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“A Woman is Not a Man”: The Culture of Gender and Generation in Soviet Russia, 1921-1928

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anne E. Gorsuch
Anne E. Gorsuch*
Affiliation:
The Department of History, University of British Columbia
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Extract

The Russian revolution was intended to remove all limits to women's equality. Collective organizations were to take over the kinds of tasks–childcare, cooking, and cleaning–that had traditionally restricted women and limited their full participation in economic life, while legislative actions mandated equal economic, marital, and civil rights. Accompanying these changes was a "sexual revolution" (preached most famously by Aleksandra Kollontai) that encouraged equality in love and sex as well as in economics and politics.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , Fall 1996 , pp. 636 - 660
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1996

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References

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and I thank Wendy Goldman for her comments. Thanks also to Caroline Ford, Barbara Heldt, Peter Konecny, William Rosenberg, Christine Ruane, and to participants in the Vancouver Gender History Colloquium for helpful readings and to Isabel Tirado for archival suggestions. Research support was provided by the Social Science Research Council, and by the International Research and Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the United States Department of State (Title VIII) and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1. Fisher, Ralph, Pattern for Soviet Youth: A Study of the Congresses of the Komsomol, 1918–1954 (New York, 1959), 67 Google Scholar. Founded in 1918, the Komsomol admitted youth between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three.

2. I. IV. “Bez luny,” hvestiia TsIK 58 (3292) (8 March 1928): 6.

3. S. Kirillov, “Devushka v komsomole,” Kommunistka, 1928, no. 9: 27.

4. See especially Goldman, Wendy Z., Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elizabeth Ann Wood, “Gender and Politics in Soviet Russia: Working Women under the New Economic Policy, 1918–1928” (Ph. D. diss., University of Michigan, 1991); and Clements, Barbara Evans, “The Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations,” in Koenker, Diane P., Rosenberg, William G., and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, 1989).Google Scholar

5. For more on the new ways that young men and women met, see Gorsuch, Anne E., “Flappers and Foxtrotters: Soviet Youth in the ‘Roaring Twenties, '” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1102 (March 1994): 1–33.Google Scholar

6. Balashov, B. A. and Nelepin, , VLKSM za 10 let v tsifrakh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), 10 Google Scholar; Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth, 135; Tsentr Khraneniia Dokumentov Molodezhnykh Organizatsii (TsKhDMO, formerly the Central Komsomol Archive), “O rabote sredi devushek,” f. 1, op. 23. d. 864a, 1. 2. The largest number of Komsomol women were found in the central industrial regions (22 percent in late 1925) and the smallest in the Muslim-dominated Central Asian republics (8.1 percent in 1925). TsKhDMO, “Report on the Condition of Women in the Komsomol,” 1925, f. 1, op. 23., d. 391, 1. 39.

7. Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth, 112. Also see TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 40, and Rigby, T. H., Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, 1968), 361.Google Scholar

8. See Diane P. Koenker, “Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (December 1995): 1438–64.

9. Like the early American sociologists and criminologists of deviancy in Chicago, Soviet scholars in the 1910s and especially the 1920s began to make a “scientific” study of youth cultures. A large number of scientific institutes (most based in Moscow and Leningrad and most under the direction of Narkompros or of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs [NKVD]), examined family life, schools, libraries, street culture, and leisure activities. A valuable account of sociological studies of youth as primary sources can be found in E. A. Semenova, “Materialy sotsiologicheskikh obsledovanii detei i podrostkov kak istoricheskii istochnik po izucheniu sovetskogo obraza zhizni (20-e gody),” htoriia SSSR (September-October 1986): 112–22.

10. The reference to “on the page” and “on the streets” comes from Neuberger, Joan in Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley, 1993), 5.Google Scholar

11. Histories of youth culture have typically had little to say about questions of gender, the work of Angela McRobbie on British girls’ culture and Hilary Pilkington on contemporary Soviet girls’ culture being notable exceptions. The imbalance was first pointed out in a chapter by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber entitled “Girls and Subcultures,” in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London, 1976)Google Scholar. Also see Pilkington, Hilary, “Going out in ‘style': Girls in Youth Cultural Activity,” in Buckley, Mary, ed., Perestroika and Soviet Women (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar, and Pilkington, , Russia's Youth and Its Culture: A Nation's Constructors and Constructed (London, 1994).Google Scholar

12. Eric Naiman, “The Case of Chubarov Alley: Collective Rape, Utopian Desire, and the Mentality of NEP,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 17 (Spring 1990): 7.

13. Elizabeth Waters, “From the Old Family to the New: Work, Marriage and Motherhood in Urban Soviet Russia, 1917–31” (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1985), 59–60.

14. Barskaia, Teleshevskaia, Truneva, Ianovich, and Iakunichkin, “Deiatel'nost rebenka po obsluzhivaniiu sem'i,” in A. Gel'mont and Durikin, A., eds., Tried i dosug rebenka (Moscow, 1927), 26, 37.Google Scholar

15. Kabo, E. O., Ocherki rabochego byta: Opyt monograftcheskogo issledovaniia domashnego rabochego byta (Moscow, 1928), 50.Google Scholar

16. Speech by Petrova, Comrade, “Iz stenogrammy soveshchaniia devushek rabotnits moskovskikh fabrik,” in Dmitriev, V. and Galin, B., Na putiakh k novomu bytu (Moscow, 1927), 27.Google Scholar

17. Provincial activists spent an average of 2 hours and 55 minutes a day in meetings. Trud, otdykh, son komsomol'tsa-aktivista: Po materialam vyborochnogo obsledovaniia biudzhetov vremeni aktivnykh rabotnikov RLKSM (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 6: 27–28, 32, 36.

18. See the speech by Comrade Beliaeva in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 36.

19. Ibid., 27–28.

20. Vera Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol (Leningrad, 1927), 49.

21. G. Grigorov and S. Shkotov, Staryi i novyi byt (Moscow, 1927), 99; Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 27, 46; Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 26. According to one author, the solution to such concerns was to show parents that the Komsomol was good for girls, that “we don't teach them just to sing the ‘Internationale, ’ but also to sew, to knit, to cultivate two ears where before there was only one.” Murin, V. A., Byt i nravy derevenskoi molodezhi (Moscow, 1926), 94 Google Scholar. For more on rural parents and their opposition to their daughters’ participation, see Tirado, Isabel A., “The Komsomol and the Krest'ianka: The Political Mobilization of the Young Women in the Russian Village, 1921–1927,” Russian History I Histoire Russe 23, nos. 1–4 (1996): 1–22.Google Scholar

22. Murin, Byt i nravy derevenskoi molodezhi, 35. Male rural youth were also more likely to travel to big cities like Moscow. The pedagogical archive has a whole series of letters describing young peasants’ vacation trips to Moscow, the plays and movies they saw, and the museums they visited. See Nauchnyi Arkhiv Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk (NAAPNS), f. 1, op. 1, d. 243, 11. 1–3.

23. Peasant girls were particularly underrepresented in the Komsomol. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 40. In 1925, peasants represented 46.3 percent of the Komsomol membership as a whole as compared to just 31.7 percent of Komsomol girls.

24. Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 48.

25. Murin, Byt i nravy derevenskoi molodezhi, 94.

26. Ibid., 86.

27. Speech by Comrade Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 40.

28. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, 11.

29. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 11. 41–42; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 11. 6, 7. Similarly, young women heard the same tired presentations on “Girls and the Komsomol” so often that they complained they could not tell one meeting from the next.

30. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 11. 26–27.

31. See for example Murin, Byt i nravy derevenskoi molodezhi, 94. On men who did help share household tasks with their wives, see Vera Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Vladimir, Zhizn’ bez kontrolia: Polovaia zhizn’ i sem'ia rabochei molodezhi (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 77–78, 80.Google Scholar

32. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn1 bez kontrolia, 93. Also see “Devushka v Komsomole,” Kommunistka, 29–30.

33. Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 55.

34. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 59. Or as another Komsomol Central Com mittee report concluded: “The influence of the old ways of life, of meshchanstva is very strong among girls.” TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 14.

35. Elizabeth Waters, “The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917–32,” in Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, 1991), 232.

36. Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth, 41–42.

37. Tirado, Isabel A., “Nietzschean Motifs in the Komsomol's Vanguardism,” in Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 240 Google Scholar. Some women did enter into new and more public roles during the war as they “joined the Red Army and rode into battle in men's overcoats.” For most Bolshevik women, however, “[a] gender-based division of labor and power within the party influenced strongly the types of jobs available … and the progress of their careers, even during the most desperate and therefore liberating days of the Civil War.” Clements, “Effects of the Civil War,” 105, 117.

38. See Peter Konecny, “Creating the Responsible Husband: The Crisis of Masculinity among Soviet Students, 1924–36” (paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, October 1995). For more on Civil War culture in the Komsomol, see Anne E. Gorsuch ‘ “NEP Be Damned!’ Young Militants in the 1920s and the Culture of Civil War,” Russian Review (forthcoming, October 1997).

39. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 5, d. 13, 1. 13 ; Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 21.

40. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 5, d. 13, 1. 12.

41. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 61.

42. For male Komsomoltsy, the adoption of the adolescent persona and its contrast with the adultness (and backwardness) of women was principally associated with women's reproductive and household roles. Though more “adult” in their private lives, in other ways women were seen as less adult than young men. In the factory, for example, young and older women alike had long been treated by older workers as minors, on a par with unskilled youth in terms of pay and presumptions of ability. It was easier for young men to graduate to the world of the adult worker by acquiring skills; women were more often forced to remain unskilled and thus less than “adult.” This idea of women as “minors” is borrowed from Nicholas Stargardt's argument about factory life in late nineteenth-century Europe, which he says was an environment in which “only married, qualified men ever came of age “—an analysis that seems to me to be equally true for Russia. “Young men might under propitious circumstances acquire skills in a trade,” Stargardt argues, “or develop a class outlook in social democratic study groups, and so be admitted to the ranks of men; women could find a half-way house in the social democratic women's movement, but never fully escape from being minors.” Stargardt, Nicholas, “Male Bonding and the Class Struggle in Imperial Germany,” Historical Journal 38, no. 1 (1995): 190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Report by Komsomol Secretary Chaplin, June 1925. TsKhDMO, f. 37, op. 4, d. 6, 1. 34. On the new tasks of youth during NEP see, Vladimir Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth League,” On Youth (Moscow, n. d.).

44. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn1 bez kontrolia, 101. The survey was conducted among young women with children.

45. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 11. 23–24; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 822, 1. 84; “Devushka v Komsomole,” Kommunistka, 29. It was also not uncommon for a young man whose advances were spurned to exact retribution by getting the young woman expelled from the Komsomol.

46. Wynn, Charters, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, 1992), 85.Google Scholar

47. Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, 1990), 360.Google Scholar

48. Smidovich, S, “Sem'ia i stroitel'stvo sotsializma,” in Slepkov, A., ed., Byt v molodezhi (Moscow, 1926), 55 Google Scholar. Some blamed the transition from Civil War to NEP for the sexual excesses of youth, arguing that young people demanded self-fulfillment after years of self-deprivation. S. Ia. Vol'fson, Sotsiologiia braka iz sem'i (Minsk, 1929), 418.Google Scholar

49. From a diary entry as cited in Rubinshtein, M. M., Iunost': Po dnevnikam i avtobiograficheskim zapisiam (Moscow, 1928), 202 Google Scholar. Also see Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn’ bez kontrolia, 56.

50. The summary is from Mehnert, Klaus, Youth in Soviet Russia (1933; reprint, Westport, 1981), 86–87.Google Scholar

51. See Alexandra Kollontai, “The Family and the Communist State,” and Leon Trotsky, “From the Old Family to the New,” in William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions (Ann Arbor, 1990). For views of the family more generally, see Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, and Waters, “From the Old Family to the New. “

52. Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms, 85.

53. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn’ hex kontrolia, 65.

54. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 64; Iunyi hommunist, 1927, no. 2: 60. Observers like Ketlinskaia and Slepkov were most outraged by reports of secretaries of Komsomol collectives who made their wives leave the organization and stay home. Zhizn’ bez kontrolia, 64–68.

55. Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 75.

56. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 26.

57. Carol Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract” as cited in Eley, Geoff, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Dirks, Nicholas B., Eley, Geoff, and Ortner, Sherry B., eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, 1994), 313.Google Scholar

58. Steinberg, Mark D., Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867–1907 (Berkeley, 1992), 78–79.Google Scholar

59. Stratonistkii, A., Voprosy byta v Komsomole (Leningrad, 1926), 50 Google Scholar, and TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 822, 1. 83; Dubrovin, I, “Revoliutsionirovanie byta,” Iunyi kommunist, 1923, no.8: 20–21 Google Scholar; Bobryshev, Ivan T., Melkoburzhuazhnye vliianiia sredi molodezhi (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928), 78.Google Scholar

60. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn’ bez kontrolia, 96; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 31.

61. Stratonistkii, Voprosy byta v Komsomole, 52.

62. As cited in Galin, B, “Bytovye zametki,” Iunyi kommunist, 1927, no. 2: 63 Google Scholar. Also see TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 50.

63. Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 31–32. In some cases, such as at the Moscow Red October candy factory, Komsomol men never went out with Komsomol women, but “always tried to chose good-looking non-party girls.” For this reason some non-party girls would not even join the youth league for fear that they would never get married. Beliaeva in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 38.

64. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 16, 23; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 50.

65. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 5, d. 13, 1. 12. There are interesting correspondences between Komsomol views of young women as both “victim” and “villain” and Bolshevik views of prostitutes, especially in the late 1920s. See Waters, Elizabeth, “Victim or Villain: Prostitution in Post-Revolutionary Russia,” in Edmondson, Linda, ed., Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar.

66. Goomilevsky, Lev, Dog Lane (London, 1927), 68, 102 Google Scholar. The characterization of women as sirens who would pull men away from their revolutionary agenda again finds its origins in the prerevolutionary period. Radical worker Ivan Babushkin similarly “rejected two women's request to join his social democratic reading circle after asking himself, ‘Would the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex not have a retarding effect on our studies?'” Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms, 85.

67. Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 77; N. Vigilianskii, “O studencheskom byte,” Iunyi kommunist, 1927, nos. 11–12: 77; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 43.

68. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 11. 17–19. Also see Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 40. On the percent of young women holding qualified positions in the textile industry, see “Devushka v Komsomole,” Kommunistka, 28. These dynamics are very similar to what Diane Koenker has described in her work on men and women on the postrevolutionary shop floor where men still “retained the power of control” and “women were represented as partial workers, incomplete” and “transient.” Koenker, “Men against Women,” 1463.

69. Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 31. Also see Ketlinskaia, Devushkai Komsomol, 4. Places “reserved” for women were called a “mesta dlia iubok” (places for skirts).

70. As cited in Winter, Ella, Red Virtue (London, 1933), 99.Google Scholar

71. Beliaeva in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 37. Other examples of women who succeeded in their leadership positions can be found in TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 22.

72. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 21; Beliaeva in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 37.

73. V. E. Maksimova, TV s “ezd RLKSM, 5, 9. Reports from the fifth all-union congress in 1922 suggest it may have been even worse. Iunyi kommunist writes that there were only “a few girls” at that congress, and not a one at the following all-Russian congress. Iunyi kommunist, 1923, no. 8: 22; TsKhDMO, “Devushka v aktive,” January-October 1926, f. 1, op. 23, d. 580, 1. 108; TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 21. For similar reports elsewhere see TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 11. 51–53 and f. 1, op. 23, d. 428, 1. 94 as well as Biulleten’ IV vsesoiuznoi, 19.

74. Iunyi kommunist, 1924, no. 1: 27.

75. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 20. For more on problems of promotion in rural areas, see Tirado, “Komsomol and the Krest'ianka,” 16–19.

76. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 11. 2, 5; TsKhDMO, f. 1, d. 23, op. 391, 11. 1, 8, 69. Also see “O rabote komsomola sredi devushek” (17 March 1927) and “O rabote sredi molodezhi” (May 1924) in KPSS o komsomole i molodezhi 1917–1961 (Moscow, 1962) 50, 117–20.

77. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 6.

78. Ketlinskaia, Devushka i Komsomol, 21. The party too argued that, although the Komsomol was to make a special effort to bring young women into the league, there were to be no special women's sections. See Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth, 67.

79. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 864a, 1. 8.

80. As cited in Bobryshev, Melkoburzhuazhnye vliianiia sredi molodezhi, 80–81.

81. Some women left the league of their own accord. Comrade Revina had been an active worker who had chided other Komsomol women when they left the league after getting married. But when she herself got married, she too left. When questioned, she answered: “What do I need the Komsomol for? My husband works and makes 150 rubles. I work and get 70 rubles, and I'm going to live quietly without the Komsomol.” TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 833, 1. 16. Underlined in original.

82. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, 242–45; Clements, “Effects of the Civil War. “

83. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, 127–28.

84. Beliaeva and Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 35, 40.

85. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, 128–29.

86. Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 39, and Petrova, ibid., 29–30.

87. Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 32.

88. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn’ bez kontrolia, 89.

89. Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, 1978), 322 and n. 11.Google Scholar

90. Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 35.

91. Petrova and Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 34–35, 40.

92. Petrova in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 27–29. Despite her disapproval of young women who chose the “unrevolutionary” route, Petrova was not unsympathetic to the difficulties of their lives or their reasons for wanting to marry, admitting that economic conditions and parental pressures made it very difficult for a young woman to join the Komsomol. In this she differs from those Zhenotdel activists who rarely admitted that “very real problems were keeping most women occupied,” insisting that “women's attitudes were the obstacle preventing them from joining the revolution.” See Clements, Barbara Evans, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman,” in Gleason, Abbott, Kenez, Peter, and Stites, Richard, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 1985), 224.Google Scholar

93. Clements, Barbara Evans, “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

94. Ibid., 486.

95. Ognyov, N., The Diary of a Communist Undergraduate, trans. Werth, Alexander (New York, 1929), 41 Google Scholar. Also see the description of the young daughter in Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees, trans. Cathy Porter (London, 1977).Google Scholar

96. As cited in Rubinshtein, Iunost', 195.

97. As cited in Winter, Red Virtue, 128.

98. Ibid., 136.

99. Shtern in Dmitriev and Galin, Na putiakh, 42.

100. “Devushka v komsomole,” Kommunistka, 28.

101. Semashko, N, “Nuzhna li ‘zhenstvennost,'” Molodaia gvardiia 6 (1924): 205–6Google Scholar. This view is also reflected in the play Our Youth in which the character Besais describes the kind of woman he would like: “For my part she may be enlightened about everything; but I should be offended if, while I was stammering out my love she were to clean her teeth with a match-stick and swing her legs—'Good, Besais my darling, I love you too.’ In a word the girls may be modern if you like, but they may not lose their capacity for blushing.” As cited in Mehnert, Youth in Soviet Russia, 123. Anxiety about the “blurring of the sexes” was not particular to Soviet Russia. In France, according to Mary-Louise Roberts, “the blurring of a proper division between the sexes” was used “as a central metaphor for cultural crisis” and the “fragility of civilization” following World War I. Here it was the waistless, flat-chested dress of the flapper that most symbolized the masculinization of women. Mary-Louise Roberts, ‘ “This Civilization No Longer Has Sexes': La Gargonne and Cultural Crisis in France after World War I,” Gender and History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 52.

102. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 391, 1. 50.

103. Murin, Byt i nravy derevenskoi molodezhi, 89

104. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 5, d. 13, 1. 13.

105. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 5, d. 13, 1. 20.

106. Ketlinskaia and Slepkov, Zhizn’ bez hontrolia, 66.