“Women and lifting are an unusual pair”: a history of Soviet women's athleticism in the 1960s

The article focuses on a history of Soviet female athleticism using the articles from the Soviet sports media as an archive. Scholars usually perceive Soviet athleticism which was a sort of physical activity based on doing exercises with iron to create an aesthetically appealing body as an exclusively masculine discipline, but the author shows that it was not the case in the 1960s. State authorities at least tolerated the practice, and it joined the rank of unisex activities. Instead of transgressing the borders between masculine and feminine roles, Soviet female athleticism enforced normative understandings of female’s body and beauty. However, by the beginning of the 1970s, the situation changed, and there is no sign of the discipline’s existence anymore. The author links its disappearance with the discussion covering the issues of the late Soviet masculinity’s crisis started in 1969. The author affirms that the state wanted to support male’s role by clearly defining all disciplines dealing with muscles and iron as exclusively masculine. As a result, female athleticism did not have its second birth during the Perestroika age, and all post-Soviet female activities, such as bodybuilding and weightlifting, were created from scratch, without reference to previous experience of the 1960s.