Russianists Consider Gender: A Look at the State of the Art

Russianists Consider Gender: A Look at the State of the Art Wendy Goldman. Women, The State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xi + 351 pp. ISBN 0-521-37404-9 (cl). Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, eds. Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993. χ + 357 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-804-72113-0 (cl); $37.50. Laura Engelstein. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia.. Ithaca: CorneU University Press, 1992. xiii + 461 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8014-2664-2 (cl). Barbara Evans Clements The study of gender is thriving among those who study Russia. This is a relatively recent development, for Russianists have tended to stay immersed in poUtical issues and come upon new subject matter and new methodologies a bit late. Their insularity has had a host of negative consequences, not least among them a paucity of scholarship on women. Scholars are now redressing this deficiency, however, and they have discovered a very rich body of sources to support their work. Using literary, ethnographic, legal, medical, and folk materials, they are bringing gender to a central position in the story of Russia. Three recently published works are excellent examples of this scholarship. Of the three, Wendy Goldman's Women, The State, and Revolution is the most traditional in conceptualization. Goldman seeks to understand the Communist Party's treatment of women and the family in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1936 by analyzing the leaders' expressed principles and the realities that they confronted. She begins by examining the Marxist analysis of the position of women in society. She then looks at the pohcies that the Communists formulated shortly after seizing power in 1917, particularly marriage law, and at the ways in which the party's radical goals collided with Russian realities, particularly with the dislocations caused by war and revolution. From the civil war years through the 1920s millions of abandoned children scratched out an existence by begging and stealing; millions of women coped with unemployment; and divorce and abortion rates soared. In such an environment, the early dreams of absolute individual freedom in private Ufe increasingly seemed an unaffordable luxury. The government responded with revised laws that took into account Russian traditions and the continuing vulnerability of women and children. In the 1920s, these laws remained true to the spirit © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 Book Review: Barbara Evans Clements 133 of Marxist liberation. In the 1930s, the Stalinist regime turned its back on that spirit. It outlawed divorce and abortion and subordinated women's interests to the economic and pohtical priorities of a repressive state. Women, The State, and Revolution is a very good book about a very important subject. The Soviet Communists were the first ruling party to attempt to emancipate women. Goldman gives them credit for decent intentions (a somewhat unorthodox stance now) and argues that they modified their earliest policies primarily in response to the desperate dislocations of the society that they were trying to transform. In order to sustain this argument, she must document developments in Soviet Russia, a task she fulfills admirably. The book abounds with discussions of women's unemployment, divorce, child abandonment, abortion , and changing patterns of family life. The result is a convincing argument that Russia was a very difficult place in which to make a socialist revolution. Goldman's analysis of the party debates over how to deal with Soviet problems is less satisfying. She gives most of her attention to the liberal Marxists, whom she admires, and downplays more conservative voices within the Communist Party during the 1920s. She demonstrates that certain jurists remained true to Marxist principles of individual freedom and female autonomy when redrafting the original marriage laws. She does not assess the rising importance throughout the decade of people more influenced by traditional values, nor does she consider that such people might have been closer to the attitudes of the party majority than the liberals. This somewhat one-sided approach to party policy-making then leads' her to write off...