“We Created Ourselves and the city”: Women's Contribution to the Development of Magnitogorsk in the 1950-1960s

Abstract

The everyday life of Soviet women during the years of the Khrushchev thaw is one of the insufficiently studied issues of Soviet women's history. This article is devoted to its study using the methods of gender anthropology and multi-focal ethnography of urban life. Its analysis is based on: heterogeneous empirical material - published memoirs of contemporaries, their oral stories (recorded by the authors of the article), materials from periodicals, neglected works of fiction, and visual sources. Magnitogorsk was chosen as the main research locus due to it being a large non-administrative industrial center that had appeared even before the war, and in which demographic gender imbalance persisted even after 1945. After analyzing the features of the women’s contribution to the formation of a new image of the city, the authors completed the picture of the lifestyles of urban women, showing several social types that changed the face of the industrial giant: architects, housewives, social activists, workers of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. The collected material showed the success of the Soviet Union’s new social policy, which was an innovative transition of the Soviet state from the harsh methods of management of the 1930s - early 1950s to Soviet democracy, including recognition of the importance of private life, including of Soviet women. However, everyday life of Soviet women from a half a century ago also revealed a number of issues such as: gender inequality and has the exposed the difficulties of organizing everyday women's domestic (family) and industrial life. By proving the importance of gender anthropology as an approach that expands the ability to analyze social idealism and hopes of the political thaw, this approach helps frame the period by showing how gender interacted with the shifting value-normative structures of Soviet thinking and the social image of the female builders of socialism.