SOUNDS OF SOVIET FEMININITY: SOCIALIST EXPECTATIONS FOR WOMEN’S LABOR AND MUSIC IN SOVIET TALLINN, TBILISI, AND RIGA, 1970-1991 Allison Rose Brooks-ConradGlenda Goodman This dissertation investigates how women living in Soviet cities of Tallinn, Estonia; Tbilisi, Georgia; and Riga, Latvia used music in their attempts to conform to and diverge from Soviet state policy, social expectations, and gender roles during the late socialist era in the Soviet Union. By studying these questions in the contexts non-Russian republics in the Soviet Union, I investigate how women employed music and sound in their attempts to navigate the relationship between their local, peripheral culture and Russian-Soviet culture imposed from the center. I argue that through women’s lives and their everyday musical practices, we can better grasp how individuals negotiated identity at ethnic and national levels, as well as at a Soviet level. Finally, I argue that centering gender reveals the patriarchal and Russifying systems that constructed and constricted, yet did not fully dictate women’s musical lives. This dissertation combines oral history interviews with archival research and musical analysis to offer a nuanced perspective on women and music not readily available in other secondary sources. Chapter 1 argues for an understanding of women’s labor in Soviet apartments as a form of amateur sound abatement. Chapter 2 describes efforts to create a network of Soviet Social Motherhood through the lens of Georgian singer-songwriter Inola Gurgulia. Chapter 3 focuses on the genre estrada, the way the genre is gendered, and how it worked to flatten ethnic difference among performers. Chapter 4 identifies how music figured in the state’s messaging for expectations for women’s behavior and appearance. Finally, chapter 5 places two 21st-century women musicians from Georgia and Estonia in conversation to identify how their respective countries’ Soviet past influences their experience as women today and how that experience is reflected in their music.