Synthesizing several decades of scholarship by historians East and West, Barbara Evans Clements traces the major developments in the history of women in Russia and their impact on the history of the nation. Sketching lived experiences across the centuries, she demonstrates the key roles that women played in shaping Russia's political, economic, social, and cultural development for over a millennium. The story Clements tells is one of hardship and endurance, but also one of achievement by women who, for example, promoted the conversion to Christianity, governed estates, created great art, rebelled against the government, established charities, built the tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945, and flew the planes that strafed the retreating Wehrmacht. This daunting and complex history is presented in an engaging survey that integrates this scholarship into the field of Russian and post-Soviet history.
The Kievan Period, Tenth Century to 1240
The Appanage Period, 1240–1462
Women of the Conquered Territories
Extraordinary Women in Troubled Times
The Age of the Empresses, 1725–96
Change for Noblewomen in the Eighteenth Century
Romanov Domesticity, 1796–1855
Women of the Conquered Territories
The Beginnings of Russian Feminism
Political and Economic Change, 1861–1917
The Woman Question in the Reign of Alexander II
Peasant Women after Emancipation
Gender Ideas in the Late Nineteenth Century
The Hardship and Anger of World War I
Women in the Civil War, 1918–21
Women in the NEP Years, 1921–28
Reconstruction and Late Stalinism, 1945–53
Khrushchev and the Woman Question, 1955–64
Brezhnev and the Woman Question, 1964–82
Women in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia
Gender Discontents and Feminist Whispers
Women’s Work in the Post-Soviet World
Politics in the Successor States