Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 by Choi s> Chatterjee (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 755 unofficial British dealings with the countries of East-Central Europe. Evans also contraststhe ostensibly correct, but distant and non-committal, attitude of the ForeignOffice with the 'unofficialcontacts' that were 'much closer, but haphazardand often conflicting'(p. I5). One may counterthat Britishforeign policy sufferedfromthe same contradictionsand conflictingsympathies.Even so, scholarly interest has undoubtedly proved much stronger than political links. Historians, the 'dramatis personae' of Evans, persevered with their partisan views even after I948, when 'Eastern Europe (as it had become) revertedto being a distantand alien environmentforBritishpolicy' (p. 21). Overall, this study is a measured attempt to prove the significance of intellectual connections between Britain and East-Central Europe, without exaggeratingthe strategicimportanceof the region or the impact of historians on the officialmind. Department ofLanguages andEuropean Studies G. BATONYI University ofBradford Chatterjee,Choi. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, andBolshevik Ideology, I9IO-I939. PittSeriesinRussianandEastEuropean Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2002. X + 223 PP. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $34.95. CHOI CHATTERJEE opens this study with a personal anecdote about her own experience of International Women's Day in Moscow in I992. The flowers, the meal procured and preparedby women, the men's ritualisticand archaic toasts these images and her sense of incongruity evoke my own memories of the 8 March in the Soviet Union and Russia. Precisely the incongruities between women and celebrationsin Soviet discoursedrew her to thisproject. The resultisa persuasiveandwell arguedstudythatexploresthe 'morphology' of the New Soviet Woman and helps to explain many of the incongruitiesof women's roles duringthe I930s. Chatterjee examines the history of International Women's Day from its initial proposal by Clara Zetkin in I9IO and first Russian celebration sponsored by the Bolsheviks -in I913 through to its establishmentas one of the three key holidays (alongside I May and I November) in the Soviet politicalcalendar.This was not an inevitableprogression,asshedemonstrates, forthe holiday was almosttotallyneglected duringthe CivilWarand the early years of the NEP. It would find increasing acceptance by both women and men in the late I920S and then experience its heyday during the following decade. However, this study does not focus narrowly on the institutional history of a holiday. As Chatterjee emphasizes, International Women's Day also provided an annual opportunity to write about women's roles in the family, society as a whole, and the revolutionaryprocess. The study of these multiple discoursesthus illuminatesthe changing content of Soviet ideology, the development of a public culture, and, to some extent, the ways in which people functioned in this new public space. 756 SEER, 8i, 4, 2003 The book is organized chronologically and topically. In the first chapter, which focuses on the period before 1917, Chatterjeeanalysesselected themes from Marxist and Bolshevikdiscussionsof the woman question as well as the attempts to celebrate the new holiday despite both tsaristrepression and the feminists'bid to appropriateit for their own uses. Bolshevikideology did not presume women's biological inability to act as citizens, she suggests, but instead constructed female liberation (and agency) around a transformative narrativewhich merged historical and personal regeneration. Backwardness could thusbe overcome throughthe internalizationof Bolshevikpropaganda. In chapter two, Chatterjeere-readsthe events and narrativesof the February Revolution, especially the reasons for dating its beginnings to International Women's Day on 23 February.Indeed, she suggeststhat historicalnarratives of the revolutionaryyear are built upon a gender dichotomy contrastingthe unruly and spontaneous ('feminine')revolution of Februaryto the organized and conscious ('masculine') events of October. The following chapter then turns to the early Soviet period. The almost complete absence of female representations in early celebrations and Bolshevik political culture more generally thus corresponded to the initial lack of official interest in International Women's Day, despite its continued presence in the Soviet political calendar. By the mid-i92os, however, celebrations were becoming more regular, and the Bolsheviksused them to review all that the state had achieved for women, inscribing I9 I7 as the source of women's liberation and development of political consciousness.Particularlyinterestingis Chatterjee's review of the popular responsesto the holiday, which ranged from supportto confusion to outright hostility and suggest that many women were also appropriating the new narratives and language. Precisely these narratives form the topic of chapter four, which presents a truly fascinating textual analysisof propagandaplays for InternationalWomen...