Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union

Author(s): Barbara Alpern Engel

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Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 309-321
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Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-
Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union

Barbara Alpern Engel

The revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s sparked a

resurgence of interest in women in Russia and the Soviet Union. His-
torians then already had foundations on which to build such as S. S.
Shashkov's survey of the history of women in Russia' and Elena Li-
khacheva's monumental pre-revolutionary study of women's education
in Russia which extended beyond the limit of its title to explore the
birth and growth of the Russian women's movement.2
Historians and social scientists in the 1970s attempted to find
women omitted from previous accounts of Russian and Soviet history.
In 1978, Richard Stites published his monumental and pioneering study
that maps vast portions of the terrain that other scholars would later
explore in greater detail and from different perspectives.3 Some mem-
bers of this new generation of scholars, myself among them, were per-
sonally and politically as well as intellectually motivated. Feminism
encouraged women historians of Russia, as it encouraged historians of
the US and western Europe, to seek "our" past, to tell "herstory." To
correct the masculine bias of earlier accounts, we hunted through ar-
chives and published sources, looking for traces of women's experi-
ences, trying to hear women's hitherto silent voices. If we studied lit-
erate women, as most of us did, we pored over diaries, memoirs and
letters. To the usual questions of historians and social scientists, this
feminist cohort added new ones, questions concerning the power that
men exercised over women and its impact on women's ideas and ex-
periences. We questioned the nature and sources of patriarchal power
and asked how being female shaped a woman's choices and activities.
And even as we carefully gathered and sifted evidence, as professional
historians do, explicitly or not and in varying degrees, we often brought
our own experience as women and as subjected beings to the materials
we examined.4

I would like to thank Diana Greene for her advice and assistance in the preparation
of this essay.
1. S. S. Shashkov, Istoriia russkoizhenshchiny(St. Petersburg: 0. N. Popova, 1898).
2. Elena Likhacheva, Materialydlia istorii zhenskogoobrazovaniiav Rossii (St. Peters-
burg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1899-1901). Most early works in English, while useful
introductions to the past of Russia's women, often lacked both scholarly rigor and
scholarly apparatus. See, for example, Nina Selivanova, Russia's Women(New York: E.
P. Dutton & Co., 1923).
3. Richard Stites, The Women'sLiberationMovementin Russia: Feminism,Nihilism and
Bolshevism,1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
4. In my introduction to Mothers and Daughters, I acknowledge the personal ele-
ment explicitly; so do the editors of a recent collection on Soviet women. See Barbara
Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Womenof the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century
Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992)

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310 Slavic Review
Whether or not scholars adopted a self-consciously feminist per-
spective, its content places much of this initial scholarship in "contri-
bution" history, to borrow Gerda Lerner's phrase. Such histories de-
scribe "women's contribution to, their status in and their oppression
by male-defined society."5 Partly because of the intrinsic importance
of those topics, but also because they left a relatively accessible paper
trail, they focus either on women of the intelligentsia or on the bol-
shevik attempt to liberate women after 1917.6 While such works re-
vealed hitherto unknown or neglected aspects of Russian women's ex-
periences, they primarily discussed only the educated, the articulate
and the radical; they told us almost nothing about the lives and ex-
periences of "ordinary" Russian women-lives which activist women
rejected and which revolutionaries aimed to transform. They also left
unchallenged the ways that historians have traditionally conceptual-
ized and periodized Russia's past.
More recently, the focus has broadened, the questions have grown
more multi-faceted and the methodologies more diverse. Evolution
and diversity were evident at a conference on "The History of Women
of the Russian Empire," held in Akron, Ohio in August 1988. Scholars
from England, the Soviet Union, Germany, Australia and the United
States contributed papers on a broad range of topics that offered new
perspectives on women's experience and on the role of gender in struc-
turing historical change. In 1991, selected articles from the conference
were published.7 Together with the scholarship that has appeared in
the last decade or so, the collection provides a basis for reassessing
Russia's past.

Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Barbara Holland, "Intro-
duction," Soviet Sisterhood,ed. Barbara Holland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985).
5. On "contribution" history, see Gerda Lerner, "Placing Women in History: A
1975 Perspective," in Liberating Women'sHistory, ed. Bernice Carroll, (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1976), 358, 360. Works on Russian history that conform to this
characterization are to be found in the note that follows.
6. Jay Bergman, VeraZasulich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983) Vera
Broido, Apostles into Terrorists:Womenand the RevolutionaryMovement in the Russia of
AlexanderII (New York: Viking Press, 1977); Barbara Clements, BolshevikFeminist: The
Life of AleksandraKollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Barbara En-
gel and Clifford Rosenthal, eds., Five Sisters: WomenAgainst the Tsar (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1975); Beatrice Farnsworth, AleksandraKollontai:Socialism,Feminismand the Bol-
shevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); Ann Hibner Koblitz, A
Convergenceof Lives:SofiaKovalevskaia:Scientist, Writer,Revolutionary(Boston: Birkhauser
Boston, Inc., 1983); Robert McNeal, Bride of the Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1972); Cathy Porter, Fathersand Daughters:Russian Womenin Revolution
(London: Virago, 1976); Gail Lapidus, Womenin Soviet Society:Equality,Developmentand
Social Change(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). The pioneering collection
Womenin Russia, (ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, [Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1977]) contains essays that extend beyond these subjects, as
does The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (ed. David Ransel
[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978]).
7. Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel and Christine Worobec, eds., Russia's Women:
Accommodation, Resistance,Transformation(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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Notes and Comments 311

This essay is an overview of the major themes in recent publications

and the fresh perspectives that they offer on the history of post-eman-
cipation Russia and the Soviet Union. I will treat only publications in
English.
Much recent work, mirroring larger developments in the field of
Russian history, treats the lives of lower class women. Scholars of
women have gone to the people, as did the intelligentsia that so many
of the first generation initially studied. And as was the case with the
intelligentsia, social and cultural differences have raised formidable
barriers to communication. Few working women and still fewer peas-
ant women left the kind of personal documents that allow historians
to trace the experience of educated women. Historians must therefore
rely heavily on the accounts of others. But the majority of ethnogra-
phers, physicians, lawyers, zemstvo statisticians, socialists of various
stripes and others who produced accounts of the lower class were for
the most part educated men who brought their own class, gender and
political biases to bear on the information they transmitted. While the
few primary sources written from a feminist perspective provide an
important counterbalance and corrective, they are of course no more
objectively "true" than the rest.8 Finally, in the field of social history,
as in every other field of Russian history, there is a persistent tendency
to assume that the masculine experience is the universal one. All of
this complicates the problem of interpretation and makes it difficult
to shift the focus to women.
Rose Glickman's ground-breaking study of the Russian factory
woman demonstrates some of the difficulties in shifting focus.9 Based
on prodigious research in published and archival sources, Glickman's
respectful treatment of the woman worker is aimed at revising Russian
labor history. On the one hand, it describes patriarchal tradition, the
confinement of women to unskilled and semiskilled labor and women's
contemptuous treatment by organized men as circumstances that re-
tarded women's ability to organize. On the other hand, it demonstrates
convincingly that women workers were nonetheless acquiring a sense
of their own self-worth and becoming more militant. Such an approach
effectively takes issue with the tendency of labor historians to dismiss
women workers as "backward" because of their failure to engage in
strikes or to join labor organizations to the same degree as men. How-
ever, it uncritically accepts such activities as the sole measure of "con-
sciousness" and does not ask whether women might have found other
forms of collective action or political expression more congenial. For
example, Glickman explores neither the ties between women workers

8. See, for example, Aleksandra Efimenko, Izsledovaniianarodnoi zhizni (Moscow:

V. I. Kasperov, 1884); Maria Gorbunova's study of peasant women's crafts, published
as Sbornikstatisticheskikhsvedenii po moskovskoigubernii, t. 7, vyp. 4 (Moscow: Izd. mos-
kovskago gubernskago zemstva, 1882) and the numerous articles by Maria Pokrovskaia.
9. Rose Glickman, The Russian Factory Woman: Workplaceand Society, 1880-1914
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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312 Slavic Review
nor the workplace culture that historians of women in other times and
places have found to be important elements in women's resistance.10
Indeed, one of her contentions is that Russian women had no such
ties, that unmarried women especially were singularly isolated.11 Given
the importance of zemliak and kin in facilitating women's migration
from villages, such isolation seems unlikely.
In her book and in recent articles, Glickman addresses the deploy-
ment of power on a personal level: they present stark and unrelenting
pictures of peasant patriarchy and stress the extreme oppression of
the peasant woman in addition to her prodigious burden of work in
the field and the household. Rural oppression included women's lack
of access to land in their own right, their absence from village self-
government (the skhod) and their subordination in the family.12 Judith
Pallot's work on women and kustarsupports this perspective by arguing
that, while women's participation in household industry may have ex-
panded their horizons and enabled them to contribute to household
economies, it failed to alter women's subordinate status in household
and village.13
Other research on peasant women presents a rather different pic-
ture and some of it suggests alternative modes of power and social
standing among Russian peasants. Christine Worobec shows that
women had property rights to their dowries and to goods purchased
with brideprice, and that as widows they could gain access to com-
munal lands.14 Based on her research in volost' court records, Beatrice
Farnsworth asserts that the peasant daughter-in-law, the least powerful
member of the household, actually enjoyed considerable status and
rights."5As David Ransel notes in his account of the Russian foundling
system, many peasant women behaved more like entrepreneurs than
passive victims.16 By drawing on ethnographic and zemstvo materials

10. For a discussion of recent scholarship on women's work culture, see Sandra
Morgen, "Beyond the Double Day: Work and Family in Working-Class Women's Lives,"
Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 53-67.
11. On the basis of very different evidence, Anne Bobroff draws the same con-
clusion. See "Russian Working Women: Sexuality in Bonding Patterns and the Politics
of Daily Life," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine
Stansell and Sharon Thompson, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 206-27.
12. Rose Glickman, "Women and the Peasant Commune," in Land Communeand
Peasant Communityin Russia: CommunalFormsin Imperialand EarlySovietSociety,ed. Roger
Bartlett (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 321-38; and "The Peasant Woman as
Healer" in Russia's Women,163-85.
13. Judith Pallot, "Women's Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880-1900,"
in Russia's Women,163-85.
14. Christine Worobec, "Customary Law and Property Devolution among Russian
Peasants in the 1870s," Canadian Slavonic Papers XXVI, nos. 2 and 3 Uune-September
1984): 220-34.
15. Beatrice Farnsworth, "The Litigious Daughter-in-Law: Family Relations in Ru-
ral Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century," Slavic Review 45, no. 1
(Spring 1986): 49-64.
16. David Ransel, "Abandonment and Fosterage of Unwanted Children: The
Women of the Foundling System," in The Family in ImperialRussia, 189-217.

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Notes and Comments 313
and by examining demographic patterns, I have demonstrated that
when a husband left his village to work elsewhere, his absence often
enhanced his wife's position in the household and village, even as it
increased her work.17 Other scholarship tends to confirm the agency
of women and to locate its source in family, community and culture.
Over a decade ago, Nancy Frieden used the experience of physicians
to demonstrate how family networks of women resisted modernization
in childcare practices.18 More recently, Christine Worobec has ex-
plored at length the nature of women's position in peasant society and
culture.19 Without denying the reality of the patriarchal order, she
emphasizes women's abilities to utilize peasant patriarchy to their own
advantage, to accommodate themselves in order to benefit. Worobec
points out that women gained power as they aged: when a man became
head of the household, his wife was in a position to dominate her
daughters-in-law and to exert influence over her sons. Worobec also
draws attention to women's important roles in arranging marriages,
safeguarding family and community, and in transmitting culture to the
young. She does not deny, however, that the culture safeguarded and
transmitted by women remained deeply patriarchal. Thus far no his-
torian of Russian women has argued that women derived power and
sustenance from a semi-autonomous culture with its own ethos and
institutions, as have historians of the United States and western Eu-
rope.20
Current scholarship on Russian women does offer fresh perspec-
tives on the deployment of power on the political level by showing the
importance of stability in the family and in gender order to the main-
tenance of social and political stability. Whatever power women ex-

17. Barbara Alpern Engel, "The Woman's Side: Male Out-Migration and the Fam-
ily Economy in Kostroma Province," Slavic Review 45, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 257-71.
18. Nancy Frieden, "Child Care: Medical Reform in a Traditionalist Culture," in
The Family in ImperialRussia, 236-59.
19. Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Communityin the Post-Emancipa-
tion Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); "Accommodation and Resist-
ance," in Russia's Women,17-29; and "Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and
Patriarchy," in Peasant Economy,Culture,and Politics of EuropeanRussia, 1800-1921, eds.
Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), 177-206. See also Beatrice Farnsworth, "The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Re-
cord," Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 58-74; Mary Matossian, "The Peasant Way
of Life," in The Peasant in Nineteenth CenturyRussia, ed. Wayne Vucinich, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1968), 1-40; and Antonina Martynova, "Life of the Pre-
Revolutionary Village as Reflected in Popular Lullabies," in The Family in Imperial
Russia, 171-85. The annotated bibliography at the end of this edited volume surveys
important primary, secondary and bibliographic literature on women and the family.
20. See the contributions by Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda
Lerner and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg to "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A
Symposium," Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 26-64. On the basis of her reading
in secondary sources, Temma Kaplan applies this argument to the February revolu-
tion. See Temma Kaplan, "Women and Communal Strikes in the Crisis of 1917-1922,"
in BecomingVisible: Womenin EuropeanHistory, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz
and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), 430-38.

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314 Slavic Review
ercised within it, the patriarchal order in peasant villages-indeed, in
all of Russian society-was sanctioned and buttressed by law because
it fostered discipline and respect for state authority.2' To buttress pa-
triarchal authority by providing a refuge for illegitimate children who
were evidence of the family's inability to control its members, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under circumstances of rapid so-
cial change, the state instituted foundling homes.22 Aware of the con-
nection between the patriarchal family and an authoritarian political
order, radicals of the 1850s and 1860s attacked the patriarchal family
and attempted to liberate women from its authority (the bolsheviks
would do the same half a century later). The state responded with
repression: women living outside the family became suspect, even if
their sole objective was to obtain an education. State concern with
women's place shaped women's struggle for higher education in the
second half of the nineteenth century, as ChristineJohanson has dem-
onstrated.23 Aware that their quest challenged conventional ideas about
women's roles, feminists took care to avoid threats to the traditional
family structure and to stress the social utility of women's education.
By cooperating with the government and avoiding confrontation, fem-
inists succeeded in gaining for qualified women access to university
degrees and medical study. But these gains were always endangered by
the involvement of a radical minority of women. Although she does
not emphasize the point, Johanson's research suggests that in the minds
of conservative government officials, social stability depended upon
the relegation of middle- and upper-class women to their proper
spheres.
Similar concerns conditioned official responses to the growing
numbers of peasant women who migrated to the cities and factories
in search of employment. While migrant women's working and living
conditions were often no easier than they had been in the village, they
experienced a new kind of independence, as well as a greater vulner-
ability.24 And although women often remained psychologically and
legally tied to the village, they were nevertheless no longer directly
subject to patriarchal control of their behavior, their sexual behavior
in particular.25 High illegitimacy rates in Russia's major cities provided

21. William Wagner, "The Trojan Mare: Women's Rights and Civil Rights in Late
Imperial Russia," in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, eds. Olga Crisp and Linda H. Ed-
mondson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65-84.
22. David Ransel, iMothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988).
23. Christine Johanson, Women'sStrugglefor Higher Educationin Russia, 1855-1900
(Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987). For a survey of women
students, see Ruth Dudgeon, "The Forgotten Minority: Women Students in Imperial
Russia, 1872-1917," Russian History 9 (1982): 1-26.
24. Rose Glickman discusses the lives of factory women; material on the life of
domestic servants can be found in David Ransel, Mothersof Misery. Domestic service,
which employed the largest proportion of urban working women at least until 1914,
merits further study.
25. On village controls, see Barbara Alpern Engel, "Peasant Morality and Pre-

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Notes and Comments 315

statistical evidence of the difference between town and country.26 But

the growth of prostitution was the most visible and troubling symbol
of women's freedom from patriarchal control and it moved the state
to action.27 Suspecting all lower-class women without families of "trad-
ing in vice," the state attempted to substitute its own patriarchal power
for absent husbands and fathers. It created and elaborated a network
of laws to regulate prostitution and control venereal disease, laws that
in fact affected all women of the lower classes. Even women who plied
the trade casually and intermittently (or perhaps not at all) risked
receiving a "yellow ticket" from the police.28 A "yellow ticket" was a
permit for prostitution that subjected women to police surveillance
and medical supervision, allegedly in order to control venereal disease
but really to control the women themselves, as Laura Engelstein has
contended.29 Once registered as a professional prostitute, a woman on
her own would no longer be her own mistress. State investment in
upholding the traditional gender order also rendered women's bodies
tokens of the authority contested by educated society. William Wagner
has argued that jurists' efforts to expand the individual's civil rights by
expanding women's rights was part of a more general social and po-
litical -struggle from the 1860s onwards.30 But conservative jurists
blocked legal reform by maintaining that respect for state authority
derived from-the respect for patriarchal authority fostered by the fam-
ily. To undermine the one was to undermine the other.
Wagner also points out that the liberal argument for women's rights
impeded women's cause because it made legal advances for women
contingent on broader civil rights.31 And jurists' efforts to revise the
laws that treated sexual crime and prostitution served men more than
they served women: Laura Engelstein's analysis of the language of legal
reforms reveals how jurists denied women agency and ensured that
individual autonomy remained a male preserve.32 Physicians likewise

Marital Relations in Late Nineteenth Century Russia,"Journal of Social History 23, no.
4 (Summer 1990): 695-714; and Christine Worobec, "Temptress or Virgin? The Pre-
carious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society,"
Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 227-38.
26. David Ransel, "Problems in Measuring Illegitimacy in Prerevolutionary Rus-
sia," Journal of Social History 16 (Winter 1982): 111-27.
27. On prostitution in Russia, see Richard Stites, "Prostitute and Society in Pre-
Revolutionary Russia,"JahrbiicherfiirGeschichteOsteuropas31, no. 3 (1983): 348-64; and
Barbara Alpern Engel, "St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A
Personal and Social Profile," Russian Review 48, no. 1 (1989): 21-44.
28. On the "yellow ticket," see Laurie Bernstein, "Yellow Tickets and State-Li-
censed Brothels: The Tsarist Government and the Regulation of Urban Prostitution,"
in Health and Societyin RevolutionaryRussia, eds. Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutch-
inson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 45-65.
29. Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View
Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905," Representations 14 (Spring
1986): 169-208.
30. Wagner, "The Trojan Mare," 84.
31. Ibid.
32. Laura Engelstein, "Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape

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316 Slavic Review
used women as the basis for claims to greater authority: those who
disliked official regulation of prostitution, for example, argued that
medical authority should replace it.33Ironically, in the scholarship on
gender and power, as in the discourse itself, women only rarely figure
as actors or as agents on their own behalf.
Yet as a civil society began to take shape in Russia in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women, like men, claimed
larger and more autonomous social roles. In some cases, women did
so by extending their customary sphere. In religious communities, for
example, women moved from contemplation to acts of charity for the
poor and to education of the young. Especially in rural areas, these
women's communities remained relatively free of the bureaucracy
which continued to be suspicious of any private initiative or inde-
pendent action.34 Women teachers in St. Petersburg fought for the
right to enjoy their customary sphere, to be wives and mothers, as well
as professionals. Protesting regulations that forbade women teachers
to marry, they banded together to claim that right and to control their
own personal lives. In their struggle with the city Duma, the teachers
found allies in the re-emergent feminist movement which sought to
expand women's civil rights and after 1905 to gain for women the
vote.35
Feminists in Russia, like radicals, contested the authority of the
state. When women sacrificed themselves for radical causes, they gained
the respect and admiration of their male comrades. But when women
pursued a feminist cause, men were more ambivalent despite the fact
that feminists collaborated with leftist and liberal men far more exten-
sively than they did in Europe or the United States.36 During the rev-
olution of 1905, only a minority of men in the opposition movement
were willing to endorse the feminists' call for women's suffrage, fore-
most among them the peasant-dominated Trudovikgroup. The Cadets
were divided over the issue, while other leftist parties were suspicious
and reluctant to support "bourgeois feminism."
The ambivalent relation of socialism to feminism persisted across
the rupture of 1917. After the October revolution, feminism disap-
peared as an independent political and intellectual current: "bourgeois
feminism" became (and remained) a pejorative term, used by a male
leadership when women articulated needs that diverged too far from

in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes," Journal of Modern History 60, no. 3

(September 1988): 458-95.
33. Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon."
34. Brenda Meehan-Waters, "From Contemplative Practice to Charitable Activity:
Russian Women's Religious Communities and the Development of Charitable Work,
1861-1917," in Lady Bountoiul Revisited Women,Philanthropyand Power, ed. Kathleen
McCarthy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 142-57.
35. Christine Ruane, "The Vestal Virgins of St. Petersburg: School Teachers and
the 1897 Marriage Ban," Russian Review 50, no. 2 (April 1991): 163-82.
36. Linda Harriet Edmondson, The Feminist Movementin Russia, 1900-1917 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1984); and Stites, The Women'sLiberationMovement.

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Notes and Comments 317
theirs. Nevertheless, varieties of bolshevik feminism became part of
the political discourse and the bolsheviks tried to fulfill the radical
promise to do away with the patriarchal family. In 1918, they issued a
code that equalized women's status with men's, removed marriage from
the hands of the church, allowed a marrying couple to choose either
the husband's or the wife's surname and granted illegitimate children
the same legal rights as legitimate ones. Divorce, virtually impossible
in the tsarist period, became easily obtainable. In 1920, abortion be-
came legal if performed by a physician. The revolution unleashed not
only a flood of experimentation in personal lives and in the culture,37
it also provided unprecedented opportunities for lower-class women
to speak and act on their own behalf. The Women's Bureau (Zhenotdel)
was established in 1919 as a result of the efforts of bolshevik women
such as Inessa Armand and Aleksandra Kollontai who produced some
remarkable theoretical work with a marxist approach to women and
women's issues that raised sexuality and sexual relations as proper
topics for political discussion.38 During the 1920s, the Women's Bureau
tried to organize working women to bring them into the revolutionary
process and to promote their equality in public and private life.
Hundreds of thousands of lower-class women served as delegatkiof the
Zhenotdel.39
Yet even as they challenged the patriarchal family and mobilized
women to an unprecedented degree, many bolshevik cadres resisted
women's emancipation and barely concealed their contempt for the
Zhenotdel. From the first, gender differences were subtly re-inscribed
in the revolutionary iconography which consistently depicted the he-
roic worker as male and women as helpers of man or as "Mother
Earth."40Proletcul't artists and writers also reinforced the image of the
working class and its institutions as male while they relegated women
to the family. For them, as for much of the bolshevik leadership, wom-
en's "backwardness" and their power in the family constituted a threat
to the revolution.4" Although devoted to the ideal of a genuinely eman-
cipated woman, even the Zhenotdel avoided challenges to women's

37. Richard Stites, RevolutionaryDreams: Utopian Vision and ExperimentalLife in the

Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Surprisingly, this book
has rather little to say about the role of women or about gender in post-revolutionary
utopian visions.
38. On Kollontai, see Clements, BolshevikFeminist;and Farnsworth, AleksandraKol-
lontai. For Kollontai's writings, see SelectedWritingsof AlexandraKollontai, ed. Alix Holt
(Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977); and the analysis in Mary Buckley, Womenand Ideologyin
the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 44-57.
39. On the Zhenotdel, see Stites, The Women'sLiberationMovement,Carol Hayden,
"The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party," Russian History, 3 (Fall 1976): 150-73; and
Buckley, Womenand Ideology.
40. Elizabeth Waters, "The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-
1932," in Russia's Women,225-42 and Victoria Bonnell, "The Representation of Women
in Early Soviet Political Art," Russian Review 50, no. 3 (July 1991): 267-88.
41. Lynn Mally, Cultureof the Future:TheProletkultMovementin RevolutionaryRussia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 6.

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318 Slavic Review
42
traditional roles when they addressed audiences of lower-class women.
On the other hand, Wendy Goldman has criticized the tendency to
view ideology and politics as the ultimate arbiter of the historical pro-
cess; she argues instead that historians should look to both the material
possibilities and the actions of working women. She emphasizes that
economic factors hampered Zhenotdel efforts to establish child-care
centers, communal dining halls and other services, and that the vast
majority of the Zhenotdel's constituency was illiterate, unorganized
and largely unresponsive to feminist appeals.43 In fact, as Barbara
Clements demonstrates, the revolution in many ways worsened wom-
en's lot, at least in the short run: revolution and civil war had taken
away their men and had destroyed their fragile family economies.44
What could promises of sexual equality mean to an unemployed work-
ing woman or to a peasant woman without access to land in her own
right? Rates of female unemployment remained high through the 1920s.
Moreover, revolutionary transformation lessened women's loyalty nei-
ther to their families nor especially to their children; but food short-
ages, poor housing, lack of job opportunities and especially family
instability made women's traditional responsibilities considerably
heavier.
These grim realities shaped lower-class women's responses to the
New Family Code of 1926, which not only facilitated divorce but also
proposed that women in de facto unions have the same legal protec-
tion as women in registered marriages. Parts of the nationwide debates
over the Code were published, allowing working-class and peasant
women to articulate their opinions openly, and so giving historians a
rare glimpse into their thinking.45 Wendy Goldman and Beatrice
Farnsworth both argue that the debates foreshadowed the conservative
trends of the 1930s, although they arrive at this conclusion by very
different routes. Farnsworth stresses ideology and contends that bol-
shevik social policy in the 1920s was basically conservative, aimed at
maintaining marital and family stability. She presents as evidence the
failure of the party to take up a general insurance fund that would
support and maintain the independence of unwed mothers.46 Gold-

42. Barbara Evans Clements, "The Birth of the New Soviet Woman," in Bolshevik
Culture:Experimentand Orderin the Russian Revolution,eds. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez
and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 220-37.
43. Wendy Goldman, "Women, the Family, and the New Revolutionary Order in
the Soviet Union," in PromissoryNotes: Womenin the Transition to Socialism, eds. Sonia
Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn Young (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), 59-
81.
44. Barbara Evans Clements, "Working Class and Peasant Women in the Russian
Revolution," Signs 8, no. 2 (1982): 215-35; and "The Effects of the Civil War on Women
and Family Relations," in Party, State, and Societyin the Russian Civil War:Explorations
in Social History, eds. Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 105-22.
45. Excerpts from the debates are reproduced in TheFamilyin the USSR:Documents
and Readings, ed. Rudolf Schlesinger (London: Routledge and Paul, 1949).
46. Beatrice Farnsworth, '"'BolshevikAlternatives and the Soviet Family: The 1926
Marriage Law Debate," in Womenin Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson et al., 139-66.

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Notes and Comments 319
man, by contrast, stresses social causes and highlights the "conserva-
tism" of lower-class women themselves. She shows that these women
opposed the provisions of the New Code because they believed that it
would encourage male irreponsibility and further erode family stabil-
ity.47 Barbara Clements holds that the two kinds of conservatism in-
teracted to result in the bolshevik approach tailored to suit their au-
dience of working-class and peasant women. Fearful of alienating
potential supporters and eager to enlist lower-class women in support
of the revolution, bolsheviks softened the emancipatory features of
new Soviet womanhood by incorporating elements of a traditional
feminine ideal.48
Research on women in the 1930s reveals other forms of women's
resistance to bolshevik policies. Both collectively and individually,
women defended their interests against the growing power of the state:
peasant women rioted in opposition to the collectivization and the
eradication of their family farms;49on an individual level, women re-
fused to relinquish to the state control over their sexuality. Upon re-
vocation of the right to abortion in 1936 which deprived them of their
primary means of birth control, women subjected themselves to back-
alley abortions and dangerous home-remedies to limit their fertility so
that they might take advantage of education and industrialization.50
Sources for women's history in the period after the early 1930s
have been fewer than for earlier periods so that women's voices of that
time seemed virtually inaudible. Except for stirring accounts of per-
sonal suffering and repression,51 the sources are primarily official. They
offer reports of policies affecting women, of ideas about women or of
images of women, all of which present a grim picture. The exception
is the Smolensk archive, which historians of women are just starting
to mine. And although the opening of Soviet archives is now changing
the picture dramatically, published work does not as yet reflect that
change.
Since the 1930s, women have shouldered the burden of full-time,
waged labor while continuing to do almost all housework without la-
bor-saving devices. Their burden is especially heavy in villages, where

47. Wendy Goldman, "Freedom and its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet
Family Code of 1926," Russian History 11 (Winter 1984): 362-88.
48. Barbara Clements, "The Birth of the New Soviet Woman," in BolshevikCulture,
220-37.
49. Lynne Viola, "Bab'i bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectiviza-
tion," Russian Review 45, no. 1 (January 1986): 23-42.
50. Wendy Goldman, "Women, Abortion and the State, 1917-36," in Russia's
Women,243-67.
51. The most well known of these are Nadeihda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope
(New York: Atheneum, 1970); and Eugenia Ginzburg,Journey Into the Whirlwind(New
York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967). Raisa Orlova in Memoirs(New York: Random
House, 1983) provides a thoughtful recounting of the Stalin years. Elena Kochina in
BlockadeDiary (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990) provides a harrowing account of the siege of
Leningrad.

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320 Slavic Review
work-days are longer and the amenities even scarcer than in the cities.
(As late as 1976, the vast majority of rural housing lacked running
water.52) As in the west, Russian women in both village and city are
clustered in poorly paid sectors of the workforce, are inadequately
represented in managerial positions and have been excluded from
positions of genuine political power.53
Since the 1960s, gender differences have acquired the status of
scientific truth from which few dissent publicly: these differences are
immutable, biologically and not socially created, and include women's
"natural" roles of motherhood and childrearing.54 Nevertheless, alter-
native interpretations of women's roles and experiences are beginning
to be heard and some of them are self-consciously feminist.55 After the
death of Stalin, the debate on the woman question was revived and,
in the recent past, it has broadened so dramatically that it is impossible
to know where it will lead.56 As Russians currently attempt to define
for themselves a new social and political order, they almost inevitably
invoke notions of an appropriate gender order as well. Elizabeth Waters
has provided an astute commentary on the engendering of the dis-
course on current changes.57
The Russians' current fascination with their own history is slowly
extending to the history of women;58 they have a lot to learn as do we.

52. Susan Bridger, Womenin the Soviet Countryside:Women'sRoles in Rural Develop-

ment in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
53. See Lapidus, Womenin Soviet Society;Norton Dodge, Womenin the Soviet Econ-
omy: Their Role in the Economic, Scientyifcand Technical Development(Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1966); Michael Sacks, Women'sWork in Soviet Russia: Conti-
nuity in the Midst of Change(New York: Praeger, 1976); Buckley, Womenand Ideology;and
the essays by Sacks, Dodge, Chapman and Moses in Womenin Russia, eds. D. Atkinson
et al.
54. Mollie Rosenham, "Images of Male and Female in Children's Readers," in
Womenin Russia, eds. D. Atkinson et al., 293-306; Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man
and Woman:Sex-RoleSocialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990); and the essays by Attwood, McAndrew, Peers, Holland and McKevitt in Soviet
Sisterhood.Even Soviet writers who seem "feminist" in other respects endorse stereo-
typed views of women as is clear from the essays in Women,Work,and Family in the
Soviet Union, ed. Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).
55. On Soviet feminists, see Alix Holt, "The First Soviet Feminists," in Soviet
Sisterhood,237-65; and Rochelle Ruthchild, "Sisterhood and Socialism: The Soviet
Feminist Movement," Frontiers:A Journal of Women'sStudies 7, no. 2 (1983): 4-12. In
1987, a new feminist samizdat entitled Women'sReadings (ZhenskoeChtenie)appeared in
Leningrad, edited by Olga Lipovskaia. See Barbara Alpern Engel, "An Interview with
Olga Lipovskaia," Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989): 6-10. Some feminist dissident writings
have been collected and published in Womenand Russia. Feminist Writingsfrom the Soviet
Union, ed. Tatyana Mamonova (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). An earlier collection of
feminist writings was published in England: Womanand Russia. The First Feminist Sam-
izdat (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1980).
56. Buckley, Womenand Ideology,is especially good on recent developments in
Soviet thinking about women.
57. Elizabeth Waters, "Restructuring the 'Woman Question': Perestroika and
Prostitution," Feminist Review, no. 33 (Autumn 1989): 3-19. A prime example of the
invocation of gender is Valentin Rasputin, "Women Mirror our Entire Culture,"
Perestroika,no. 3 (1991): 32-39. I am very grateful to Elizabeth Waters for sending this
article to me.
58. For example, in February 1991, a conference on "Feminism in Russian Cul-

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Notes and Comments 321
Despite the solid foundation that has been built over the last few dec-
ades, much work remains to be done. Some of the more obvious ex-
amples are: explorations of the prescriptive literature or religious
teachings concerning women's roles in the pre-revolutionary period;
social or economic histories of noblewomen, merchant women, women
of the urban petty bourgeoisie (meshchanstvo),professional women and
women of the clerical estate.59 We still know very little about the roles
that women played in the emergent civil society of late imperial Russia
or in Soviet society, or about the ways that gender structured both.
(Doubtless, women's religious or family values Provided alternatives to
official ideology after the bolshevik revolution. 0) The research agenda
could be extended almost indefinitely, especially if cognate fields such
as the history of private life, of sexuality, of the family, are included.
Work on women and gender holds the promise not only of correcting
assumptions about the universality of men's experience, but also of
providing fresh perspectives on Russia's past and on the nature and
sources of historical change.

ture" was held in Leningrad. A substantial portion of the papers was provided by
historians. A similar conference was planned forJanuary 1992 but canceled.
59. References to women of the clerical estate can be found in Gregory Freeze,
"Caste and Emancipation: The Changing Status of Clerical Families in the Great Re-
forms," in The Family in ImperialRussia, 124-50.
60. For the impact of grandmothers, for example, see Ludmilla Alexeyeva and
Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation:Comingof Age in the Post-StalinEra (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1990), 11-12.

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