Women

• 1000 snipers + 400 instructors

  • 12000 Germans shot by women
• 1/2 million served in armed forces

  1/2 million served in support staff
• Any childless woman aged 18 - 25 was called to arms
• Separate female air regiment

  • Bombers + Fighter planes
  • 23500 Sorties - Women known as night witches - 261in nigh witch regiment
  • 23 recieve hero of the Soviet Union award
• Women fought in tanks and machine gunners As a minority
• 100% nurses was women

  40% of doctors and surgeons were female

  • huge casualties as they treated on the first lines
• Signallers and radio operators

  • Constantly attacked in stalingrad
• partisan groups emerge :

  • predominantly women + 1/4
  • hand to hand combat
• Economically

  • 50% workers in heavy industry were women
  • 80 - 90% female in light industry e.g parachutes
  • Power stations - 1/2 operators were female
  • Under 1/2 went into mines
  • 8000 women moved with their factories and lived in a hole in the ground
  • outnumber men 4 to 1 in countryside - 80% workforce were women working agriculture by hand
• Home Front 


  • Familial losses + emotional
• Seige of Leningrad - 600 days

  • 75% of population were female as men were fighting
  • Anna Akhmatova
  • malnurition and shortages
  • 70 hour work weeks
  • also looking after families - double burden