Reclaiming Ice as a Space for Men: Selling Hockey Masculinity in Soviet Culture

• In Event: Men and Masculinity in Late Soviet Society

Abstract

Given last year’s launch of the new Professional Women’s Hockey League in
North America (PWHL), one might assume that women’s hockey is a recent
phenomenon. However, women in many Nordic countries, including imperial Russia and
the USSR, played organized forms of hockey from the 1890s to the beginning of the
Second World War. After the war, these leagues all but disappeared in several hockey-
playing countries until the 1990s. In the late 1940s, Soviet (men’s) hockey authorities
finalized a change to marginalize the previous game, called bandy, and to forge ahead
with the newer “Canadian-style” of puck hockey, as Soviet sport overall sought increased
international competition. Along with several other differences in play – including
outdoor vs. indoor rinks and the use of a ball vs. a puck – women were permitted to
continue playing bandy but not to form teams playing the new puck hockey. Bandy was
coded as feminine, while “Canadian” hockey deliberately became a man’s game.
This paper will look at how bandy/hockey was gendered and what this trend had
in common with other cultural spaces that were reclaimed for men in Soviet society after
1945 (as I have shown in my previous research on military culture). Using newspaper and
film sources, my research disrupts assumed links between hockey and masculinity to
make visible how Soviet authorities, fans, and players alike deliberately constructed that
connection.

Author

• Erica L. Fraser, Carleton U (Canada)