Illustrating Identity: Soviet Women and the Visual Labor of Pedagogy

Abstract

The Russian Revolution and formation of the Soviet Union yielded an unprecedented period of ideological, experimental artistic production. Art was esteemed as a method of proliferating monumental propaganda which could educate the Soviet masses about revolutionary ideology and industrial life. A core tenant of this artistic production was illustrated books for children, as well as animated films. Children’s media provided an efficient mechanism to bridge education, entertainment, and nationalism into an individual quotidian artistic product. A considerable portion of this media was created by female artists, who utilized children’s media as a way to generate aesthetic content which corresponded with Soviet values and gendered obligations of labor. Digital methodologies provide a way to explore the relationship between children’s media and gendered artistic labor, with this project placing a critical emphasis on the manifestation of political and social identity in book illustrations. In this project, I used a Princeton dataset of Soviet books published between 1917 and 1939 to examine publication patterns in books illustrated by women. My project posits that digital visualizations can represent the relationship between artist gender and image content, while also modeling broader trends within the Princeton archive.