미국인 여성 메리 레더(Mary M. Leder)의 눈에 비친 스탈린 체제 여성의 일상

By following the lives of Mary M. Leder, an American woman emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 with the dream of socialism, this paper attempts to reconstruct everyday lives of women during the Stalin’s regime. Like many other ordinary women in the Soviet Russia, Mary strove to adapt herself to the socialist system and transform herself into the new ‘Soviet woman.’ However, she had to overcome many obstacles emerging from her daily life in the process of the transition. Mary first encountered the difficulties due to the blurring line between private and public space in the communal housing. Since the communal housing was composed of several different households in the limited living space, each member of the family had to struggle for guaranteeing the preservation of private space. The private space in the communal housing was indirectly controlled by public values since the behaviors and talks of family members were exposed to supervision of outside family members. Mary also in vain tried to establish the collective ethics to make the lives of communal housing more pleasant. As an emigrant with the dream of socialism, Mary also expected the equal rights of gender in the Soviet Russia. Even though her husband was a well-educated socialist intellectual, she was not completely free from the burden of domestic chores in the daily lives. On the one hand, women in Stalin’s Russia had the great possibility to emerge as social workers in the factory as well as in the government, they on the other still were bound up with their traditional role as mothers and housewives. Mary in the end found out that the equal rights of gender in the Soviet Russia was a noble dream that could not be achieved. The greatest dismay to Mary in the process of becoming a ‘new Soviet woman’ was her Jewish ethical identity. Many other Jewish women in the Soviet Union did not recognize the ethical identity in their everyday lives. But some of them could clearly appreciate its disadvantage when they tried to move up the higher social status in the Soviet Union. Mary did not acquire the membership of the party because of her Jewish identity, which drove her to give up her hopes in the Soviet Russia and stimulated her to go back to the United States. In the long run, Mary’s case was a good example of finding out the clue of strategy for consolidating the stability of Stalin’s regime. If the Stalin’s system could not provide elite new classes with the possibility of improving their daily lives and of securing material benefits, it could not acquire support from its components.