The Mother Citizen and the Absent Father: Gender Roles and the Family in Early Bolshevik Posters

The Mother Citizen and the Absent Father: Gender Roles and the Family in Early Bolshevik Posters Tinsley, Treasure In the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolshevik state used health and hygiene propaganda to attempt to reinforce socialist ideology among the Soviet people. This essay analyzes maternity and natal care posters from this era to argue that the state used the absence of the paternal figure to reinforce state authority and power within the private sphere of the household. This required the posters to navigate the tensions between a state that was pushing an ideology of ‘Women’s Liberation’ from the chains of domesticity and a reality in which women were necessary caretakers of the next generation of comrades.