ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on passing comments in women's narratives that serve to shed light on the state provision of health care services and Soviet attitudes towards the environments in which they lived and worked. It looks at the daily living arrangements experienced by Soviet women in terms of domestic sanitation and attitudes to personal hygiene, as well as the provision of domestic and public conveniences. In terms of optic health, Mary Leder notes that few people, and particularly women, wore spectacles in the 1930s, and it was impossible for people with poor eyesight to be granted a driving licence, even if they wore glasses. In rural areas, Luba Brezhneva’s travels to the Soviet countryside in the 1960s and 1970s made her well aware of the physical harm caused to village women’s bodies by the heavy lifting that their routine work involved. One interviewee from Dagestan noted that it was unthinkable for women to drink or smoke in her village community.
