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  • Russkii feminizm kak vyzov sovremennosti [Russian Feminism as a Challenge of Modernity]
  • Barbara Alpern Engel
Irina Iukina , Russkii feminizm kak vyzov sovremennosti [Russian Feminism as a Challenge of Modernity]. 544 pp., illus. St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5903354214.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the easing of archival access and end of state-dominated academic discourse that followed, have stimulated renewed interest in the history of the Russian women's movement both outside of and, most notably, within Russia itself. In the final decades of the Soviet era a few intrepid Russian scholars endeavored to explore aspects of the "woman question" or the "women's movement" outside the paradigms of "bourgeois feminism" or revolutionary activism to which Soviet historiography consigned them.1 Only since 1991, however, have the ideological strictures been fully overcome. The new openness is reflected in recent publications both in Russia and abroad.2 In this book, Irina Iukina, among the first Russian historians to study the prerevolutionary women's movement, builds upon the work of other scholars—social scientists and philosophers as well as historians—much of it having appeared since 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence as well as published material generated by movement activists and institutions, she offers a thorough reconsideration of the nature and achievements of the women's movement in Russia from the era of the Great Reforms to the closing of the Women's Department (Zhenotdel) in 1930.

Aiming to reclaim a neglected past, Iukina writes for an imagined reader who is likely to be unfamiliar with the story. In consequence, those who have read the work of Richard Stites, Linda Edmondson, or, for that matter, Barbara Alpern Engel will find little that is new in the chronology or some of the details she [End Page 974] presents.3 Although Iukina formally begins the book in the reform era, as have other authors, with the emergence of the woman question and the first women's organizations, she glances back to an earlier period, and to the precedents set by the writings of George Sand and the first generation of the intelligentsia. She divides the women's movement itself into two stages: a first stage, from 1858 to 1905, and a second, feminist stage, from 1905 to 1918. The first phase begins with women's philanthropic initiatives and encompasses nihilism, the battle for women's higher education, and the development of female radicalism in the 1860s and 1870s. It closes with the decline of the women's movement during the reaction of the 1880s and its re-emergence in the mid-1890s with the formation of the Women's Mutual Philanthropic Society. The second stage begins with the politicization of the movement in 1905. Iukina traces the fortunes of the movement through the post-1905 doldrums, the renewed civic activism of the war years, and the triumph of 1917. Under the Provisional Government, women finally gained the vote and equal rights under the law, only to have victory snatched from them in October, after which the Bolsheviks implemented their own version of women's emancipation and crushed the earlier women's movement.

Yet even those familiar with the overall narrative will find much that is new in the approach, interpretation, and detail of Iukina's book. A social scientist by training as well as a historian, Iukina approaches her topic with a methodological rigor that pays large dividends even as it sometimes taxed this reader (of which more below). The book is distinguished from its predecessors by its attention to institutional, structural, and cultural factors that provide measures of success in addition to more conventional signs of achievement such as, for example, winning the vote or obtaining government approval for women's education. It is also noteworthy for its exacting definition of "women's movement" and its close attention to the ideas the movement generated. A woman's movement, Iukina insists, must be a movement of women for women (emphasis mine); feminism is the ideology or philosophy that its members develop. Consequently, although the book notes the contribution of men in various capacities—those of writers such as Nikolai Pirogov and Nikolai Chernyshevskii...

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