Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women under Soviet Rule, 1924–29

Abstract

In the Soviet campaign to abolish backwardness in Central Asia, some of the fiercest battles were fought over the fate of Muslim women. It was impossible to build a socialist society without freeing women from their subordinate status and recruiting them into Soviet collective farms, factories, and schools, Soviet authorities believed. By doing away with archaic and degrading customs, the Soviet regime hoped to transform Central Asian women into free individuals and active Soviet citizens. In much of Central Asia, the effort to transform the lives of women centered on the campaign against female seclusion and the veil. The Bolsheviks viewed the veil as an appalling manifestation of female inferiority, and the veiled woman herself as a potent symbol of Central Asian backwardness. Soviet propaganda vividly and indignantly described Muslim women who were covered from head to toe with heavy fabric, secluded in the female quarters of their houses, and prohibited from speaking to men who were not their relatives. A campaign to promote unveiling culminated in the hujum (onslaught) of 1927, in which thousands of women tore off and burned their veils in public squares.' Yet the unveiling campaign-and indeed, the veil itself-was generally limited to the urban and sedentary agricultural areas of what are today Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Turkmenistan, as in other parts of Central Asia with a recent history of pastoral nomadism, women were not secluded and did not wear the paranji and chachvon, the heavy veil and cloak that were the focus of Soviet activists' attention.2 How, then, did Soviet