Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives

2. New Directions in Russian and Soviet Women’s History

38 > 39 those days, women’s studies was so new it was possible to read everything, not only history but anthropology, sociology, psychology, theory—anything that shed light on the situation of women, as Kathy Peiss also notes in her chapter in this volume. I participated in several of the informal and interdisciplinary feminist study circles, many with a Marxist orientation, which flourished in New York City, where I had the great good fortune to live at that time. Like other students of Russia’s women, I benefited from the informal but invaluable mentorship of Richard Stites, who had defended a dissertation on the women’s liberation movement in Russia in 1968. I also took part in regular, intense, and fruitful conversations with a handful of other colleagues in Russian and Soviet history, most importantly Rochelle Ruthchild, another historian of Russian women, and soaked up information and methods at the Berkshire conferences of women’s history, the first of which took place in 1973. In those days, the Berks were relatively small, and as much like a pajama party as a scholarly conference. Scholarly papers were presented during the day; at night, we chatted in our rooms (only dormitory rooms in those years), sat on the lawns and sang folk songs, and attended women’s dances. My own work, and likely that of others of my generation, profited immensely from, and still bears the impress of, the wide-ranging, deeply engaged conversations of those years. Even if we remained largely unaware of it at the time, however, Cold War politics were as influential as second-wave feminism in the field of Russian and Soviet women’s history. The influence can be discerned on a number of levels. Most obviously, hostilities between the United States and the U.S.S.R. severely limited the sources that we were able to consult. The Soviet Union was off-limits to U.S. scholars in the Stalinist era, and began to allow academic exchanges with the United States only in 1958. Those who participated braved notoriously difficult research and living conditions. Access to Soviet archives was restricted not only by political considerations (what you were permitted to see, what was off-limits), but also by the lack of access to lists of archival holdings. To know what documents to request, one scoured the footnotes of Soviet scholars or depended upon the choices of one’s assigned research assistant. To be sure, scholars could and did make use of the rich holdings of libraries in Moscow and Leningrad, renamed St. Petersburg after 1991. But many preferred Helsinki, Finland. Once part of the Russian empire, Helsinki offered easy access to a treasure trove of prerevolutionary publications , and copying that was relatively straightforward, by contrast with the onerous process in the Soviet Union, where certain materials—statistics, even prerevolutionary statistics, for example—could not be copied at all, or at least not by me as late as 1985. The consequences were evident in our 40 > 41 was charged with overseeing the emancipation of Soviet women. Kollontai was also a theorist who wrote articles, pamphlets, and books treating the situation of women in the past, present, and future. Pioneering in her effort to meld Marxism and feminism, Kollontai was also attentive to sexuality and sexual relations, and to women’s inner lives as well as their material conditions . Indeed, as a result of her unorthodox sexual ideas and behavior, as well as her affiliation with groups that opposed Lenin’s line, she fell into political disfavor after 1922. In the early 1970s, many of her works were translated from the Russian into a variety of languages and made available for the first time, almost simultaneously with the revival of Soviet interest in her ideas after an eclipse of close to half a century.4 Biographies of her soon followed.5 Our political orientation also meant that historians of Russia turned to social history rather later than most, and historians of the Soviet Union, much later still.6 Nevertheless, as the Soviet Union became more open and archival restrictions eased, the trickle of scholarship that sidestepped the radical political orientation of earlier studies gradually became a stream. The resulting scholarship on imperial Russia focused primarily on elite women and on educated women who participated in public life not as revolutionaries , but as reformers, some—but by no means all, of a feminist orientation . Offering new detail about...