| My dissertation seeks to expand our knowledge of Russian and German women's history under totalitarian systems by comparing women's fashioning by the state and their self-fashioning in Germany and Russia during the Third Reich and Bolshevik and Stalinist rule respectively. I argue that processes of women's fashioning and self-fashioning were largely influenced by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the so-called Woman Question and the New Woman and were culturally specific. I map the evolution of the Woman Question and the New Woman in the decades directly preceding and following the Nazi and Bolshevik seizure of power, defining changing standards of femininity and prevalent emancipatory paradigms. My dissertation analyzes the complex interaction of women and the dictators, focusing on state organizations for women, policies, official propaganda, and mass literature and culture. |
