In this article, on the basis of a gender approach, it is proposed to consider the image of women soldiers created on the pages of the Soviet military periodical press. This is undertaken in order to understand how exactly the idea of women in the Red Army was formed and promoted. This approach allows us to determine the main characteristic features in the interpretation of the “female issue” and at the same time to identify the features of the design of “female” and “male” authorship in the military press, as well as to prove that, although gender equality was officially proclaimed in the USSR, discriminatory practices were widely used in newspaper materials. The army and front newspapers of the period under review were characterized by two tricks in covering the issue of women’s participation in the war: the first — articles authored by women themselves, the second — publications about female military personnel by authorship of men. In the first case, we see the desire of women to emphasize their equal rights with men at the front. In the second case, the heroism of women became famous, but in most cases, the heroism of female military personnel stood out in the context of help provided to male combatants in various combat and non-combat conditions. The author concluded that so different a coverage of the participation of women in the war in the Soviet military periodical press testifies to the high importance of both the issue of equality in the army for women and the image of the valiant female military personnel created by them in the newspapers. However, due to the fact that the USSR remained essentially a patriarchal state and the traditional gender hierarchy was not violated, which is confirmed by examples of publications of male authors who honored women with an auxiliary role in the war. read in PDF>>>
