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As a special discipline gender studies appeared in Russia at the beginning of
the 1990s. Now it is rather well developed and represented academic trend, though
it still occupies to some extent a marginal place in humanities. The history
of emerging women's and gender studies did not take place in isolation, but
was instead echoed around the former SU as women became activists for improvements
in women's status. The rise of women's studies as an academic field practiced
by teachers and scholars is only one form of that activism, which also leads
to the transforming education. Women's studies itself arouse out of feminists'
recognition that both the experience and the perspectives off women had been
excluded from traditional scholarship and pedagogy. Women's studies began to
emerge as an academic field with an unusual agenda: although concerned with
the discovery and recovery of information about women (and gender relations),
and with the analysis and theorization of women's position in culture and society,
the ultimate goal of women's studies was the transformation of all other academic
fields through the total integration of women's experience into existing disciplines.
But women's history is still in the merging position and we can mention only
several researchers in Russia who seriously work in this sphere. It is difficult
to edit a journal or organize a special section on women's/gender history at
the conference devoted to gender problems.
There are several reasons explaining this situation. Firstly, at present the
history as an academic discipline falls within a very difficult position in
Russia. Because of the strong domination of the Marxist methodology the history
turned to be in a backward position with a lot of gaps within itself including
those in the sphere of social and cultural history. At the same time, it would
be wrong to state that there were no works devoted to women in the Soviet historiography,
but the principal emphasis was made on the positive changes of the women's status
due to the achievements of the October Revolution. Accordingly, a woman was
viewed only as a Mother and Toiler. Praising woman's involvement in the public
and labour activity, authors of these books proceeded nevertheless from the
bio-determinist approach. Till the beginning of the 1990s the notion of "gender"
was unknown among Russian academicians and it is still not a widespread concept.
In the Soviet Union feminism was taken up as a bourgeois tendency, that is why
everything related to it was considered as unworthy of studying. As a result
there were no works on the history of the non-proletarian women's movement and
scholars refused to use the feminist methodology. The positivist approach, criticized
by the feminists as based on the peculiarities of the male way off thinking
and that is why secured its dominance, is still regarded by Russian historians
as a methodological canon. Narrow specialization, which is still existed in
the humanities, leads to the fact that interdisciplinary studies are rather
rare. Historians who engaged in the interdisciplinary studies are reproached
for the unscientific character of their researches. The postmodern approach,
which is fundamental for gender studies, is blamed with its anti-historical
method, and that also does not favour their acceptance by the scholars involved
in the humanities and history studies in particular. Women's problematic is
a question of minor importance. Historians and sociologists viewed women either
as wives and mothers, or as prostitutes under the studies of the social deviations.
Therefore a well-developed trend in the frames of the women's history is the
family history. Recently a lot of works were published on the history of prostitution.
Another trend, which is rather well developing, is the history of women's movements,
represented as a part of the history of social and political movements and using
its methodology. Such popular and well elaborated in the Western women's history
issues as the history of sexuality, cultural representations of gender are practically
not presented in the Russian women's history. Undevelopment of these issues
correlates to the circumstance that many scholars engaged in the women's history
do not manage the gender theory and methodology. This leads to the fact that
many researches, marked as "women's studies", proceed from the good
old bio-determinist approach.
In the present time many scholars prefer to rank themselves among specialists
in the sphere of gender, but not women's, history. Just so gender studies are
more popular than women's studies among other humanities. This is conditioned
not only by the fact that women's/gender studies began to develop in Russia
almost simultaneously, but also by the negative perception of the feminist discourse
in the Russian society and academic community. Gender studies not always mark
as feminist, and this secures their neutral perception. The same circumstances
result in the lack of the works of the misoandrogenist character among studies
in the sphere of women's history.
The conservative character of the history departments attached to the universities
determines the development of women's history mainly on the chairs of the humanities
in the technical institutions or in the recently founded educational institutions
(for instance, the Chair of the Sociology of Gender Relations at Nevsky Institute
of Language and Culture; the Department of Humanities at Kostroma Technical
University and so on).
The lag of women's history in comparison with gender studies can be explained
also by the lack of financial support. There is no financial support for the
researches in the sphere of women's history not only from the Ministry of Education
and universities, but also from the Western foundations. Therefore those scholars
who are interested in the history of women on the West almost deprive of the
opportunity to work in the archives and libraries of the countries under study
and this makes these works secondary and reduce their value. According to this,
there are few scholars involved in the Western women's history. It is also difficult
for the scholars engaged in the Russian women's history to work in that sphere
because of the procedure of searching for the materials in archives. Reference-guides
to the Russian archives until 1917 were published in the 1950 - 1960s, therefore
their indexes do not contain description of the funds, related to the women's
history. In Russian archive studies there is still no practice of publishing
subject guidebooks to archives. Such state of affairs embarrasses the work of
scholars involved in studying this problem. Although archive consultants sometimes
cannot give the exact answer to the question, the documents of which women's
organizations and leaders of the women's movement they have on their storage.
Everything mentioned above, makes it important to compile the subject catalogues
of those funds, which have documents concerning women's history in Russia, and
to publish collections of the respective documents and materials.
However, in spite of the hardships mentioned above, gender studies gradually
gain their place in the Russian science and their development, in our opinion,
has a good prospect. Properly speaking, gender problematic has been already
settled down in the medieval studies, especially in the sphere of mental history,
private life, micro-history, where the poststructuralist methodology is effectively
used.
It seems that good prospects of developing of gender studies in the frames of
the humanities are conditioned by the peculiarities of their evolution. Till
the recent times the fundamental methodological canon was the Marxist one. It
is known that there is rather close connection between some feminist trends
and Marxism. Radical feminism actively enough uses Marxist theory for the explaining
reasons and mechanisms of women's subordination. On the other hand, Marxist
trend in the history sometimes turns to the women's history, considering it
as a part of the social history or the history of the labour movement. Intellectual
crisis grasping at the end of the 1980s Russian humanities forces its representatives
to look for new problematic and new methodological approaches. In that sense
gender problematic rather well fit in the social studies, including history.
Now there are several main centers of women's/gender history in Russia: Tver
State University (the Center of Women's History and Gender Studies); Ivanovo
State University (Center for Gender Studies); the Center of Intellectual History
(Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Science) with its almanac
of gender history "Adam and Eve". Here are the academic schools and
trends on gender/women's history. There are effectively working scholars in
that sphere in Moscow (N. L. Pushkareva), St.-Petersburg (I. Yukina, M. Razhbaeva),
Omsk (N. Bykova). Gender history begins its development in Tomsk university.
However, there are a lot of historians (especially in the province) who consider
the women's history from the traditional viewpoints and approaches, sometimes
from the point of view of the bio-determinist approach, and at the same time
they do not mark themselves as scholars involved in the gender/women's history.
Small number of editions leads to the lack of the informational exchange between
specialists. Thus it is quite urgent and necessary to create a network of the
scholars. The network will permit to liquidate the isolation of the academicians,
to create the united informational space, to build up new contacts, integrate
into the international academic community, overcome the lag in the methodology.
So we hope, that the foundation of the Russian committee of the International
Association of the Researchers in Women's History will be the first step in
this direction.