Daejeon, July 27–31
This study examines how gender roles are reflected in everyday written communication. The empirical basis of the research is a digital corpus of postcards from the late Russian Empire and the Soviet period. The analysis draws on the Pishu Tebe Digital Archive, which contains 59,328 postcards dating from 1873 to 2025. The study combines statistical analysis with microhistorical approaches to short epistolary texts. Particular attention is paid to the textual subsystem of 65 thematic tags and their correlations with the gender of addressees and historical periods. The findings reveal a strong association between women and family-oriented and emotional communication, as well as a stable link between formal correspondence and male addressees in the imperial period. Historical dynamics demonstrate that during the Soviet era women increasingly became recipients of professional messages, reflecting broader social transformations and the institutionalization of emotional labor. The study highlights the potential of integrating big data, micro-narratives, and interpretative methods for the development of digital gender history and for expanding the source base of women’s history.
Postcards are traditionally perceived as brief and informal messages, primarily associated with greetings and congratulations. However, when assembled into a large-scale digital corpus, such texts become a significant historical source that allows for the analysis of social norms, communicative practices, and gender roles. This study is based on the Pishu Tebe Digital Archive, which as of early December 2025 includes 59,328 postcards sent between 1873 and 2025. Despite the wide chronological scope of the archive, the analytical focus of this study is concentrated on two periods – the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – since the proportion of post-Soviet postcards in the corpus remains minimal.
The aim of the study is to demonstrate how gender roles manifest themselves in the themes, vocabulary, and communicative strategies of everyday correspondence through postcards. The methodological approach combines quantitative analysis of a large corpus with microhistorical close readings of individual texts.
Research on epistolary culture has shown that personal letters, postcards, and other minor genres of written communication play a crucial role in the formation of social and emotional bonds and identities. Classical works by Janet Gurkin Altman Altman, Janet Gurkin. 1982. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press Barton, David, and Nigel Hall, eds. 2000. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Henkin, David. 2006. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Medyakov, Aleksandr S. 2019. “The Postcard at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon.” Dialog so Vremenem 67: 146–162. https://roii.ru/r/1/67.12 Sambur, Marina V. 2013. “The Postcard as a Source for the History and Culture.” Vestnik MGUKI 4 (54): 65-69. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/pochtovaya-otkrytka-kak-istochnik-informatsii-po-istorii-i-kulture
In gender studies, beginning with Joan Scott’s seminal article Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–1075. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1993. “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It.” Critical Inquiry 20 (1): 10–35.
Within the digital humanities, numerous projects have been developed to create digital archives of ego-documents, including letters and postcards (e.g., Making Meaning at the Intersections, the Africana Historic Postcard Collection, and others). However, most contemporary studies focus primarily on the visual aspects of these objects or on metadata, paying less attention to textual analysis and rarely addressing gendered dimensions of everyday communication. When textual analysis is undertaken, it is usually based on relatively small samples.
This study employs a large corpus of postcards, combining large-scale quantitative analysis with micro-analytical readings of short epistolary texts – a methodological combination that remains relatively rare. The research seeks to fill this gap by demonstrating how big data and small narrative units can be jointly used to reconstruct gender roles and communicative practices in historical perspective, thereby contributing new evidence to the study of women’s history and labor.
The study is based on the Pishu Tebe Digital Archive, which as of 30 November 2025 contains 59,328 postcards. Each record includes:
Tags in the corpus are assigned on the basis of both visual data and textual content, making the archive suitable for linguistic, sociocultural, and gender analysis. In the present study, however, only tags related directly to the textual content of the message are used (e.g., the most frequent tags include everyday matters, textual greeting, sending regards, kisses in letters, news, travel, etc.). This tagging system enables the analysis of correlations between message themes, the gender and status of correspondents, and historical periods.
4.1. Quantitative Analysis
The following methods are employed:
The key macro-level observation is that postcards addressed to women are 2.5 times more numerous than those addressed to men. In the pre-revolutionary period, women were recipients of postcards almost twice as often as men; in the Soviet period, this ratio increased to approximately three to one, indicating a significant transformation of social roles.
4.2. Thematic Correlations
Out of 65 tags, 16 show no statistically significant association with the gender of the addressee. These represent gender-neutral zones of communication, most often related to calendrical practices or mass events. In contrast, tags associated with economic, business, and professional topics in the pre-revolutionary period are significantly more often addressed to men. This reflects the structure of the public sphere, which was almost entirely masculinized at the time. In the Soviet period, however, this situation changes noticeably.
For example, the frequency of conveying “regards” and “kisses” (tags sending regards and kisses in letters) differs markedly depending on the gender of the addressee. Among women, these practices occur far more frequently (55.5%) than among men (22.9%).
4.3. Qualitative Microanalysis
Qualitative microanalysis complements quantitative methods by allowing for the examination of narrative elements and communicative features that are only partially captured – or not captured at all – by statistical approaches. This analysis focuses on individual postcard messages that reveal hidden mechanisms of relationship maintenance and gender expectations not always expressed through tags or statistically significant patterns. Key examples include:
Microanalysis makes it possible to link statistical patterns with actual communicative practices and narratives. It shows how quantitatively observable differences – such as thematic distributions, frequencies of particular forms of address, or tag usage – are embodied in concrete speech acts that shape everyday scenarios of communication. Attention to individual texts reveals what aggregated data tends to obscure: personal writing styles, situational emotional nuances, local distributions of responsibility within families, and forms of politeness and care.
5.1. Gendered Communication in the Late Russian Empire (1880–1917)
In the imperial period, a clear division of spheres is evident:
Postcards reproduce a model in which women are structurally associated with the private sphere and emotional labor, while men are associated with the public sphere.
5.2. The Soviet Period: Expansion of Public Roles
During the Soviet period, the number of professionally oriented messages addressed to women increases significantly. This reflects Soviet gender policies, including industrialization, the expansion of women’s education, and the involvement of women in science, medicine, and administration. The gender gap in business correspondence narrows, and the thematic range of messages addressed to women becomes substantially broader.
5.3. Emotional Labor and Institutionalized “Social Motherhood”
Private correspondence functioned as an important instrument of emotional labor: through the regular sending of postcards with “regards,” “bows,” and “kisses,” women bore responsibility for maintaining and reproducing social ties within families and circles of relatives and friends. Emotional labor reflected in postcard correspondence formed part of women’s obligations in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet period. Only in the post-Soviet era does the balance begin to shift in favor of men (42.9% for men versus 40.2% for women).
The analysis of postcards from different periods demonstrates that, despite substantial social changes, emotional labor remains primarily feminized. In the Soviet period, however, it becomes institutionalized in professions such as teachers, nurses, librarians, and secretaries. These shifts are visible both in the thematic content of postcards and in the choice of communicative strategies.
This study expands the range of topics addressed in the digital humanities by turning to everyday sources and historically “invisible” actors – women, children, and the elderly. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of combining big data analysis with microanalysis, contributing to the democratization and expansion of historical knowledge.
Postcards constitute a unique type of historical source that enables the reconstruction of the dynamics of gender roles, emotional practices, and social structures. The integration of quantitative and micro-analytical approaches illustrates the potential of digital technologies for identifying previously non-obvious patterns and for amplifying attention to everyday, “small” voices in history.