Older Women and the Meanings of Active Retirement in the 1960s Soviet Union

Women’s emancipation through paid labor was a cornerstone of Soviet ideology. The Soviet Union was the first state to enact mass mobilization of women into production, making it a nation with one of the highest share of women in the labor force. While motherhood continued to be an essential component of womanhood promoted by the state, labor defined one’s place in society. This was especially true for educated urban women: contribution to socialism through labor was at the heart of their identity. In 1956, however, many of these women found themselves outside the workforce, as Nikita Khrushchev introduced universal old-age pensions for workers and employees. What did retirement mean for the women, who had dedicated their lives to building socialism? This paper will focus on retired women who sought to reinvent themselves through participation in volunteer organizations. Even though official propaganda mostly featured men as faces of the post-Stalinist volunteer movement, older women in fact played a far greater role. Based on the documents of a city women’s soviet and a district people’s guard in the industrial city of Perm, the paper will examine how understanding of gender roles shaped older women’s activism. The paper will demonstrate that retired women played an outsized role in volunteer organizations charged with communist upbringing of children. Women-only organizations like women’s soviets, however, allowed women to be in control of the programs, while in mixed-gender organizations such as people’s guards leadership positions went to men. Participation in women’s soviets also heightened older women’s interest in women’s issues and encouraged them to reflect on their role as women as well as representatives of a distinct generation in the building of socialism.