Poster “What the October Revolution gave to the worker and peasant woman”.
RSFSR. Moscow. 1920.
State publishing house
Unknown artist
Paper, fabric, typolithography
107×67.8 cm

Until the early 1920s it was rare to find the figure of a woman in a Soviet poster. The artists, abandoning popular fairy tale female images and elegant heroines of advertising and charity posters of the early 20th century, were looking for a visual embodiment of a woman, an active participant of building a new communist life. The image was found only in 1920. Immediately after the revolution, in search for support of the events of Soviet power by the “female proletariat of town and country,” the party declared the protection of motherhood as the slogan of a free Russia. A certain role in the popularization of this slogan was given to the political poster. It is significant that the female image in the Soviet poster was resolved as a replica of the symbolic interpretation of the male vanguard of the revolution, a blacksmith forging the keys of happiness. Unknown artist depicted his heroine with a hammer in her left hand, while her right hand pointed to the state institutions that promoted liberation “from family and household bondage.” After the appearance of the poster reproduction in the newspaper Pravda on November 28, 1920, it was widely replicated as a reference in the representation of a female worker.