Mothers in the Fight for Peace: The Soviet Project of the 1970s

The article uses material from popular women’s magazines to reconstruct the ideological project of a woman-mother fighting for world peace. This project is interpreted as a phenomenon of post-conflict culture in the 1970s, shaped by the reflection on the outcomes of the Great Patriotic War, and by the corresponding changes in the attitudes toward new military conflicts of that period. Designing the human being is understood not only as the goal of a specific project but also as an activity aimed at understanding and describing the future in various anthropological theories and as different practices of human engineering represented in culture. The process of creating a new woman was riddled with contradictions: on the one hand, women were encouraged to benefit from state support to become even more modern and to freely realize themselves (among other things, as active participants in the fight for peace); on the other hand, the traditional meaning of motherhood as an inherent quality of femininity was re-emphasized. The project is analyzed on four levels: the conceptualization of military conflicts, the moral assessment of war, visual images of mothers fighting for peace, and the embodied ideal.