Join CSEEES for our Graduate Student Lecture. Our spring 2026 lecture entitled "Reading the Female Soldier: Soviet Periodicals and Women in the Second World War" will be given by Victoria Paige (Department of History, CSEEES Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies).
A light lunch will be provided to in-person attendees, please register for this talk using the link below. Registration will close on Wednesday, February 4.
Register for the in-person session here!
Abstract
In this lecture, Victoria Paige will explore why the Red Army prohibited women’s combat service after 1945, despite their prominent roles as snipers, scouts, and pilots during World War II. Paige argues that women’s participation in martial violence destabilized the Soviet gender order, which closely linked military service to masculinity. Drawing on wartime media, she will analyze portrayals of female soldiers across Soviet periodicals to uncover cultural anxieties surrounding gender. Newspapers such as Pravda and Krasnaia Zvezda minimized women’s combat roles, emphasizing traditional tropes of women as caretakers and victims. Conversely, women’s magazines and Komsomol’skaia Pravda celebrated female soldiers to inspire enlistment, while satirical cartoons in Krokodil mocked coed military service, depicting fears of feminized armies and masculinized women. Paige concludes by asking: what does the Soviet decision to exclude women from combat reveal about the enduring relationship between gender and military power?
Speaker Bio
Victoria Paige is a Ph.D. candidate in Russian and Eastern European history with a focus on women and gender studies. Her current research interests are women in combat during the Second World War and constructions of gender during the Stalin period.