CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Omanova, Dina |
|---|---|
| Title | "Female Workers Are Still Waiting for Your Answer, Comrade Novoselov!": Soviet Women's Agency in the Rabotnitsa Magazine, 1953-1964 |
| Summary | This research focuses on the functioning of women’s press during the Khrushchev era (1953-1964), and in particular it analyzes the Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker) magazine for the entire period of Khrushchev's rule. By focusing on women-readers’ letters as well as on the editorial board’s engagement with those letters, my research explores the functioning of the women’s press and acknowledges the readers’ participation in its content production. My research questions are: How did readers participate in and contribute to the media during Khrushchev’s rule? What kinds of questions did women-readers and the magazine’s editorial board raise? In what way were the letters published in the magazine expressions of women’s exercise of agency? The main argument of this research is that readers’ roles in the press went beyond that of passive receivers of the Party messages – the role taken for granted in virtually all of the scholarly literature on this topic, in the vein of traditional, top-down Sovietology. By analyzing readers’ letters in the Rabotnitsa magazine, I demonstrate a multitude of active roles that women as letter-writers undertook in Rabotnitsa. The problems addressed by women included but were not limited to: the shortage of kindergartens, their slow construction, and unsatisfactory conditions, work-related problems, such as unequal treatment, illegal dismissals, poor labor conditions and lack of mechanization. By raising these concerns in their letters, women acted as claimants, initiators, and critics. |
| Supervisor | de Haan, Francisca |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/omanova_dina.pdf |
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