Kis, O. (Ed.). (2017). Ukrainski zhinky v hornyli modernizatsii [Ukrainian women in the crucible of modernization]. KSD Publishing.
Annotation: The processes of modernization swept rapidly into the measured, centuries-old rhythms of Ukrainian women’s lives at the turn of the twentieth century, reshaping their value systems, worldviews, and spheres of activity, transforming familiar social roles and introducing new ones. Two world wars, revolutions, the Holodomor, Soviet rule, and occupation — what did it even mean to “be a woman” in those times?
This book is about Ukrainian women in all their diversity: peasants and townswomen, workers and intellectuals, the educated and the illiterate, communists and nationalists, Ukrainians and women of other nationalities, young and old. Their lives took very different paths. Yet they were not merely passive observers of historical processes or victims of dramatic circumstances — women were active participants in all these changes, genuine agents of history, engaging with them in distinctly female ways. This complex and rich female historical experience resembles a unique alloy, forged and tempered in the crucibles of modernization. Understanding the “formula” of this alloy can make contemporary Ukrainian women stronger and more resilient in the face of today’s challenges.
The volume’s contributors — professional historians and members of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History — illuminate the gendered dimensions of women’s lives and activities against the backdrop of the rapid modernization and far-reaching historical upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century — forces that shaped, and were inhabited by the Ukrainian women who became who they are today.