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American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream
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About American Girls In Red Russia: Chasing The Soviet
Product Description If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments. Review A Library Journal Editors' Pick ― Library Journal "Julia Mickenberg's extensive research in US and Russian archives fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the roles played by US women in the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union. This book is also an invaluable contribution to transnational American studies, because it treats US-Soviet political and cultural relations between 1905 and 1945. Long considered the purview of international relations and political scientists, the transnational connection of Americans and Russians in this period is actually a fascinating story of mutual influences." ― Critical Inquiry "In this well-researched and wonderfully written volume, readers will find a story that has long been overlooked." ― Diplomatic History “Here, in taut, fascinating prose filled with quotes from writings of all sorts from the era, Mickenberg limns the many intrepid women who finagled their way into Russia, starting in the late nineteenth century, to help with everything that needed to be done, and that was a lot. . . . Though success stories are here, so is much disillusionment, as the reality failed to meet the promise.” ― Booklist "Mickenberg paints a vivid picture of the postrevolutionary Soviet Union as a society working to live up to lofty, and ultimately unrealized, ideals. . . . Mickenberg tells a relatively unknown story of the time in between, of the new woman’s disappointments with America and her enthusiasm for Russia, and she does so with rich archival research and in beautiful prose. Graduate students and scholars of early-twentieth-century American feminism and the cultural history of Soviet/U.S. relations will be most interested in this book." ― American Historical Review “Mickenberg tells more than the story of specific women who traveled to Russia looking for a new way to live
