Hosting in the Heart of Moscow: Selling Consumer Culture to Russian Women through the American National Exhibition, 1959

Abstract

During the early Cold War, America’s normative gender roles and consumption-oriented culture became intertwined with its foreign policy goals in rivalling its primary “threat,” the Soviet Union. This paper will discuss the American National Exhibition, a grand spectacle that took place across six weeks in Moscow during the summer of 1959, and was attended by 2.7 million people. Filled with glittering displays of American consumer culture, the exhibition was rife with representations of happy, fulfilled, and feminine women. This event symbolized the pinnacle of US government efforts to undertake a unique form of female oriented cultural diplomacy and soft power as a means to convince the “other” – Russian women - that the American way of life could improve their own lives, due to its consumer goods and their accompanying comforts and conveniences. It is part of a larger study on the American National Exhibition which seeks to demonstrate that cultural diplomacy and soft power should be considered an important element in the gradual erosion of the Soviet government.