Conceptualizing Gender under State Socialism: Sociological Research on Women in the Late Soviet Union

• Applicant: Anna Ivanova, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 545049891

My project aims to study the production of knowledge on gender in the late Soviet Union. It looks at sociological research on women, produced in different parts of the USSR in the period from the late 1950s to the late 1980s to examine how the notions of women’s rights and gender inequality were explored under state socialism. It focuses on the social scientists from various Soviet republics, mainly women themselves, who explored conditions of female labor, evaluated the problem of "unpaid work", and identified women’s concerns through surveys. My research contributes to two fields of study. First, it challenges the prevailing understanding of Soviet science as strictly controlled by the central authorities and of Soviet scholars as merely serving the state's ideological goals at the expense of empirical rigor. By focusing on sociologists working on gender in various Soviet republics, such as Latvia, Moldavia, Armenia, and Uzbekistan, I aim to explore the agency of the local researchers in choosing their topics, conducting their surveys and writing their papers. I argue that the emancipatory official rhetoric on gender and rather generously funded system of Soviet science created a high number of women among researchers across the Soviet Union and led to sophisticated sociological research on gender inequality with challenging questions and rich data. Moreover, their research agenda differed depending on the region and ist specifics, such as the share of women in the labor force, women’s level of education, and traditions regarding family life. The very biographies of the female researchers, as well as the extent to which their research could have influenced local policies, varied by republic. The comparison of the sociological research produced in various parts of the USSR allows us to give more agency to Soviet female social scientists and to explore how their research might have influenced the popular opinion and policies towards women across the Soviet Union. Second, my research contributes to the scholarly conversation about transnational fight for women’s rights. The Soviet sociological research on women took place simultaneously with the rise of the second-wave feminist movement across the globe, which raised similar issues such as gender wage gap, unpaid home labor and maternity rights. In the USSR popular activism was not allowed and women’s organizations that were said to represent women functioned rather as state ministries. And yet, Soviet sociologists who examined women’s subjective experiences contributed to the discussion of gender inequality by making their research public through newspapers and by bringing it to the attention of Soviet authorities. The proposed study deepens our understanding of how women’s rights were discussed in a non-capitalist context with no support from the grassroots activism and how it was similar to and different from the global conversation about gender inequality during that time.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants