To the moon, Alice, to the moon

[lafeber]

В западной кинопродукции 1950-70 годов можно порой заметить пренебрежительное отношение персонажей к женщинам вплоть до мизогинии. Главный герой «Honeymooners» каждую серию грозил своей жене физической расправой: «Я тебе так вдарю, что ты на Луну улетишь». И это семейное насилие считалось смешным. В «I love Lucy» такой же расклад. В британском фильме «Get Carter» 1971 года главный положительный герой бьет женщин налево направо. Bird, broad – типичное слово в устах тогдашних мачо, обсуждающих своих «птах». Шлепнуть кого-нибудь по филейной части – не вопрос. Еще улыбнутся в ответ. Следующая цитата даст примерное представление о моральных стандартах в СССР за тот же самый период:

9 февраля 1963 Хрущев казался жизнерадостным, когда позировал фотографу, готовясь к интервью международному медиамагнату Рою Герберту Томпсону. Когда Томпсон подарил самому Хрущеву часы на батарейках, а «миссис Хрущевой» наручные часы с брильянтами, советский руководитель пошутил: «Большое спасибо. Выглядит как какая-то адская машина, которую придумали капиталисты, чтобы взорвать коммунистический мир. Я скажу жене, чтобы она их примерила первой». И добавил: «У югославов есть поговорка, что они все – за равенство женщин, так что, если им надо идти по минному полю, они пускают женщин туда первыми» [578]. To the Moon, Mrs Khrushchev, to the Moon!


«Неправильно останавливать строительство «Востока» [советского космического корабля с людьми на борту ]» - заявил Хрущев на заседании Президиума 21 марта 1963. Кроме того он потребовал, чтобы в советскую космическую программу на 1963 год включили женщину-космонавта - первую женщину, которая отправится в космос [580].

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[tijd]

Советский анекдот: Армянское радио спрашивают «Что было бы, если бы убили не Кеннеди, а Хрущева?» «Одно можно сказать точно: Онассис не женился бы на Нине Петровне.»

Но Нина Петровна своей простотой по-своему очаровала американцев. Боролись три стереотипа: измученные советские работницы, лишенные доступа к модной одежде и косметике, добрая бабушка Нина Хрущева, а также Валентина Терешкова, бросающая вызов неравноправию.

One prevalent discourse characterized Soviet women as graceless, shapeless, and sexless, a description that functioned to discredit Communist women and, more important, Communism itself. In the eyes of Western critics, the ills of communism were inscribed on the bodies of women, and the clothes, makeup, and jewelry that "adorned" these bodies became metaphors for the systematic failures of the Communist system. Conversely, such images confirmed the superiority of svelte, fashionable American women and the economic and political system that made such bodily presentations possible.
But the image of Soviet women in the American imagination did not stop here. A second discourse centered on one woman, Nina Khrushchev, a flesh- and -blood communist who visited the United States in the late 1950s.
Married to the most feared man on the planet, a revolutionary in her own right, the question was simple: how should she be presented to the American people? And the answer was brilliant in its simplicity. The imagined Nina Khruschev became a way to defuse Cold War tensions. She would be humanized and domesticated: for Americans, she quickly became a kind of world grandmother who focused on her family and had little interest in Kremlin intrigue. Her example seemed to prove there were matters more important than politics, more transcendent than what was happening in Berlin or Warsaw. This constructed image suggested the malleability of American images of Soviet women and the cultural and political uses of such stereotypes. On the latter point, Nina Khrushchev became a much needed human face for the Soviet Union, proof to an uneasy nation that perhaps, if all the rhetoric and hostility could be swept away, away, Americans would find that the Soviet and American peo different after all.
At about the time Nina Khrushchev visited the United Stat commentators constructed a third vision of Communist women centered neither on fat bodies nor on maternal and grand-maternal qualities. Female physicians in lab coats, women engineers with their slide rules, even a young cosmonaut in her spaceship - a "Russian blonde in space" - now began to take center stage in the American imagination. This new stereotype took shape just at the point when Cold War rhetoric underscored the importance of harnessing the energies of American citizens to compete with a worthy adversary, one who had beaten the United States into space with Sputnik and now had sent a young woman into orbit who had traveled further than the entire American male astronaut corps combined. Valentina Tereshkova's flight became a symbol of possibility, a dramatic, worldwide display of what women - American women - might accomplish if only given the opportunity to do so.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41678943

Но Хрущев был не первым, кто распознал силу пропаганды женского равноправия. В конце 1942 Людмилу Павличенко привозили в США агитировать за второй фронт.

In the U.S. Pavlichenko became the first Soviet citizen to be received by a U.S. President after Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed her to the White House. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, invited Pavlichenko to tour the country and speak to Americans about her combat experiences to help raise support for the war.
At first, the American press seemed more occupied with what Pavlichenko wore than her achievements on the field of battle - journalists fired questions at her about whether women could wear makeup on the frontline or asked her why she wore a uniform that made her look fat. The papers dubbed her the ‘girl sniper’, belittling her achievements with condescension and sexism.
Pavlichenko’s gracious handling of the questions soon turned to understandable frustration, ‘I wish you could experience a bombing raid,’ she once responded to a journalist, ‘you would immediately forget about the cut of your outfit.’
Confused by American priorities she finally told Time magazine, ‘I am amazed at the kind of questions put to me by the women press correspondents in Washington…I wear my uniform with honour. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn.’
By the time her publicity tour reached Chicago, an emboldened Pavlichenko took to the stage and goaded the men in the audience, ‘Gentlemen. I am 25-years-old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?’ A moment’s silence befell the crowd before being replaced by a rousing roar of support.
https://www.history.co.uk/article/lyudmila-pavlichenko-lady-death-historys-deadliest-female-sniper

[chuka_lis]

нда..

[lafeber]

Нина Хрущева по своей комплекции была похожа на жен Трумэна и Эйзенхауэра. Я бы даже сказал, что она полная копия Бесс Трумэн. Я думаю, что в 50-х с точки зрения американцев Нина выглядела нормально. Также она, в отличие от своего мужа, выучила английский язык. Т.е. была почти своим, продвинутым, человеком.

[tijd]

Жены Трумэна и Эйзенхауэра при всех их внешних данных одевались немного по-другому. Но за неброской одеждой американские журналисты сумели разглядеть продвинутость Хрущевой.

Из некролога New York Times:

Immediately upon the Khrushchevs' arrival, Mrs. Khrushchev was the target of snide observations by some reporters, especially the Hearst columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who noted her matronly, poorly corseted figure, her plain round face and her undistinguished wardrobe.
''For heaven's sake,'' Miss Kilgallen wrote, ''couldn't the woman have stopped off in Paris and picked up a couple of decent dresses?''
But Mrs. Khrushchev's kindliness and unflagging smile soon ended such carping.
At first she shunned being interviewed, saying ''I am not important enough to answer questions, and in my country it is not the custom of wives of officials to be written about.'' But she delighted in pulling out pictures of her grandchildren and telling anyone who would listen how wonderful they were.
On a visit to a Department of Agriculture farm at Beltsville, Md., while her husband was busy examining turkeys and hogs, Mrs. Khrushchev got pulled into an impromptu news conference in which she cautiously answered questions in halting and accented but grammatically correct English.
She kept repeating that she wished only ''to explore what interests my husband,'' and as more and more questions were flung at her, she became frightened and confused, made her way to the wrong car and had to be rescued by a policeman. She smiled up at him, patted his hand and said, ''Wonderful American police.''
Her devotion to her husband was unostentatious, but evident. At Blair House in Washington, she interrupted a news conference to bid him goodbye as he set out for several days of talks at Camp David.
Later, in Los Angeles, where the Khrushchevs were entertained at a huge movie-studio party, the couple exchanged lingering glances while Frank Sinatra was singing a love song.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/22/obituaries/nina-khrushchev-is-dead-at-84-widpw-of-former-soviet-leader.html

Английский Нины Петровны ("halting and accented but grammatically correct") можно послушать в ее обращении к американским женщинам: https://www.wnyc.org/story/a-message-from-nina-khrushchev-to-the-women-of-america/ Она учила языки в молодости в гимназии.

[lafeber]

Интересные подробности.