Opinion: A Century Apart, Two Official Visions of Uzbek Womanhood

A century ago, in 1926, the Russian-language Uzbek newspaper Pravda Vostoka published an appeal to the “working women of the Soviet East” written by Clara Zetkin – a Marxist and a women’s rights advocate from Germany. In its appeal for women’s unveiling, it asked where the mullahs had been while women suffered through the “dark past” and promised that Soviet law now shone “bright rays” over a liberated and free Soviet present. It closed not with a tribute to women, but with a slogan: “Forward to socialism! Always ready to fight for world revolution!” There was a significant problem with this text. Literacy among Uzbek women was extremely low, particularly in rural areas, and those who could read generally read Uzbek rather than Russian. Historian Marianne Kamp documents this gap in her book The New Woman in Uzbekistan. The article calling women to political consciousness was, therefore, not directly accessible to the overwhelming majority of its stated audience. That gap is not just a flaw in the propaganda or evidence of its exaggerated reach. Rather, it explains how the propaganda worked. A Russian newspaper speaking to Uzbek women who largely could not read it depended on party cadres, activists, public readings, meetings, and other literate intermediaries who could disseminate the message in Uzbek. It did not address an existing constituency so much as construct one – handing local organisers a model of the politically awakened Soviet woman they were expected to promote in villages where practically no woman could have read the article herself. [caption id="attachment_54189" align="aligncenter" width="1774"] Uzbek women in the old city of Tashkent before going out into the street on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1924. Photo: Public domain.[/caption] The “working women of the Soviet East” were therefore both an audience and an emerging political category. That category served a larger claim the Soviet state was making about Central Asia: that the region was “backward” and required revolutionary socialist transformation. In Soviet rhetoric, as in some earlier Russian imperial writing, the condition of women became one of the principal measures by which a society’s level of development was judged. A society’s position on the imagined path from feudalism to modernity could be read from whether its women were veiled or unveiled, secluded or employed, illiterate or educated. Transforming women’s appearance and public role offered the state an especially visible means of demonstrating that Central Asia was leaving its supposedly backward past behind. This does not mean that Soviet female emancipation was merely an empty disguise for imperial domination. Many contemporary works by historians such as Adrienne Edgar, Marianne Kamp, and Shoshana Keller showcase the genuine changes produced by Soviet literacy campaigns, education, employment, family law, and women’s political participation. Soviet gender policy did not simply reproduce the restrained paternalism of the tsarist administration. It attempted, and in many ways succeeded, at a much more radical transformation in the realm of gender politics. What it does complicate is who was doing the defining. It is tempting to read...