Olga Labur

“The veil of Soviet feminism”: Women’s narratives about the first Soviet gender practices

Abstract: Modern Ukrainian women’s history researchers respond to frequent practicesof underrating women’s memories, biographies with uniqueness of each woman’s empirical reflection, experience of living and becoming one’s own person. For themselves, for broader audiences, and for the scholarly community, they shedlight on women’s narratives about World Wars One and Two, collectivization, etc. Narratives, biographies of women, who went through Soviet gender experiments of the 1920s are still a separate, "hidden", and poorly studied research subject.The methodological basis was the crossing of gender theory and the biographical discourse. They accurately separate and layer memoirs as "contemporary stories" and memoirs as "autobiographies" in women’s stories. As a result, weobtain a new restored vision and evaluation by women of their biographies, working out women’s counter-positions or associations. Such gender and biography construct has forced to the surface the emancipation context of women’s narratives that was hidden behind the informational "veil" of the authorities’ official reports.We understood that the women in their memoirs could not step outside of thelimits of the Soviet generalizing gender theory. For this reason, our objective wasto see the authors’ complicated combination of different gender meanings. Similar processes were identified in the combination of official political truisms with thegender social dialects. These women’s narratives uncovered the new collectiveway of thinking – what means being a Soviet woman who went through gender experiments of the 1920s and the next dramatic steps of Stalin’s era.

Keywords: women’s narrative, emancipation practice, Bolshevik gender experiments of the 1920s, individual/collective biography, paternalism of gender relations, sisterhood.

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• Olga Labur (National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" (Kyiv, Ukraine), [email protected]) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0194-0419

Cite:
Olga Labur (2020). “The veil of Soviet feminism”: Women’s narratives about the first Soviet gender practices. Biographistica Ukrainica, (20) 39-54. (In Ukrainan). https://doi.org/10.15407/ub.20.039

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