What stigma did women face when serving in the Red Army? Was it seen as radical by Russian soldiers?

by Paradox-ical_Major
Georgy_K_Zhukov

I've written on women in the Red Army before in this answer which you might find relevant.

Jon_Beveryman

I've also written on women in the RKKA before, which may complement Zhukov's answer. In addition to the issues they faced with questionably consensual or completely nonconsensual sexual & romantic relationships (not to dismiss, of course, the number of these relationships which were consensual!) there was still a definitive patriarchal slant in Soviet society, and particularly the military. The front generation had grown up within the transformed Soviet society of Stalin's era. Markwick & Cardona describe the reaction of this generation's women to the outbreak of war thusly:

More than a decade of official proselytizing of women’s equality, of the threat of war and of the need for women to be as ready as men to defend the Soviet Motherland, had forged a generation of young women, especially the most urbanized and educated, who immediately demanded the right to take up arms on the front. The rhetorical commitment of the Stalinist state to sexual equality was suddenly put to the test. To the profound disappointment of the most politically active young women, when the hour came to exercise their rights to bear arms alongside their menfolk, they were rebuffed... Rejection of women by the Red Army was more than just sexist prejudice by male recruitment officers. ‘War is not women’s business’ was a rhetorical excuse by a patriarchal state justifying the exclusion of women from serving as professional soldiers with the Red Army.

-Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona. Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 32-37.

The realities of traditional Great Russian patriarchy and the remnants of the pre-Soviet era meant that gender roles were very much alive, even in the official propaganda. In the first period of the war particularly (1941-Stalingrad) women were recruited almost exclusively as doctors, nurses, and radio operators; for instance, throughout the war, 43 percent of Red Army surgeons were women. (Markwick & Cardona, 58) The propaganda of the time emphasized the nurturing role of women, though in a different manner than Western propaganda around nurses. Soviet nurses were expected to be militant & maternally protective, rather than the exaggerated femininity and nurse-girlfriend duality embodied by contemporary American imagery.

Even in the second and third periods of the war, when manpower shortages forced the GKO & NKO to recruit women more formally - including as combatants - the propaganda wavered between emphasizing the war as an "all-people's war" (vsenarodnaia voina) in which men and women alike would fight, and emphasizing the role of Soviet women as caretakers, sources of stability on the home front, and of course sources of children. The careful phrasing in the state media about the mobilization of women, as well as internal documentation, bears testament to the Stalinist state's awareness that Soviet society was still quite conservative on matters of gender.

I'm going to copy and paste the "Masculinity and Cultural Norms" section from my linked post verbatim here:

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.”