Название: Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s & 1930s
Автор: Marcelline Hutton
Издательство: Zea Books
Год: 2015
Формат: pdf
Страниц: 436
Размер: 12 MB
Язык: English
The stories of Russian educated women, peasants, prisoners, workers, wives, and mothers of the 1920s and 1930s show how work, marriage, family, religion, and even patriotism helped sustain them during harsh times.
The Russian Revolution launched an economic and social upheaval that released peasant women from the control of traditional extended families. It promised urban women equality and created opportunities for employment and higher education. Yet, the revolution did little to eliminate Russian patriarchal culture, which continued to undermine women’s social, sexual, economic, and political conditions. Divorce and abortion became more widespread, but birth control remained limited, and sexual liberation meant greater freedom for men than for women. The transformations that women needed to gain true equality were postponed by the poverty of the new state and the political agendas of leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
The defunct economy and widespread famine, disease, and misery of the 1920s and the policies of collectivization and terror of the 1930s make those decades dark periods in Russian history, as Bolshevik male-dominated work culture triumphed and women’s needs and voices were ultimately silenced. When Russian society chooses to revisit those times, it will find in the remarkable poetry and prose of these resilient women plentiful evidence of the everyday horrors, struggles, and disappointments the people endured.