What is Soviet girls' literature and where can we find it in the Baltics?

Since the 1990s, literature for girls has been established as a noteworthy subfield of women's writing. In the preface to their seminal volume, "What Katy Read" (1995), Shirley Foster and Judy Simons highlight the need to analyse popular girls' books against the era of their writing and publication, the surrounding cultural climate and gender ideologies. In this vein it is worth asking: what messages are conveyed to girl readers in the Soviet Union, with its infamously contradictory gender politics?

This talk introduces some Thaw- and Stagnation-era Estonian and Latvian books about girls and for girls, by authors such as Anna Brodele, Zenta Ērgle, Silvia Rannamaa, and others. It is proposed that those works constitute a distinctive cluster of Soviet girls' literature, standing out against the earlier, predominantly masculine Soviet children's and youth literature. An attempt is made to outline the defining traces of this cluster and to initiate a discussion on what these books tell their young readers about girlhood.

Johanna Ross is currently doing post-doctoral research on Soviet Estonian and Latvian girls' literature at ILFA. In 2018, she defended her PhD thesis on Soviet Estonian women's Bildungsromane and ways of reading them. Her interests include women's writing, Soviet literature, Estonian literary history, and the history of literary criticism. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Keel ja Kirjandus (Language and Literature).

The research is funded by the Estonian Research Council through the project "Gender Patterns in Late Soviet Estonian Girls' Novellas" (PUTJD1207).