EDN: https://elibrary.ru/chrroe
DOI: 10.21064/WinRS.2025.4.8
The article analyzes representations of Soviet women’s labor in the discourse of American anti-communism during the Cold War. The sources for the study are the works of
American anti-communist ideologues, propaganda books, and issues (more than 200 in total) of The American Legion Magazine, Freedom’s Facts, Life, and Look, founded in the 1950s. Among the discursive strategies aimed at discrediting the Soviet model of emancipation, accusations against the Soviet authorities stand out, namely the defeminization of women, the deliberate destruction of the family, the exacerbation of discrimination against women, and the coercive nature of their involvement in production. The article shows that representations of female workers contributed to the construction of a negative image of the USSR, serving as a resource for creating an image of the enemy and facilitating the realization of all functions of this image.
Acknowledgments: this work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant № 22-18-00305-P “The images of enemy in Cold War popular culture: their content, contemporary reception and usage in Russian and U.S. symbolic politics”, https://rscf.ru/en/project/22-18-00305/.