This is quite timely, as a recent similar question prompted me to finally pick up Roger Markwick & Euridice Cardona's Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War which addresses these exact questions.

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###Mobilization
So, the Red Army never technically conscripted women, except for trained medical personnel who could be compelled to serve. In 1942, facing serious manpower shortages from the apocalyptic bloodletting of 1941-42 (for context, by the end of 1941 60% of the men in service at the start of the invasion had been killed, captured, or wounded too severely to return to service), the GKO (State Defense Committee) and NKO (Ministry of Defense) began issuing secret orders to mobilize women for roles in the anti-air defense units (PVO), Red Navy, and separate women's rifle brigades, as well as support roles such as NKVD firefighting units. All told, the initial mobilization orders called for 250,000 women to serve; by the end of the war, the total quota reached some 712,000. However, they often fell short of their target numbers. As of January 1, 1945, just over 490,000 women had actually been recruited for these orders. Furthermore, many local committees turned away women attempting to volunteer for positions at the front. These positions on the front lines, such as snipers and radio operators, were explicitly volunteer-only. However - and here's where the pseudo-conscription comes in - a lot of the recruitment for rear area roles was through enlistment agreements during recruitment into the Komsomol, the Communist youth league. Komsomol membership was a significant (indeed for many people one of the only) avenue for social mobility, so one can consider this avenue of recruitment ‘semi-voluntary’. The success of these mobilization drives was inconsistent; some local Komsomol committees received so many woman volunteers that they had to turn away more than half of them. For instance, the first drive in Moscow received 20,000 applicants for a quota of 8,000. The Chechen-Ingushetian Komsomol committee hit 70% of its quota for the first drive in less than two days. Later drives were noted, however, to stretch some of the stringent political requirements; increasing numbers of recruits were not Komsomol members when recruited, and only formally joined upon arriving at Army training depots. By mid-1943, local committees were having trouble meeting quotas, partially because the first wave had already taken many of the most politically and physically suitable women, and partially because increasing demands on female domestic, farm, and industrial labor began to compete more heavily with the demand for women as soldiers.

You may note that I said the GKO and NKO mobilization orders were secret. The fact that women were serving in relatively large numbers was, of course, not a secret, but for several reasons the Soviet government seems to have been concerned with concealing how actively it sought female volunteers. Partially, this was to avoid fueling the enemy propaganda charges that the Red Army had been so badly whipped that it had to resort to throwing women into the front lines. Partially, it was likely to conceal how serious the Stavka’s concerns over manpower shortages really were. And, of course, the Soviet government still had to cater to the social mores of Russian society. The grand efforts to reshape Russian society into the egalitarian socialist mold had not been uniformly successful, to put it lightly, and concern for traditional gender roles was still prevalent. Markwick & Cardona briefly allude to another factor in this tightrope act between traditional gender roles and the impulse (both pragmatic and ideological) to recruit women en masse: the need to maintain the bruised masculine pride of the predominantly male combat forces of the Red Army.

###Masculinity and Cultural Norms
Masculinity in the Red Army is a really interesting topic that I won’t digress too far into, but it’s impossible to ignore entirely in this discussion. The really quick version (and I cannot stress enough that this is not doing it justice - I strongly recommend Catherine Merridale and Kerstin Bischl’s work on the subject for better depth) is that the masculine pride of the Red Army’s fighting men was seriously damaged by the successive catastrophic defeats at the Wehrmacht’s hands in 1941-42, and a lot of behaviors of Red Army frontoviki throughout the war can be interpreted as individual and collective attempts to reconstruct that sense of masculinity. These included, to loop back to your questions, a lot of misogyny directed at female soldiers particularly. They experienced frequent sexual assault, and were often coerced into some less-than-consensual relationships by superiors. Many women did also enter into consensual relationships with enlisted men and officers alike - a practice the men crudely referred to as "marching field wives,” pokhodno-polevye zheny or PPZh, a play on the PPSh submachine gun - which provided unfortunate fuel for postwar stereotypes of “wild” soldiering women. An example of this is the callous slang for the military service medal - the za boevye zaslugi - which was called the za polevye zaslugi or “for sexual service” when worn by a woman.

So, with this context - what were the debates or discussions about this? Public debate in this period of Soviet history is pretty circumscribed, as you might guess. I am not myself aware of a whole lot of recorded private discussion on the matter. One example I am aware of is a 1942 letter from one Irina Bogacheva, a volunteer nurse, to her friends back home. Clearly there was some argument with her female friends over whether her appropriate place was in the front lines or contributing her university physics expertise on the home front. This reflects a cultural characteristic of the frontovichki generation - the women who came of age during or right before the war - which I will return to a bit later. First though, the public record at least gives some insight into the Soviet government’s internal debates. Before the war, the general militarization of Soviet society had included calls for women to learn military skills - rifle marksmanship, first aid, swimming, and parachuting - especially as members of the Komsomol. The crisis hours of 1942 brought new urgency, and editorials in the (state-run, of course) newspapers Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda specifically exhorted women to serve: “In an extraordinary military moment, when the entire country has been transformed into a unified military camp, all Soviet patriotic men and women must master the use of arms. A warrior- people, a people able to defend their motherland weapons in hands, will terrify the enemy. The universal military education of all male and female citizens strengthens our defence, making it virtually invulnerable.” The desire for military service, however, was still tempered with traditional gender roles. In a resolution issued on March 8, 1942 - International Women’s Day - the Central Committee reminded women to “care for the heroic combatants of the Red Army, attend to the wounded, and show motherly concern for soldiers’ children!” The ideal of Soviet womanhood during the early periods of the war largely carried forward the 1930s ideals of both motherhood and industrial modernism. The perfect Soviet woman by 1944, per Merridale, was “stern and provident, tough as a tank driver, the nurse and teacher of armies to come...[but] also sweet, innocent, and untroubled by hardship, let alone by war.”

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