Paper long abstract:

Thus far, the scholarship on gender in Soviet Central Asia has focused primarily on the campaigns for women’s “emancipation” and unveiling in the late 1920s. But beginning with collectivization, Soviet policy around women in Uzbekistan turned toward mass mobilization for labor in the cotton fields. The imperatives of the cotton monoculture demanded that married women with children join the ranks of the young, often unmarried women who had been the face of the Hujum. In the early 1930s, to assist the mobilization of mothers, the Party-state vastly expanded the network of child care facilities in rural Uzbekistan, including long-term and seasonal nurseries and kindergartens. Accordingly, throughout the 1930s, child care was represented as a problem of cotton infrastructure, as well as a matter of women’s and children’s welfare. Child care brought together Soviet projects around education, collectivization, health and sanitation, and women’s “emancipation.” This paper examines early Soviet child care institutions on Uzbekistan’s collective farms, including their administrative structure, curricula, and the food and material culture associated with them. Many rural women utilized the services, while others resisted using state-run nurseries, which were often poorly staffed and lacking in resources. I argue that the campaign for childcare in 1930s Uzbekistan represented a new relationship between Central Asian women and the state and contributed to a changing distribution of labor in some rural families. This paper relies on archival work in archives in Moscow and Tashkent and extensive research in the Uzbek-language press, especially women’s magazine Yangi Yo’l/ Yorqin Hayot/ Yorqin Turmush.