Bolshevik Women is a history of the women who joined the Soviet Communist Party before 1921. The book examines the reasons these women became revolutionaries, the work they did in the underground before 1917, their participation in the revolution and civil war, and their service in the building of the USSR. Drawing on a database of more than five hundred individuals as well as on intensive research into the lives of the most prominent female Bolsheviks, the study argues that women were important members of the Communist Party at its lower levels during its formative years. They were lieutenants, printing leaflets, speaking to crowds, and running party operations in the cities. They also created one of the most remarkable efforts to emancipate women from traditional society of the twentieth century. This book traces their fascinating lives from the earliest years of the revolutionary movement through to their old age in the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

"Bolshevik Women is a history of the women who joined the Soviet Communist Party before 1921. The book examines the reasons these women became revolutionaries, the work they did in the underground before 1917, their participation in the revolution and civil war, and their service in the building of the USSR. Drawing on a database of more than five hundred individuals as well as on intensive research into the lives of the most prominent female Bolsheviks, the study argues that women were important members of the Communist Party at its lower levels during its formative years. They were lieutenants, printing leaflets, speaking to crowds, and running party operations in the cities. They also created one of the most remarkable efforts to emancipate women from traditional society of the twentieth century. This book traces their fascinating lives from the earliest years of the revolutionary movement through to their old age in the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev."--Back cover.

Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and the invented state rituals surrounding Women's Day to demonstrate the ways these celebrations helped construct gender notions in the Soviet Union.

Richard Stites views the struggle for liberation of Russian women in the context of both nineteenth-century European feminism and twentieth-century communism. The central personalities, their vigorous exchange of ideas, the social and political events that marked the emerging ideal of emancipation--all come to life in this absorbing and dramatic account. The author's history begins with the feminist, nihilist, and populist impulses of the 1860s and 1870s, and leads to the social mobilization campaigns of the early Soviet period.

Focusing on how women, peasants and orphans responded to Bolshevk attempts to remake the family, this text reveals how, by 1936, legislation designed to liberate women had given way to increasingly conservative solutions strengthening traditional family values.

The dominant view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is of a movement led by prominent men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the demonstrations of female workers for ‘bread and herrings’, which sparked the February Revolution, in most historical accounts of this momentous period, women are too often relegated to the footnotes. Judy Cox argues that women were essential to the success of the revolution and to the development of the Bolshevik Party. With biographical sketches of famous female revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and less well-known figures like Elena Stasova and Larissa Reisner, The Women’s Revolution tells the inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organize, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.

For generations in the West, Cold War animosity blocked dispassionate accounts of the Russian Revolution. This history authoritatively restores the upheaval's primary social actors-workers, soldiers, and peasants-to their rightful place at the center of the revolutionary process.