Book Launch -- <i>Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition</i>

At a recent Kennan Institute seminar, Kathleen Kuehnast of The George Washington University and Carol Nechemias of The Pennsylvania State University discussed their edited volume Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. The volume was developed during a series of three Kennan Institute research workshops held during 2001-2002. Kuehnast and Nechemias noted that the workshop participants who contributed to the volume constituted a very diverse group representing many different countries and academic disciplines. They found that searching for common themes among these diverse voices was one of the most interesting aspects of the workshop series.

Nechemias argued that Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition is a unique contribution to the field of post-Soviet studies. The contributors based their chapters on extensive fieldwork and in-depth, qualitative studies, and the chapters cover the entire geographic area of the former Soviet Union, including rural areas that are often ignored. Kuehnast added that the use of qualitative methodology allowed the researchers to develop deep understandings of the relationship between people's perceptions, experiences, and behavior. This is particularly important in the former Soviet Union where opportunities for such research became available only recently.

Despite the Soviet Union's diversity, its collapse left women facing similar challenges in all its successor states, according to Kuehnast. Women became a site of political and economic contention in the newly nationalizing states. The new states experienced a backlash against Soviet-style gender "equality," and there was widespread re-traditionalization of gender roles. Nechemias explained that the book examines four different aspects of the Soviet collapse on women: the first section of the book discusses the role of gender in nation-building processes, the second section considers the role women play in the economic survival strategies of rural households, the third focuses on democratization and women's civic activism, and the fourth covers international assistance programs and their impact on women and women's organizations.

According to Kuehnast, several conclusions can be drawn from the research presented in Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition. She argued that women lack voice in the process of nation-building and have very little opportunity to influence the agendas of international donor agencies. Nechemias noted that the book demonstrates that women's political and economic roles have shifted during the post-Soviet transition. Women were largely pushed out of government following the Soviet collapse and experienced higher rates of unemployment than men. They responded by becoming active in the informal labor market, often as traders, and in civil society. Kuehnast concluded with the idea that societal responses to transition often involve a repositioning of the social, political, and economic status of women. This repositioning is influenced by actors at the local, national, and international levels.