Woman In Soviet Russia

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

"From the earliest years of the Soviet regime, deliberate transformation of the role of women in economic, political, and family life aimed at incorporating female mobilization into a larger strategy of national development. Addressing a neglected problem in the literature on modernization, the author brings an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the motivations, mechanisms, and consequences of the official Soviet commitment to female liberation, and its implications for the role of women in Soviet society today. She argues that Soviet policy was shaped less by the individualistic and libertarian concerns of nineteenth-century feminism or Marxism than by a strategy of modernization in which the transformation of women's roles was perceived by the Soviet leadership as the means of tapping a major economic and political resource. Bringing together the available data, the author analyzes the scope and limits of sexual equality in the Soviet system, and at the same time places the Soviet pattern in a broader historical and comparative perspective."--Jacket.

This book brings together for the first time a collection of essays by western scholars about women in the Stalin era (1928-53). It explores both the realities of women's lived experience in the 1930s and 1940s, and the various forms in which womanhood and femininity were represented and constructed in these decades. Women in the Stalin Era challenges the scholarly neglect women's history has suffered at the hands, and pens, of Russian and western historians of the Stalin period.

Russia's maternal health crisis and postsocialist transition examined through ethnographic observation in clinics and hospitals.

Until the late 1960s, most Western scholars studying the history, culture, social and political life and economy of Russia and the Soviet Union, paid scant attention to the participation and experience of women. The multifarious ways in which gender roles and perceptions of gender were influenced by and in turn influenced the heterogeneous cultures of the Soviet empire were largely ignored. However, this neglect has slowly been rectified and now the study of women and gender relations has become one of the most productive fields of research into Russian and Soviet society. This volume demonstrates the originality and diversity of this recent research. Written by leading Western scholars, it spans the last decade of tsarist Russia, the 1917 revolutions and the Soviet period. The essays reflect the interdisciplinary nature of women's work, women and politics, women as soldiers, female prostitution, popular images of women and women's experience of perestroika.

In this book, leading western specialists and Russian and Ukrainian feminists examine how gender has shaped Russian and Ukrainian history from the twelfth century to the present. In particular, they analyse the current backlash against women's emancipation. Using new archival materials and the insights of feminist theory, the contributors explore the relevance of gender equality and difference in Russian history. They find that women have not merely submitted to the patriarchal system, but instead have found creative ways of resisting it. Chapters focusing on contemporary Russia discuss abortion, pornography, sexual minorities, young women's lifestyles, the impact of economic reform on women and the development of the women's movement. This book will be of interest to students and specialists in Russian, Ukrainian and women's studies, as well as to historians, political scientists, sociologists and economists.