"Emancipation" of muslim women in Central Asia: strategies of resistance and ways of adaptation (1920s-1930s)

Abstract

The emancipation of Muslim women in Central Asia was one of the most ambitious and yet one of the most challenging tasks that the Bolsheviks in the region have attempted to address. Changes in this area started earlier. The Russian imperial administration in Turkestan and the Jadids discussed and sometimes tried to implement measures that would promote women's emancipation in the previous period of the region's history. The efforts of the Bolsheviks should be seen in the light of this experience. Nevertheless, the campaign for the emancipation of Muslim women, which was launched by the Bolsheviks, was unprecedented if we evaluate it from the point of view of the goals set, the ways of their implementation and the resources mobilized for this. This campaign met with powerful resistance not only in social groups that were initially seen as hostile to the new government, but an ambiguous and often negative reaction from those forces that were, or at least could be considered its supporters. Faced with the inability kept apart from a large-scale social experiment, some people sought to develop practices for adapting to current policies, while others looked for ways to resist it. However, there was no impassable border between resistance and adaptation. And the first and second were extremely diverse, changed in time and depended on many factors. Between the two poles — active resistance and active support — there were many intermediate forms that often eluded attention of researchers.