Presentations by Streams

The panel will discuss Soviet and Communist experiences of women during the pre-World War I and interwar period.
Vellia Luparello’s and Emiliano Giorgis’ paper will focus on the International Women’s Day by analysing its emergence in American and German socialist parties and the influence of the Russian women’s strike of February 1917 that helped give rise to the Russian Revolution, and eventually set the official date to March 8. Using Progressive Woman, the official organ of the Woman's Committee of the Socialist Party of America; letters and documents written by Antoinnette Konikow and Theresa Malkiel; as well as documents and resolutions of the Women Socialist International, the paper analyses how women socialist leaders in the US and Germany created "Woman's Day" to promote the enactment of women's suffrage.
Daria Dyakonova’s paper will analyse the early years (1920-1924) of the international Communist Women’s Movement and discuss its transnational character and its complex relationship with the Comintern’s leadership. Anchored in the movement’s archives and international magazine Die Kommunistische Fraueninternazionale, the paper will argue that despite the overall egalitarian discourse, the relations between men and women within the communist movement were tense and often characterized by prejudice against women. It will further discuss how such prejudices affected Communist Women’s campaigns designed to tackle the grievances of the “Women of the East.” It will then demonstrate how Communist women actively and effectively fought against such sexist attitudes.
Anne McShane’s paper will address the activities of the Zhenotdel (Woman’s Bureau) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1920s Soviet Central Asia. The research is based on a close reading of the Zhenotdel’s journal Kommunistka between 1920 and 1930, and is focused on the Zhenotdel’s work among veiled Muslim women in Uzbekistan.The paper will re-evaluate the work of Russian women activists in the region, including the Hujum campaign, and point to problematic narratives within academic literature, in particular the view of the Central Asian Zhenotdel as a loyal servant of the party leadership, nationally and locally.This paper will show that the involvement of the Zhenotdel in Central Asia has to be understood on the terms of the Zhenotdel’s struggle to make progress for its own programme while at the same time seeking to establish itself as a core part of the Soviet strategy in Central Asia.