Gender Images in Children’s Magazines from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s: the Formation of Military-Sports Childhood

Abstract

The relevance of the topic is due to the trends of recent years: a controversial view of gender policy and the actualization of the cultural heritage of the Soviet period. The study of gender images in children’s literature reveals the specifi cs of gender policy in the USSR, the peculiarities of Soviet upbringing and educational settings, as well as ways of representing these topics in children’s magazines for different age groups. In this article, the history of Soviet children’s magazines (mid-1930s-mid-1950s) is shown through gender studies. The children’s magazine in the context of this study is considered as a unique publication that offers the child not only the passive acceptance of textual and visual information, but also the active consolidation of it through play and creative activities. Gender issues in magazines are analyzed on the examples of illustrations, as well as games and tasks for manual labor. It is interesting to trace how the return to the traditional content of gender roles in Soviet society in the mid-1930s. refl ected in the visual and playful component of popular children’s magazines. And also, is there in the visual representation of images of characters in children’s magazines and the representation of gender roles in games and headings for creativity confi rmation of the attempts of the state to create a sexless «Soviet man» in the period of the mid-1930s-mid-1950s, defi ned by sociologists as a period of totalitarian androgyny.