Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union

This volume offers an interdisciplinary insight into the study of women and gender relations in Russian and Soviet society.

Linda Edmondson (Edited by)

9780521413886, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 August 1992

244 pages
23.7 x 15.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.546 kg

"As Edmondson notes in the introduction, one of the aims of this collection is to stimulate further research, and along with providing much-needed information and analysis itself, the volume does provide an impetus for future scholars. Finally, many of these essays will be useful in the classroom, and all will be of interest to those who want to know more about the history of women in Russia and the former USSR." Jehanne Gheith, Russian Review

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.

Introduction
1. 'Better halves'? Representations of women in Russian urban popular entertainments, 1870–1910 Catriona Kelly
2. The Silver Age: highpoint for women? Charlotte Rosenthal
3. Women pharmacists in Russia before World War I: women's emancipation, feminism, professionalization, nationalism and class conflict Mary Schaeffer Conroy
4. Women's rights, civil rights and the debate over citizenship in the 1905 Revolution Linda Edmondson
5. Laying the foundations of democracy in Russia: E. D. Kuskova's contribution, February-October 1917 Barbara T. Norton
6. Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian amazons of 1917 Richard Abraham
7. Russian women writers: an overview. Post-revolutionary dispersion and adjustment Marina Ledkovsky (Astman)
8 .Victim or villain? Prostitution in post-revolutionary Russia Elizabeth Waters
9. Young women and perestroika Sue Bridger
10. Glasnost and the woman question Mary Buckley.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1]