‘We were very upset if we didn’t look fashionable’: Women’s Beauty Practices in Post-war Russia

Abstract

‘Beauty’ has attracted considerably less academic attention amongst scholars concerned with the Soviet gender order, than questions of gender ideology and gendered divisions of public and private sphere roles.¹ Where beauty has been discussed, it is usually treated as something of ‘secondary importance’, an aspect of broader studies of private life, intimacy, sexuality and consumption.² However, feminist researchers have noted that concepts of ‘beauty’ are extremely important to the production of femininity in any society, and can shed light on less overt mechanisms of domination which, due to their invisibility, may easily survive and/or adjust to transformations of the ‘visible’ political and social order.³ From this perspective the Soviet case is particularly interesting. Although the majority of women were employed outside of the home and in spite of constant shortages of fashionable clothes and other beauty products, Soviet women continued to show an interest in ‘looking nice’ throughout the Soviet period. Indeed, during the perestroika years western visitors were often impressed by Soviet women’s attempts to look ‘as feminine as possible’.