Engendering a Feminist Identity: Women's Movement to Feminism

Liudmyla Smoliar. Mynule zarady maibut'n'oho: Zhinochyi rukh naddniprians'koi ukrainy II pol. XIX-poch. XXst. Storinky istorii (The past for the sake of the future: The women's movement in Trans-Dnipro Ukraine. Second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Pages of history). Odessa, Ukraine: Astroprint, 1998. 407 pp.; ill.; tables; no bibliography or index. ISBN 966-549-087-7 (pb).

Written in Ukrainian, this pathbreaking work merits women's historians' attention internationally. Containing abundant detail and a wealth of new materials on Ukrainian women in the Russian Empire, the study provides a richly textured account of Eastern Ukrainian women's organized activities between 1860 and 1917. It offers a fresh appreciation for the roles women played in their country's struggle for national and women's liberation, while offering insight into Ukrainian society. As the title of the book suggests, the author's primary aim is to return to Ukrainian women that which has been denied them for so long, namely, their own history. Her comprehensive narrative of the emergence and growth of a women's movement in Eastern Ukraine, supplemented by biographical sketches of prominent female activists and women writers, contributes to this goal. For much too long, explains Smoliar, historians of Ukraine have consigned women to the shadows of their nation's history. Few studies examine the emergence of early Ukrainian women's organizations; reasons for their formation; objectives; organized educational, philanthropic, and self-help activities; and overall contributions to society. Ultimately, she suggests, a thorough knowledge of their history will enable contemporary Ukrainian women both to apprehend more fully, and to reject, prevailing gendered notions, such as those that relegate women to allegedly natural female tasks. Moreover, this historical understanding will strengthen their resolve to challenge all constraints on women's public roles.

Smoliar's monograph covers part of the world where the "woman question," when it finally emerged, was predicated upon conditions that did not pertain to the West. For centuries, Ukrainians have existed as a stateless people, subject to Austro-Hungarian and Russian imperial political systems. Owing to such vagaries of history, they acquired no national frame of reference. Accordingly, when women appeared as active participants in the public sphere during the second half of the nineteenth century, their community marker became one of self-help, designed to function on local and regional levels. Unlike in Western countries, the women's movement in Ukraine did not concentrate on opposition to prevailing gender relations, nor did hostilities between the sexes develop.

Smoliar's introduction reveals the author's command of Western feminist discourse. She insists on the need to distinguish explicitly between women's and feminist issues in Ukrainian history. Any study of women's movements in Ukraine, Smoliar warns, must also take into account distinguishing features of the country's political reality, cultural legacy, popular mentality, and historical evolution. Her occasional failure in the course of the text to make clear distinctions between feminist activism and women's organized public activity illustrates the dilemma of trying to separate the two in Ukraine. A similar predicament results from attempts to adapt imported feminist theory to Ukrainian reality.

The various women's organizations that emerged in Eastern Ukraine during the nineteenth century never united in a single cause, yet their members did form a women's community, encompassing a female culture and emotional bonds among elite women. Because the early organized movements excluded peasants from their ranks, more than 90 percent of Ukraine's female population did not participate in this community formation, or in the early struggle for women's rights. For them, not only feminist ideology, but also organized women's movements, remained distant concepts.

By the nineteenth century, Eastern Ukrainians were solidly integrated into the imperial Russian structure and could scarcely avoid being drawn into its mounting revolutionary ferment. Socialist ideology, in conjunction with the Russian revolutionary...