"The Battle of the Sexes” : Postwar Marriage and Marital Identities in the Soviet Union
"The Battle of the Sexes” : Postwar Marriage and Marital Identities in the Soviet Union
Intervenante : Mie Nakachi (enseignante chercheuse, historienne, invitée EHESS, institution principale : Hokusei Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japon) ; discutant : Serge Zakharov (enseignant chercheur, démographe, invité Ined)
What happened to marriages and families after the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union? During the war, the ideal image of the family was of girls and wives faithfully waiting for mobilized boyfriends and husbands, as evoked by Konstantin Simonov’s famous and popular 1941 wartime poem “Wait for Me.” However, after the war was over, reality was much more diverse and complex than happy reunions for many Soviet citizens. Divisive causes were many, most tragically death, but also by wartime liaisons and fraternization in occupied areas. On top of all of the problems caused by the war, postwar Soviet population policy added a crucial legal structure of conflictual gendered interests, where women wanted to register marriages, while many men desired divorce from prewar wives. These divergent perspectives drove a battle of the sexes that led to the dismantling of many marital relations. However, postwar divorce statistics never captured this reality, as the postwar family law introduced complex and costly divorce procedure.
Biographie de l’intervenante :
Mie Nakachi is a historian of 20th century Russia. She is Professor of Global Studies at Hokusei Gakuen University and Research Associate at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center in Sapporo, Japan. Her specialty areas are population policy, gender, family, and reproductive health. She authored Replacing the Dead : The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (OUP, 2021), which examines the Soviet Union’s extreme pronatalist policy after WWII and its effects on women’s lives, gender relations, and demography. She also coedited a comparative volume, Reproductive States : Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy (OUP, 2016).