Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
One of the posters produced in the early 1920s by the Moscow Provincial Soviet of Trade Unions shows a grim industrial town, and a crowd of downtrodden women shuffling from left to right, shawls round their shoulders, kerchiefs over their heads; in the foreground a group of plump men of the bourgeoisie stand and leer. Its central characters are a young man and a young woman: he, disproportionately large, holds in his left hand a hammer, sign of his membership of the proletariat; she, small-scale and dejected, is clearly in need of assistance – and indeed, the worker is holding out his free arm to her in a gesture of fraternal solicitude. The text reinforces this visual image of the prostitute as victim: ‘By destroying capitalism the proletariat destroys prostitution. Prostitution is a great misfortune for humanity. Worker take care of the woman worker.’ The date of publication was 1923, two years after the introduction of the New Economic Policy; the country was still recovering from the economic and social chaos of revolution, civil war and famine, and for the working class faced with a housing crisis, low wages and high unemployment, life was hard. It was particularly hard for women, many of whom had to support themselves and their families in conditions of a shrinking job market. The alarming level of redundancies among the female labour force appeared, albeit as a minor item, on party and trade union agendas.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.