Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find authentic religious, marital, professional, and political experiences. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the generations-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender. Like a Slavic Downton Abbey, this book tells the stories, not just of their outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams, their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their roles as feminists and avant-gardists in shaping modern Russia and, indeed, the twentieth century in the West. In their own words and images, and each in their own unique way, these remarkable Russian women construct a fascinating tapestry of a culture at the crossroads of modernity and on the brink of catastrophe.

The stories of Russian educated women, peasants, prisoners, workers, wives, and mothers of the 1920s and 1930s show how work, marriage, family, religion, and even patriotism helped sustain them during harsh times. The Russian Revolution launched an eco-nomic and social upheaval that released peasant women from the control of traditional extended families. It promised urban women equality and created opportunities for employment and higher education. Yet, the revolution did little to eliminate Russian patriarchal culture, which continued to undermine women's social, sexual, eco-nomic, and political conditions. Divorce and abortion became more widespread, but birth control remained limited, and sexual liberation meant greater freedom for men than for women. The transformations that women needed to gain true equality were postponed by the pov-erty of the new state and the political agendas of leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

In this book, a historian of women's lives turns the lens on her own experience. Her story is ?Midwestern? for its work ethic, modesty, faith, and resilience; ?postmodern? for its sudden changes, strange juxtapositions, and retrospective ?deconstruction of the ideologies that shaped its progress. It describes a life in and out of academia and a search for acceptance, recognition, equality, and freedom. The author of three books on women's experiences in Russia and Europe, Dr. Marcelline Hutton traces her personal journey from traditional working-class La Porte, Indiana, through college, graduate school, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and independence in Iowa City, Southampton, Kansas City, El Paso, and ultimately Lithuania. She arrives at a place of ?blessed assurance, ? recognizing who she was, what she has done, and what she most valued. The book is a testimony of life found and treasured and shared. We are privileged to see her world through this honest, perceptive, and insightful recollection.

Mathilde Blind’s contributions to the New Woman and Decadent movements in the 1880s and 1890s placed her at the centre of fin-de-siècle literary culture. She rose to prominence in the early 1870s, both as an expert on and proponent of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as one of the few women writers published in the Dark Blue (1871–73), an influential journal that featured the work of Britain’s leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. By the late 1880s, she had established close associations with key figures of England’s emergent Decadent communities, from Vernon Lee and Rosamund Marriott Watson to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. When her Dramas in Miniature appeared in 1891, she was fusing aestheticism and Decadence so distinctively in her poetry that Symons evoked Charles Baudelaire in calling the dramatic monologues in the volume ‘flowers of evil’. Her career thus highlights the connections between mid-Victorian aestheticism and late-century Decadence. It also serves as an important corrective to the male-focused narratives that long dominated accounts of these movements. In addition, and because Blind was born in Germany of Jewish parents and part of a community of exiled European radicals, her poetry and prose alike are characterized by a transnational, cosmopolitan outlook that ranges across national borders and consistently engages with Continental writers and ideas. This new edition for the first time brings together the three major volumes of poetry Blind published between 1889 and 1895 alongside a critical introduction and explanatory notes. Because she was also an active reviewer and essayist throughout her career, it includes a selection of her reviews as well as her essay ‘Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s’, which serves as an important supplement to her 1889 volume The Ascent of Man. The edition also features a selection of critical responses to Blind’s writing by leading late-Victorian poets and critics.

Covers the history and politics of Russian women from the early years of the Soviet regime, through "glasnost" and into the post-Soviet era. It examines economic and professional inequalities, the role of women in the work-place and the political arena and the history of feminism in Russian.