"In the Beginning"

Abstract

"In the Beginning" Barbara Engel (bio) My interest in women's history emerged in the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of movements that aimed to transform the world we knew. Initially, it was inspired by the thrilling experience of marching down Fifth Avenue, together with tens of thousands of other women, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Women's Suffrage amendment on 26 August 1970. I was then a graduate student in Russian history at Columbia University and looking for a dissertation topic. Before I took part in the march, it had never occurred to me that women might be a topic of scholarly inquiry. I went that day only because a friend invited me. The march quite literally changed my life. When I begin my work in the field of Russian women's history, it was virtually uncharted. Neither at Columbia nor, to my knowledge, anywhere else at that time were there courses on the history of Russia's women (or even on women's history more generally, so far as I know). As I would later learn, Rose Glickman, Rochelle Ruthchild, and Barbara Evans Clements had also begun working in the field, and in 1968 Richard Stites had defended the dissertation that would lead to his first book.1 That dissertation, together with Richard himself, would provide invaluable guidance as I pursued my own work. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1970 when I commenced research, there existed no published, current academic scholarship on Russian women's history. (I proceeded initially by tracking down references in Franco Venturi's Roots of Revolution).2 I knew nothing whatsoever about women's history, Russian or otherwise. Nor was I familiar with the emerging body of literature in what would come to be called "women's studies," apart from having read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in the summer of 1965.3 [End Page 565] Others in my generation of feminist academics were little different, although a goodly number—the "big girls" as I think of them now—were already established scholars (Joan Kelly Gadol, Gerda Lerner, and Renate Bridenthal, pioneers in the field of women's history, stand out in my memory). A new wave of feminist scholarship was just beginning to emerge—in history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, even theory. (I think of Juliet Mitchell's then pathbreaking Woman's Estate and subsequently, Psychoanalysis and Feminism.)4 There was a lot to absorb and digest. "Big girls" and smaller fry like me learned as we went along, many of us—although not Gerda, a force unto herself—learning together despite differences in age and status, a kind of leveling that seems almost miraculous to me in hindsight, but which I took for granted then, twinges of insecurity notwithstanding. In those days, women's studies were so new it was possible to read everything that shed light on the situation of women. I participated in several of the informal and interdisciplinary feminist study circles, almost all with a leftist and/or Marxist orientation, that flourished in New York City, where I had the great good fortune to live in the early 1970s. (When the first Marxist-Feminist group grew too large, a sister group formed: Marxist-Feminist 2. I myself was a member of Marxist-Feminist 4. By no means everyone who participated could be considered a Marxist, including me, but we all read Marx among other authors, and I'm pretty sure we viewed capitalism as well as patriarchy with a highly critical eye.) My own work, and likely that of others of my cohort, profited immensely from and still bears the impress of, the wide-ranging, challenging, and deeply engaged conversations of those years. Even if I remained largely unaware of it at the time, however, Cold War politics were almost as influential as second-wave, leftist feminism on my own work and that of others in the field of Russian women's history. The influence can be discerned on a number of levels. Most obviously, hostilities between the United States and the USSR severely limited the sources that we were able to consult, thanks to the difficult conditions faced by foreign...