Post Soviet Women or Debating Empire

Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia

Author: Mary Buckley

How have women's lives changed in the republics of the former Soviet Union since the fall of the USSR? This is the first book systematically to examine changes and continuities across these states, focusing on women and work, social roles and women in politics. Drawing on interviews with women in factories, on farms and with women streetsellers, politicians and activists, the book questions whether women are "victims" or "agents" of change, and describes various strategies of coping and adaptation to new economic and social instabilities.

Table of Contents:

	List of figures
	List of tables
	Notes on contributors
	Map
	Introduction
1	Victims and agents: gender in post-Soviet states	3
Pt. I	Women in the Russian Federation	17
2	Do Russian women want to work?	21
3	Rural women and the impact of economic change	38
4	Women and the culture of entrepreneurship	56
5	Images of an ideal woman: perceptions of Russian womanhood through the media, education and women's own eyes	77
6	'She was asking for it': rape and domestic violence against women	99
7	'For the sake of the children': gender and migration in the former Soviet Union	119
8	When the fighting is over: the soldiers' mothers and the Afghan madonnas	143
9	Adaptation of the Soviet Women's Committee: deputies' voices from 'Women of Russia'	157
10	Women's groups in Russia	186
Pt. II	Women Outside Russia in Newly Independent States	201
11	Women in changing societies: Latvia and Lithuania	203
12	Progress on hold: the conservative faces of women in Ukraine	219
13	Out of the kitchen into the crossfire: women in independent Armenia	235
14	The women's peace train in Georgia	250
15	Between tradition and modernity: the dilemma facing contemporary Central Asian women	261
	Index	305

Book review: Che or The Voice of Reason

Debating Empire

Author: Gopal Balakrishnan

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter-day Communist Manifesto. Its ability to develop a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neoliberalism and international capitalism captured the imagination of the growing anticapitalist movement and has been claimed as a turning point for the left. As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a series of some of the most acute international theorists and commentators of our times subject the book to trenchant and probing analysis from political, economic and philosophical perspectives.