Julia Ioffe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, if I think about feminism in Russian or Soviet history, it’s striking to me how many of the top constructivist painters are women. You have Natalia Goncharova, you have Alexandra Exter, Popova, others. That must predate the Bolsheviks. What’s going on there? What’s behind that? The Russian intelligentsia of the Russian Empire was a bit different from the Victorian intelligentsia or the Belle Époque intelligentsia of the West. On one hand, the law in the Russian Empire was quite stringent. Women weren’t allowed to do much of anything without their husbands’ permission. If you were a peasant woman, your lot in life was just to work and be a draft horse, essentially, and to give birth as many times as possible, and sometimes maybe satisfy your father-in-law. If you were part of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie or the artistically inclined aristocracy, you often traveled to the West, were exposed to Western culture, but also you were very much engaged in wrestling with a question that they called the woman question, and how to emancipate women. There were various directions of thought in the late 19th, early 20th century, and some of them were quite radical. One of the main masterminds of the plot to kill Tsar Alexander II, for instance, was a woman, Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a well-known Russian general. A lot of the revolutionaries were women. There were, in fact, so many political radicals that were women that the Tsars had to build a second women’s prison just to hold all the female radicals. When the Bolsheviks took power, and before that, when the Tsar abdicated in February of 1917, women were ready to go. The women artists you mentioned fit into this tradition because there was so much intellectual ferment around the time, and women were at the forefront of that, and they were the subjects of the theorizing around that. What is the proper role of a woman? Can a woman work the way a man does? Can a woman parent the way a man does? Can a woman opt out of being a parent altogether? Even before the revolution, as you know, there were many more women doctors in Russia than in Western Europe. Your own sister is a fourth-generation female doctor. Women could own and inherit property, which was unusual for the time. Where does that come from? What’s the longer tradition? Because one thinks of the East as being worse with respect to women’s rights, but in some ways it’s not. What’s the correct mental model?…

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