Winning Women's Hearts and Minds

Throughout the Cold War, Russian citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence Russians, and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. In Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds, Diana Cucuz shows how, during the postwar period, USIA officials  deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers

Drawing on USIA archives, and comparing Amerika with  popular American women’s magazines of the time such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, Cucuz demonstrates the way the propaganda campaign was carefully designed to appeal to Russian women. Portrayed in the US media as "babushkas," they were considered unfeminine, overworked, and deprived of consumer goods and services by a repressive regime. Cucuz provides a gendered analysis of both Amerika and the USIA, whose strategy relied heavily on postwar conservative gender norms and images of domestic contentment to convey positive messages about the American way of life in the hopes of undermining that Soviet regime.

Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds tells the little-known story of how traditional gender norms and idealized images of Western consumer culture played a covert yet vital role in international politics during the Cold War.

DIANA CUCUZ holds a PhD and is an adjunct professor in the Department of History at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto.