If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman
in the 1920s or '30s 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 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 many more were
curious about 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, sometimes
by the mundane realities, others by ugly truths too horrifying to
even contemplate. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew
American women to Russia, which appeared to be the very embodiment
of modern ideas and ways of living. American women saw in Russia
the hope for a new era in which women would be not merely
independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society.
Russian 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. Yet as
Mickenberg's sympathetic biography shows, Russia turned out to be
as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with many of
the same economic and sexual inequities that the immigrants had
hoped to escape.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.
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