WOMEN IN RUSSIA

Women tractor drivers tend to be an unusual sight in any country. But in Soviet-era Russia, women were positively encouraged to take up the controls of this well-oiled agricultural machinery.

Fascinated by this unusual propaganda, Dr Sue Bridger (pictured left), of the Department of Modern Languages, has researched the legacy of the Soviet-era campaigns for post-Soviet attitudes and policies on gender.

The Brezhnev-era attempt to recruit women tractor drivers was probably the longest running and least successful campaign in Soviet history.

Modelled directly on campaigns of the 1930s, it was launched in 1969 and was still handing out awards to leading women tractor drivers at the height of Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 1980s.

Despite enormous media coverage, official presentations, commemorative songs and cash prizes, the proportion of women driving tractors never rose above one per cent throughout the two decades it ran.

During her research, Sue found a wealth of unexpected interconnections between the Russian space programme and the promotion of technology in agriculture.

Sue said: "I was intrigued by the connections and more interestingly, from the perspective of my work on gender, the explicit links made between the USSR's two women cosmonauts, Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaia, and the newly-recruited women tractor drivers. The Leverhulme Research Fellowship which I currently hold gave me the luxury of following a fascinating line of research."

Sue is currently writing a book based on her research.

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