Development, Socialism, and Women’s Work for the Soviet and Mozambican Women’s Committees, 1965–85

This paper examines connections between the Committee for Soviet Women (KSZh) and the Organization for Mozambican Women (OMM), and explores women’s empowerment work as a crucial part of Soviet development practice. Scholarship on Soviet outreach to the developing world tends to focus on men, including experts, diplomats and party leaders. This emphasis obscures state elites’ deliberate choice to involve women in international and development work. The KSZh and OMM, like similar groups across Africa and Eastern Europe, declared women’s economic empowerment a key part of revolutionary progress. Moreover, gender equity has been central to the history and politics of the “age of development” writ large.

Drawing on archival research in Russia and Mozambique, plus interviews with former members, I argue that the ways the two groups and their party-state sponsors understood the purpose of aid, internationalism and development diverged significantly. While both states officially promoted women’s participation in international development work, both channeled women’s political activities in accordance with perceived gender norms. But faced with similar limitations, the organizations responded in opposite ways: while the KZSh offered low value, highly gendered forms of aid, members of OMM keep approaching international partners confidently, seeing the KSZh as an important source of support in their domestic development efforts.

These disagreements reveal a wide range of political opinion on the purpose and potential of socialism, development and women’s work among Mozambican and Soviet actors based in Maputo, Moscow, and elsewhere. These tensions offer insights into the importance of gender for the Soviet development model at home and abroad. Building on vibrant scholarship on state socialist women’s organizations in Eastern Europe and China, and on women’s participation in nation- building in Africa, this paper offers a gendered analysis of the Soviet development project and of socialist “state feminism” in the developing world.