Emancipation and Domesticity: Decoding Personal Manuscript Cookbooks from the Soviet Union

A product of their time and of the internalized Soviet ideology that to a great extent shaped women's gendered self-fashioning as women and mothers, Soviet manuscript cookbooks became popular among Soviet women in the late 1960s. Based on the semiotic reading of two personal manuscript cookbooks in the author's family, this article explores what these cookbooks, in combination with the author's family history, tell about how Soviet women used and reshaped the gender roles available to them in late Soviet everyday life. The author also asks questions about the cost of emancipation in a society that could not truly support such progress socially or economically.