Book description
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 product of a lifetime of engagement by one of the
preeminent authorities on the history of Russian women, the book
reflects the author's deep expertise in primary sources as well as her
familiarity with the secondary literature." -Choi Chatterjee,
California State University Los Angeles
Barbara Evans Clements is Professor of History Emerita, University
of Akron. She is author of Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra
Kollontai (IUP, 1979), Bolshevik Women, and Daughters of Revolution: A
History of Women in the USSR and editor (with Barbara Alpern Engel and
Christine D. Worobec) of Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation.
