rural women

Communist Prints: Sidenotes to the Asian Women’s Conference of 1949

The paper caught my attention. The pictures slipped into my fingers from the archive file. The paper was fine and strong, with a subtle texture and sheen. It felt as if it were made of silk. Three of the brightly colored woodblock prints shared the same paper. All featured peasant women were reveling in the benefits of communism. The images suffered from mild water damage. This blurred the writing and spread a pink wash of watercolor paint over parts of the image. The stories they tell, however[...]

100th Anniversary of the Working Women’s Day (1917)

Two days before International Women’s Day in 1917, the Petersburg Interdistrict Committee, largely populated by Bolsheviks, sent out a call for the widest participation in the March 8th march. The temperature seemed high. Soldiers on the front wilted in poor morale as the Great War turned out to be anything but for them. Peasants and workers suffered economic chaos, as the Tsarist bureaucracy seemed incapable of solving the basic problems of hunger and insecurity. There was little expectatio[...]