Rossman, Ella;
(2025)
How to Be a Soviet Girl: Female Adolescence in the USSR after the Second World War (1946-1991).
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
![[thumbnail of Rossman_10215515_Thesis.pdf]](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
Rossman_10215515_Thesis.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 November 2030. Download (35MB) |
Abstract
This thesis explores the socialisation of women in the USSR after the Second World War, covering both the specifics of ideologies surrounding Soviet adolescent girls and their personal experiences. I pay special attention to how young women in the USSR were building their identities and seeking agency in the transforming political context of late Stalinism, the Thaw, the late Soviet conservative turn and Perestroika. I worked with a range of previously unexplored sources, including official documents, expert discussions among Soviet social scientists and medical doctors, Soviet manuals for teenage girls, visual arts and media, as well as the diaries and memoirs of women who grew up in different parts of the USSR. The geography of my research is broad: it covers developments in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Soviet national republics, including the Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Georgian, Uzbek and Estonian Soviet national republics. This study provides a complex and gender-sensitive view of late Soviet childhood and youth policies while simultaneously bringing minors into the scholarly discussion about the socialist version of women’s emancipation. Further, it adds to the analysis of how authoritarian ideologies target young people by appealing to personal notions like gender identity and sexuality. My research demonstrates that even in the highly controlled and repressive context of late Stalinism, children and teenagers were able to challenge the messages directed at them, asserting agency rather than passively succumbing to indoctrination.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | How to Be a Soviet Girl: Female Adolescence in the USSR after the Second World War (1946-1991) |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215515 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
