'Flowers and metal': The Soviet 'wife -activists' movement' and Stalin -era culture and society, 1934--1941

This dissertation analyzes the 1930s Soviet wife-activists' movement and its role in the Soviet "culture of daily life" ( kul'tura byta). This phenomenon, also known as the obshchestvennitsa (civic-minded women's) movement, involved women in social service provision and creating a domestic environment fostering husbands' productivity. The movement ultimately resulted in an unprecedented variant of the "new Soviet woman.";Chapter One traces Soviet efforts to appeal to wives before the rise of the obshchestvennitsa movement, urging wifely responsibility for husbands' work performance and emphasizing their domestic endeavors' role in labor productivity. Chapters Two, Three and Four trace the movement's rise, its 1936 peak, and its evolution during the Great Terror and preparation for war. These chapters illustrate two of the dissertation's three theses. First, this era was characterized by mutually reinforcing popular enthusiasm and official mobilization. Second, movement priorities reflected and shaped the era's twin goals: developing Soviet culture and industrial might. Chapter Four shows how those goals were affected by patronage politics, the international situation, and the Terror.;Remaining chapters explore the wife-activist's official persona. Chapter Five analyzes the obshchestvennitsa as her husband's "closest comrade," entailing theoretical equality and a public-spirited domesticity. Chapter Six examines the obshchestvennitsa as mother, demonstrating how the family promoted social stability and official values. The final chapter compares visual representations of the wife-activist as "new Soviet woman" with those of women workers and collective farmers. These chapters demonstrate a third thesis: that a coherent, consistent gender role system was complicated by inability to reconcile the Soviet commitment to female equality with traditional gender roles. Ambiguous domestic and public priorities meant that the two halves of the obshchestvennitsa's persona---wife and activist---were never adequately balanced.;Existing scholarship has positioned the wife-activists' movement and its cultural milieu as part of a retreat from the revolution, reasserting traditional gender roles and social hierarchy. This dissertation contends that the obshchestvennitsa movement and the culture of which it was a part strove to imbue traditional forms with a still-revolutionary collectivist ethos, in a Soviet twist on modernity.