disseminating pro-literacy pamphlets and posters during the height of the Likbez campaign. The use of women as main characters was a key element of Likbez-era propaganda literature. The plot line of women improving their stations in Soviet society through literacy was first introduced in the widely disseminated rags-to-riches tales of domestic workers in the early 1920s. For example, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Russian decree on literacy (December 1924), the State commissioning body of Ivanovo-Voznesensk (the guberniia) published a pamphlet which linked women's lag in reaching full equality to their husbands with women's ignorance and illiteracy. By achieving literacy, the pamphlet's main character Riabnkova is able to gain autonomy and escape the clutches of her overbearing husband to become a contributing member of Soviet society. Moreover, images of women became central to Soviet pro-literacy propaganda posters during the Likbez campaign. In these posters, women were shown distributing books, teaching children how to read, and generally engaging with the Soviet ideals of education and literacy. Prior to 1920, women's representation in political posters was mostly allegorical. It was not until 1920 that Soviet artists generated a female counterpart for the commonly-used imagery of the male worker or blacksmith that had come into widespread use in post-Civil War propaganda. After 1920, the imagery of women in propaganda posters began to shift to that of the woman worker, a new Soviet woman. Though some allegorical representations of women subsisted in propaganda posters and art through the early 1920s, the new depictions of women found in Likbez-era posters were of women in plain dress, "industrious women workers and peasant women, building socialism alongside their male counterparts." Throughout the Likbez campaign, the building of socialism in which women were depicted as taking part was the spread of literacy. Though representation of the woman worker waned in its prevalence in political propaganda during the NEP-era, the representation of women and books remained a mainstay in pro-literacy Likbez-era propaganda through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Women, given their low literacy rate, were regarded by the State as having the highest potential for becoming the "modernizers" of Soviet society. Reports of success in the education and literacy of women, the largest demographic group in the illiterate segment of Soviet society, were used as propaganda in reports by the Soviet State as symbols of the State's power to improve the lot of even the