The topic I will be researching is how the Russian Revolution’s impact on gender roles specifically in reference to Leadership roles in work and politics.
Primary Sources
Bisha, Robin, Jehanne M Gheith, Christine Holden and William G Wagner. Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience and Expression, An Anthology of Sources. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2002.
The edited collection cited above by Bisha Et Al. is one which provides a holistic look at the gendered experiences in Russian society leading up to 1917. Thus, it serves as a standard by which the changes experienced can be understood. Parts of this text are more relevant than others as some parts of the book focus outside of this project’s scope. However overall it is relevant to consider as background to be understood.
Farmbrough, Florence. With the Armies of the Tsar: A Nurse at the Russian Front in War and Revolution, 1914-1918. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 2000.
Additionally, Farmbrough’s book provides a personal account of the ways in which the war changed gender roles in Russia as women were nurses helping the Russian military during the First World War. A key point of interest is that this account shows women being brought into military service after the February Revolution.
Kollantai, Alexandra. “New Woman” from The New Morality and the Working Class. Translated by Salvator Attansio and Chris Clayton. Accessed February 5, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1918/new-morality.htm
Alexandra Kollantai, in this chapter and in her other writings, provides an understanding from inside Lenin’s government of the attempted changes to make Russia more meritocratic and how successful these changes were. This is only one example of many archived pieces of Kollantai’s work. Her memoirs and other writing is important as it chronicles some of the failings of the early Soviet government specifically in relations to women and work.
Secondary Sources
Clements, Barbara Evans. “Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923.” Signs 8, no. 2 (1982): 215-35. Accessed February 2, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173897.
Moving onto the secondary sources, Clements provides an explanation of how peasant women in Russia were treated before and after the revolution. This text also provides a strong explanation of how women contributed to the revolution in a perspective not only of a class struggle but also a struggle against the limiting gender roles of Russian society.
Galili, Ziva. “Women and the Russian Revolution.” Dialectical Anthropology 15, no. 2/3 (1990): 119-27. Accessed February 4, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790341.
Galili provides a detailed account of the failings of the Soviet government to reform gender roles after the revolution. They discuss the prioritisation of industrial reform and casual reinforcement of gender stereotypes in this time. Therefore it provides a useful analysis of the years after the revolution.
This all looks good, David. Just a couple of books that will be valuable for getting into the subject: The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union; and Barbara Alpern Engel and Christine Worobec’s edited volume ‘Russian Women’; And Richard Stites ‘THe Women’s liberation movement in Russia’. I’d also recommend Barbara Engel’s edited primary source volume ‘Five Sisters against the Tsar’.