Alexis Peri, <i>Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women</i>

One of the side effects of patriarchy is that state authorities often fail to take women seriously as potential political actors, relegating females on their own side to supporting, cheerleading roles and assuming that other women do not present a significant threat. The peasant women who rebelled against collectivization under Joseph Stalin, as Lynne Viola has noted, were generally dismissed as “backward” pawns of the inevitably male kulak, rather than prosecuted as counterrevolutionary enemies of the state. Shana Penn likewise wrote about the women of Solidarity in 1980s Poland who were able to shuttle copies of opposition newspapers around under their clothes (mimicking pregnancy) unmolested by their Communist party overlords and thereby kept the movement alive. To repurpose Douglas Adams's succinct description of Earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, women are often regarded by men in power as “mostly harmless.”The Soviet and U.S. women who became pen pals across the stark Cold War-era border separating the superpowers were allowed to do so precisely because of their presumed harmlessness and subordination to the authorities’ political goals. But Alexis Peri, in her delightfully readable and engaging book, shows that although their correspondence was not harmful to anyone, it ultimately played a role in disrupting patriarchal power relations in both countries.Of course, as Peri's research reveals, the political authorities in both the United States and Soviet Union believed that the pen pals would help promote a set of desired ideological messages about the respective virtues of capitalism and Communism to their contemporaries. U.S. women were expected to (and did) laud the conveniences of a consumer-directed economy, and Soviet women were, in turn, supposed to serve as exemplary beneficiaries of a supposedly gender-egalitarian system in which one's career opportunities were not delimited by one's sex. In that sense, the letters were not only a matter of private correspondence—indeed, they were read and, in some cases on the Soviet side, lightly edited and censored before being sent along to their addressees—about the pen pals’ own lives; they were simultaneously intended to express government agendas. The feminist slogan “the personal is political” thus applied to the ongoing exchange of letters in more ways than one.Peri lays out the story of the pen pal program chronologically. It began during the Second World War, when the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee (SWC) sought out American women who could be urged to lobby the U.S. government to enter the war and send more aid to their Soviet ally. It was not until the Soviet victory over the Nazis at Stalingrad that U.S. women responded to the call; in 1944, the Committee of Women, a subset of the left-leaning National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, established a relationship with the SWC. The first generation of pen pals, matched up with the assistance of these organizations, largely bonded over their desire for an Allied victory and for peace to prevail, commiserated over their male relatives who were injured, dead, or still fighting in the war, and passionately pledged to work for peace across any differences. The U.S. women looking for Soviet correspondents were largely white, middle-class, and urban, and disproportionately Jewish. Many volunteered but did not work for pay outside the home—a fact that spurred the SWC to edit the salutation often selected by the Soviet letter-writers—“To a worker”—to the more likely accurate “To a mother” (p. 46).Later chapters follow the correspondents through the late 1940s, as the Cold War set in, and into the McCarthy era of the 1950s. The U.S. contingent shifted after the war (the Jewish letter-writers were largely replaced by ecumenical midwestern Protestants), whereas the postwar Soviet writers were mostly ethnic Russians based in Moscow (p. 69). One would think that the conversion of the official U.S.–Soviet relationship from an alliance to an unfriendly rivalry in 1947 would have suppressed the “pen friends” program, but instead it expanded to include close to 300 pairs of women (p. 87).Neither government allowed men to be pen pals under the program; both believed that the “ordinary” women who participated in it posed no threat. The correspondents often focused on relatively routine issues that they had in common, such as parenting and the challenges of combining paid work and family life. But there were also differences between the approaches taken by the women in the two countries. U.S. women generally began their “Dear Unknown Friend” correspondence by describing their homes and families, whereas their Soviet interlocutors usually refrained from mentioning either their homes or family members until a few letters had been exchanged, starting instead with their own educational and work trajectories (p. 95). With regard to work, however, the Soviet women painted a nuanced image that undermined the state's propagandistic claims about gender equality having already been achieved.Dear Unknown Friend is an enjoyable and lively read, both methodologically impressive and narratively rich. Through the carefully chosen excerpts from letters, we learn about the relationships sustained by pairs of women across vast societal and political differences, and we see the writers both as constrained by societal conditions and as having agency to support and challenge each other. Interwoven with Peri's astute analysis, the letters reveal fascinating details about both the lives of the pen pals and the politics of the time.The pen pal program fluctuated with the ebb and flow of U.S.–Soviet relations. By 1952, although U.S. women continued to ask for pen pals, the SWC had refocused its efforts on outreach within the Soviet bloc and the developing world, and its personnel wrote “do not reply” on letters received from the United States (p. 180). Meanwhile, in-person meetings that became possible at international women's conferences and other such gatherings largely came to replace the slower and more intensive epistolary process.Reading this book, I could not help but think that the quality of the connections established by those “pen friends” in the 1940s and 1950s would be harder to achieve today—and not only because the U.S. government stopped sending mail to Russia after the start of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine (p. 197). It is now relatively easy to meet and exchange views with foreign strangers via the Internet, but the instantaneousness of that exchange, and the ease with which one can register agreement or disagreement with a post by simply depositing an emoji and moving on to the next thread, would seem to make deep connections across ideological differences less likely. One memorable disagreement between the pen pals that Peri describes concerned an American woman's account of how her teenage son had made money at a summer job—something she lauded as a step toward independence and a healthy sign of individualism. Her Soviet counterpart found this odd and stressed that, in the USSR, teens worked on projects to improve society and help others, emphasizing the value of collectivism. Perhaps because they had to wait for months to receive each other's letters and, when sitting down to write, had the opportunity to consider seriously what their pen pal had said and how to respond thoughtfully in turn, the letter-writers of the mid-twentieth century were able to work through political conflicts better than we often manage to do now.