The stories of Russian educated women, peasants, prisoners, workers, wives, and mothers of the 1920s and 1930s show how work, marriage, family, religion, and even patriotism helped sustain them during harsh times. The Russian Revolution launched an eco-nomic and social upheaval that released peasant women from the control of traditional extended families. It promised urban women equality and created opportunities for employment and higher education. Yet, the revolution did little to eliminate Russian patriarchal culture, which continued to undermine women's social, sexual, eco-nomic, and political conditions. Divorce and abortion became more widespread, but birth control remained limited, and sexual liberation meant greater freedom for men than for women. The transformations that women needed to gain true equality were postponed by the pov-erty of the new state and the political agendas of leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

This ambitious study provides a sweeping overview of the position of women in England, France, Germany, and Russia/USSR from 1860-1939. The book illustrates their struggles to realize their dreams and their resourcefulness in coping with often dreary, hard, even horrifying lives. Deftly combining statistical data to underscore collective experiences and belles lettres to highlight the texture of individual women's lives, the book assesses the significance of gender, class, nationality, and religion. This richly researched work traces common patterns and unique experiences in women's lives by showing how they defined themselves, coped with daily life, and confronted disaster with courage and resourcefulness.

In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.

This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.

A Window on Russia is a collection of Edmund Wilson's papers on Russian writers and the Russian language (which he taught himself to read), written between 1943 and 1971. Writers discussed include Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, among others. "In A Window on Russia, which Wilson modestly calls 'a handful of disconnected pieces, written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors,' we encounter that rare pleasure of entering a living world where the dead hand of academia never casts its shadow." - Kirkus Reviews

The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled. Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories to computerized data bases.

A world list of books in the English language.

Vols. 1-4 include material to June 1, 1929.