“No More Heroines”

No More Heroines? (note the question mark) is the title of a very interesting book about changing conditions for women in post-Soviet Russia (Bridger, Kay, and Pinnick, 1996; also see Engel, 2004). Even though it is about Russia and not Ukraine and is now more than a decade old, it applies to a very large extent to the experience of women in Ukraine as well, and still speaks to us today. The book makes a pithy comparison between the heroic image of women in the Soviet period and the unfortunate images that have emerged since the Soviet Union ended. The discussion accords with my own observations and opens a topic here about sex and sexism in contemporary Ukraine, and in Kyiv specifically.

In the propaganda of Soviet times, women were portrayed as being strong, confident, central to the economy, and during the war against the Nazis, heroic defenders of the homeland. Whether she was Olympics gymnast Olga Korbut (actually an ethnic Belarusian) or a female cosmonaut such as Valentina Tereshova or Svetlana Savitskaya, to mention the three names that are listed as examples in No More Heroines?, the popular image was “overwhelmingly one of achievement … In production, in sport or at home with the family, the Soviet woman … was strong, progressive and capable of anything” (p. 1). We see this in Soviet propaganda posters, for example, in which she joyously called her community to join the collective farm; she was seen as a determined factory worker in a black landscape of belching smokestacks; or as in a 1931 poster by G. Shegal, she broke free of the drudgery of kitchen work and stepped into the bright light of modern Soviet urban life (“Down with kitchen slavery! Let there be new household life!”). In World War II, she sternly (and now famously via a popular poster) sushed her countrymen against gossiping (Ne boltai!), unwaveringly sent her only son to war with the charge to be a hero (But heroem!), and supported the troops by laboring in field and factory. A 1942 poster by Viktor Ivanov shows the Soviet woman driving a tractor and the inscription “A tractor in the field is worth a tank in battle.” After the war, we see her calling fellow citizens to rebuild: “We defended Leningrad.