“YOU ARE FIRST AND FOREMOST A WOMAN.”

Women’s experience during the siege of Leningrad: Leningrad’s women, 16-45, were mobilized by the thousands. Women were the majority of the half-million civilians who dug anti-tank ditches and defense fortifications and1,500 women were mobilized to work in peat bogs to provide the city with fuel.

The long-suffering women of Leningrad suddenly realized that on them lay the fate not only of their family, but of their city, even of the entire country. Aware of the burden placed upon them to protect their city, able-bodied Leningradian women between 16- and 45-years-old were mobilized in numbers reaching the hundreds of thousands. Women formed the vast majority of the approximately half-million civilians assembled to build anti-tank ditches and defense fortifications along the Pskov-Ostrov and Luga rivers, and 1,500 women were mobilized to work in peat bogs to provide the city with fuel.

The death of men in Leningrad during the war made the siege of Leningrad a woman’s experience. In the face of the men’s absence, women were expected to replace men in the factories, prepare defense fortifications, and protect the city from incendiary bombs, among many other traditionally male duties. All the while, women also fulfilled their traditional responsibilities, such as maintaining home and hearth and preserving societal morality, all increasingly difficult tasks during the severe conditions of the siege. Women managed to assume both roles, all while suffering from starvation, the disintegration of relationships, and alienation from their own bodies. Their experience of the siege illustrates how the ideology of the “new Soviet woman” — woman as man’s professional equal, fulltime worker, loyal Communist citizen, and devoted mother and wife — persisted in the darkest days of the siege of Leningrad.

December 16, 2013 | Categories: History, Nightmares of World War II, Photography, Pursuit of Happiness, The Drama Of It All, The Politics of Cultural Destruction, Uncategorized, Women's Issues | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Cannibalism, city, civilians, cultural destruction, Death, destruction, experience of civilians, Female empowerment, Females, Feminism, Feminist, feminist movement, Fight, Frozen, Germany, Girls, Government, History, Hitler, Leningrad, masculinity, Modern day St. Petersburg, murder of civilians, Nazi, nightmares of World War II, normalized violence, patriarchy, Photography, Politics, Power, rape, relentless chronicle of suffering, Russia, Russians, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict, sexualized violence, sexualized violence in wartime, Soviet Union, soviet-era Leningrad, Soviets, St. Petersburg, Stalin, starvation, the deadliest blockade of a city in human history, The politics of cultural destruction, The siege of Leningrad, USSR, violence against women, War, war rape, wartime, Women, Women's experience, women’s lives, womens issues, Womens movement, Womens Rights, World War II, World War two, WW2 | Leave a comment