Post-Soviet Women

This volume discusses policies affecting women and processes transforming gender roles in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. It synthesizes results from multiple empirical studies that attend to increasingly conservative features of political governance in the region, particularly the authoritarian regime in Russia. The authors then consider diverse enactments of ideologies, policies and practices of gender equality and women's rights in crucial areas, such as legislative institutions, media, and social activism. The volume contributes to understanding post-Soviet Eurasian dynamics relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, which emphasizes gender equality as part of fundamental human rights. Part 1 of the anthology, The Position of Women in Post-Soviet Societies, concentrates on women's roles in societal processes and analyses how women's political agendas, women's rights and attitudes to gender equality have developed since the Soviet time. In Part 2, Negotiating Women's Roles, authors engage with competing attempts to reform women's roles in society within different fields of representation, from legislative institutions, quotas ensuring equal gender representation, to media and public culture, and nationalist organizations' imaginaries. Part 3, Women's Agency, New Movements and Activisms explores how activists perceive, resist and respond to transformations in politics, ideology, and practices affecting women's lives. The book shows that political and economic reforms and nationalist ideologies produce different values, ideas and policies regulating women's roles and positions in societies despite the background of "shared" Soviet history. The chapters explore how different post-Soviet countries have reinterpreted the gender values and patterns that emerged under Soviet policies and reclaimed, built upon, or diverged from them.