"Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds": Citizen Diplomacy as Women’s Liberation during the Cold War

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The image of Khrushchev and Nixon facing off before a model kitchen in 1959 is so enshrined in scholarly memory it is almost prerequisite when discussing the politics of domesticity and gender during the Cold War. What remains hidden? The parallel conversation that the vice president’s wife and wife of the Soviet deputy premier had, weighing advantages and disadvantages that socialism and capitalism posed to women. This roundtable examines the extensive though overlooked role women played as citizen diplomats. We hope to spark discussion about how women’s particular styles of diplomacy differed from those of statesmen and why scholarly blindspots about their contributions persist. Looking at a decade of Soviet and American women’s pen-friendships (1944-1954), Alexis Peri will discuss how letter-writers collaborated on strategies for balancing paid and domestic work, and how their exchange contributed to the international women’s movements in the late 20th century. Addressing the 1950s and 1960s, Diana Cucuz (from whose book this roundtable draws its title and inspiration) will present American efforts to “liberate” supposedly unhappy Soviet women through consumption. She will show how Amerika constructed confining models of both Soviet and American womanhood. Finally, Christine Varga-Harris will discuss how, during the 1960s, the Committee of Soviet Women upheld women in Central Asia to promote socialism as a model for the advancement of newly liberated peoples in the Global South. She will highlight the Committee’s diplomatic methods, including invocations of racial harmony and female solidarity, which tied Soviet triumphalism to the global movement for women’s liberation.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Rósa Magnúsdóttir, U of Iceland (Iceland)

Roundtable Members

• Diana Cucuz, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Alexis Peri, Boston U

• Christine Varga-Harris, Illinois State U