Women on the Homefront

As in many other European nations during the war, women became an essential part of the wartime economy, entering into the industrial workforce and producing materials to support the military front. Pictured above are women working in an armaments factory. The banner behind them reads: "Defenders of Moscow-- The Soviet People Are With You"

During the Great Patriotic War, Soviet women who remained on the homefront were charged with two general categories that engaged them in the war effort: first were the physical and material demands of war—assuming the roles in the labor force that had previously been occupied by their fathers, brothers and husbands, and becoming the sole provider for children and other dependent family members. Additionally, women were forced to endure an overwhelming material hardship as resources grew ever more scarce, coupled with the threat of air raids that could leave a family homeless without warning. The second component of female patriotic duty on the homefront was a symbolic one. According to Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between love for the family and devotion to the state” (Our Cities, Our Hearths, Our Families, p. 825). Women played a key role in the maintenance of morale on the homefront through their position of the protector of the Russian home, and implicitly the cultural values and traditions being defended on the front. Kirschenbaum discusses how the wartime press “represented women as both central to the war effort and as inextricably tied to the private, emotional world of the family” (p. 841). Even the metaphorical conception of the Soviet nation was realized in particularly feminine terminology as “The Motherland” (родина).