Irina Iukina, Russian Feminism As a Challenge of Modernity/Russkii Feminizm Kak Vyzov Sovremennosti (Book Review‪)‬

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.