American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

by Julia L. Mickenberg
American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

by Julia L. Mickenberg

Hardcover

$38.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Wednesday, April 3
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.

Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.

American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226256122
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 04/25/2017
Pages: 432
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Julia L. Mickenberg is professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States and co-editor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction: “American Girls in Red Russia”
Part I          Tender Revolutionaries and Child Savers
1           Dreaming in Red: Reformers, Rebels, and a Revolutionary Babushka
2           Child Savers and Child Saviors
Part II         Living and Working in the New Russia: From Kuzbas to Moscow
3           “A New Pennsylvania”: Seeking Home in Siberia
4           “Eyes on Russia”: Gal Reporters on the Moscow News
Part III        Performing Revolution
5           Dancing Revolution
6           Black and White—and Yellow—in Red: Performing Race in Russia
Part IV        Trials, Tribulations, and Battles
7           Heroines and Heretics on the Russian Front
Epilogue: Red Spy Queens?
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews