AVIATRESSES AND PILOTS: FORMATION OF WOMEN’S AVIATION CULTURE IN THE USSR ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST AND SECOND WORLD WARS

Abstract

The authors dwell on the factors of the formation of women’s aviation culture in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and during the interwar period. Contrary to the historiographical stereotype, it was not until the mid-1930s that the state develops any policy of recruiting women into aeronautics. The national aviation project remained purely masculine. The most important prerequisites that served as the basis for the formation of the image of the Soviet woman pilot were pre-revolutionary aviatresses, European and American women aviators of the 1920s–1930s. On the other hand, the invasion of women into the traditional male territory of aeronautics since the mid-1920s was based on gender equality declared by the Soviet state. In the 1920s and early 1930s, women were not influential actors of the Soviet aviation project. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, they came out of the shadows and became the symbol of a new harmonious social order. The women aviator’s successes were rather their own merit than the result of certain efforts of the state to implement the proclaimed principles of gender equality. Women’s aviation in the interwar period was more of a sporting nature. Soviet female pilots set a number of air records (in altitude, range, duration of flights). Both in the USSR and in capitalist countries in the 1930s, aviation did not become feminized, but several outstanding women really marked this era with their exploits. The development of women’s aviation culture in the 1930s became the basis for mass recruitment of women into the Air Force during the Great Patriotic War.