects. This might appear to be a radical change. But by analysing the representations of women more carefully, I show that the move towards the privatization of the body project was already under way in the late Soviet period, but only for some categories of women. That is, non-Slavic women of various ages could be working mothers, but individual consumption was a realm reserved for their Slavic countrywomen.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the Post-Doctoral Write-Up Award Scheme 2014, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Victor Albert, Ramon Mendez, Lana Chung, Rachel Loney-Howes, Yulia Gradskova, Kerreen Reiger and Carolyn D’Cruz for providing me with invaluable feedback at various stages of the production of this article.
Notes
1. German women’s magazine Burda Moden sponsored the first Moscow beauty contest held in 1988, and the winner was awarded a one-year contract with the magazine (Moskalenko, Citation1996, pp. 67, 71).
2. On the changes in the magazine’s affiliations in the 1920s–1960s, e.g. from the Russian Social-Democratic Worker’s Party in 1914–1919 to a special party-section for women until the 1930s, see Tolstikova, Citation2004, p. 134.
3. In the early 1970s–1980s, according to the information provided inside the magazines, Rabotnitsa had twice as many issues as Krest’yanka (11.2 and 6.1 million in 1971; 13.1 and 6.5 million in 1980); the gap drastically narrowed in the late 1980s when the circulation of both magazines approximated 17 million.
4. As Elena Myasnitskaya, a co-editor of the early Russian Cosmo, notes in an interview, new publishing houses that produced the first Russian editions of glossy magazines such as Cosmo, Elle and Good Housekeeping were joint enterprises between foreign and local capitalists, since the economic and legislative climate made the process of entry into the market for foreigners potentially too dangerous (Krongauz, Citation2013). These enterprises included publishing houses ‘Hearst Shkulev Media’ created by Viktor Shkulev, which began to publish the local edition of Elle in 1996; and ‘Independent Media’ that was set up by Dutch entrepreneur Derk Sauer in 1992 (and published the first English-speaking newspaper The Moscow Times, along with Cosmo and Good Housekeeping [Domashniy Ochag]).
5. Foucault (Citation1975/1979, p. 200) describes a model of surveillance through the ‘Panopticon’, an invention of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham; the main figure is a supervisor who sits in the tower, inside the circle, formed by the building with multiple cells or rooms for inmates, pupils or patients. While the supervisor can see those in the cells, they cannot see him. As the observed gradually internalize the gaze of the supervisor, the latter had no need to apply any physical means of coercion to legitimize certain norms and practices (Foucault Citation1975/1979, p. 202).
6. For the 1970s: 1971, 1972, 1973; 1975, 1978; for the 1980s: 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988 (1985 was included because Gorbachev was elected a General Secretary of the Communist Party in March and, according to a tradition, both magazines announced the news and published his profile on the first pages of their April issues); in the 1990s: 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998. The issues from each year were selected based on the author’s knowledge (informed by secondary literature) about significant national or local events such as the anniversaries of the October Revolution, of the formation of the USSR and the appointment of Gorbachev as the General Secretary of the party.
7. A region to the east of Moscow that has been under Russian rule since the mid-sixteenth century. Chuvash people speak a unique Turkic dialect. During the Soviet years, the Chuvash Autonomous Republic was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After the collapse of the USSR, it remained part of the Russian Federation. Both during the Soviet and post-Soviet times, the Chuvash Republic has been one of the few places in Russia where ethnic Russians constitute a minority (Karasar, Citation2011, pp. 72–74).
8. This opinion echoes solutions commonly debated in the 1970s–1980s such as improving the machinery on which women worked or moving them from heavy industries into less hazardous employment sectors such as the service industry (see also Lapidus, Citation1993, p. 151; Shineleva, Citation1990, pp. 84, 85). Thus, it seemed, the difficulties of providing working mothers with adequate support could be resolved only if women returned, in Gorbachev’s often-quoted words, to their ‘womanly mission’ of motherhood and hearth keeper (Posadskaya, Citation1993, p. 163).
9. Natasha Tolstiakova cites a vice editor-in-chief of Rabotnitsa during the 1960s as saying that ‘the magazine avoided printing anything on sexuality because its editors feared vulgarity and an unscientific approach [to this matter]’ (Citation2004, p. 136).
10. In the early 1980s, in their attempts to once again encourage women, particularly those residing in the European part of the USSR, the state re-introduced the award for mothers of five or more children; they received credentials such as ‘Mother Heroine’, an order of ‘Maternity Praise’ and a ‘Medal of Maternity’ (Postanovlenie Citation1982). Bridger (Citation2007, p. 110) notes that as this demographic measure from the Stalinist-era hardly had any real effect, the planners opted for the new stance of propagating a three-children family, which could simultaneously increase birth rates in urban areas of the European USSR and halt the still-high rates in rural areas and particularly in Central Asia.
11. The weakening relevance of this notion could be observed in representations from the previous decades. At that time, however, the focus was not on ‘older’, slim women’s ability to have sexual pleasure but on the joy of wearing fashionable styles that were out of reach for younger, plumper women (R 1978 Dec, p. 3 & 1979 Jan, pp. 30, 31 & 1980 March, p. 25). According to a 1987 text in Krest’yanka, for instance, the old postulates of fashion about the combination of colours or age-appropriate styles were no longer applicable and it was time to ‘reject [one’s old beautification] habits’ (K 1987 April, p. 39).
12. In the foreign-style glossy publication, Russian Cosmopolitan, images of non-Slavic, Asian or Black women and men appeared occasionally and primarily in advertisements of international brands for perfumes or attire that featured models like Naomi Campbell or the Olympic winner in fencing, Laura Flessel-Colovic (see Cosmo 1998 Sep; 1999 Dec).