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

Abstract

The revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s sparked a resurgence of interest in women in Russia and the Soviet Union. Historians then already had foundations on which to build such as S. S. Shashkov's survey of the history of women in Russia' and Elena Likhacheva'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 members of this new generation of scholars, myself among them, were personally 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 past, to tell herstory. To correct the masculine bias of earlier accounts, we hunted through archives and published sources, looking for traces of women's experiences, trying to hear women's hitherto silent voices. If we studied literate 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 experiences. 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