Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Let’s Deploy the Construction of Canteens

Preview image of work. lithograph on paper, Let’s Deploy the Construction of Canteens 33075

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Let’s Deploy the Construction of Canteens

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Artist

Vera Adamovna Gitsevich (1897 - 1976)

Title

Let’s Deploy the Construction of Canteens

Creation Date

1932

Century

mid-20th century

Dimensions

40 x 29 in. (101.6 x 73.66 cm)

Object Type

Creation Place

Asia, Russia

Medium and Support

lithograph on paper

Credit Line

Generously lent by Svetlana and Eric Silverman ’85, P’19

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

In the new era, the Soviet government pledged to make housekeeping obsolete. Posters illustrated this optimistic promise with images of state-run communal kitchens, cafeterias, laundromats, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, and even orphanages—the institutions that would liberate women from domestic slavery. To foster the enlightened, clean-living, and healthy citizens, capable of constructing and defending communism, the state prescribed good hygiene, appropriate leisure activities, healthy sex practices, and productive and safe work habits. Still bearing the weight of housekeeping, women in particular had to be guided to meet the new hygiene standards, on both ideological and physiological levels. Stalin then shifted attention as he placed Soviet womanhood at the center of pro-natalism campaigns. Increasingly, posters propagated more conservative family policies by depicting women as caretakers—nurses, mothers, and homemakers.