Until the late 1960s, most Western scholars studying the history, culture, social and political life and economy of Russia and the Soviet Union, paid scant attention to the participation and experience of women. The multifarious ways in which gender roles and perceptions of gender were influenced by and in turn influenced the heterogeneous cultures of the Soviet empire were largely ignored. However, this neglect has slowly been rectified and now the study of women and gender relations has become one of the most productive fields of research into Russian and Soviet society. This volume demonstrates the originality and diversity of this recent research. Written by leading Western scholars, it spans the last decade of tsarist Russia, the 1917 revolutions and the Soviet period. The essays reflect the interdisciplinary nature of women's work, women and politics, women as soldiers, female prostitution, popular images of women and women's experience of perestroika.
Introduction; 1. 'Better halves'? Representations of women in Russian urban popular entertainments, 1870-1910 Catriona Kelly; 2. The Silver Age: highpoint for women? Charlotte Rosenthal; 3. Women pharmacists in Russia before World War I: women's emancipation, feminism, professionalization, nationalism and class conflict Mary Schaeffer Conroy; 4. Women's rights, civil rights and the debate over citizenship in the 1905 Revolution Linda Edmondson; 5. Laying the foundations of democracy in Russia: E. D. Kuskova's contribution, February-October 1917 Barbara T. Norton; 6. Mariia L. Bochkareva and the Russian amazons of 1917 Richard Abraham; 7. Russian women writers: an overview. Post-revolutionary dispersion and adjustment Marina Ledkovsky (Astman); 8 .Victim or villain? Prostitution in post-revolutionary Russia Elizabeth Waters; 9. Young women and perestroika Sue Bridger; 10. Glasnost and the woman question Mary Buckley.
