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inter-War period were under Polish control, for a trenchant case study of the actual functioning of na tionalism.23 The area is interesting because it produced a mass women’s organization, the Union of Ukrainian Women, although it lacked all the indicators of a society conducive to the growth of a women’s organization: it was not industrialized; there was little social mobility; high school education was prized as proof of higher education; the Catholic clergy, which at the time could be and mostly were married men, formed the elite of the society; travel, even within the confines of Poland, was rare, and travel to other countries even rarer230. The area was poor and overpopulated, with almost no industry. Western Ukrainian upper classes became Polonized, but the clergy remained Ukrainian and iden tified with the rural population. It was this combination of the peasantry, clergy, and small urban population that formed the nucleus of the Western Ukrainian nationalist revival. This revival is presented by parti cipants and historians alike as a dramatic reawakening of the nation in its quest for independence. In Ukrainian consciousness, as in Polish fears, the women’s move ment also emerged as a patriotic one. Even the women who later wrote their reminiscences of the era saw the love of the enslaved motherland as the motivating factor in the emergence of the women’s organization. They were writing in the language they learned in school and from their readings, the language of patriotism. 14. It was actually the congress of zemstvos that resulted in the formation of the two wings of the liberal party, the Con stitutional Democrats and the Octobrists; there is no need to go into the details here. Those interested can read up on the story in any work on Russian history. 15. My story is based on the materials on the society and of the society preserved in the Central State Historical Archive, Moscow, f. 516; the quotation is from ed.khr... 12, p. 2. Neither Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton, 1978) nor Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-1917 (London, 1984) picked up on this important issue. Rather, they seem to have followed the criticism of the liberals on the weak ness of the women’s organization and its failure to gauge the situation in Russia. 16. Central State Historical Archive (Moscow), f. 516, ed. kh. 5, p. 37. 17. Ibid. p. 71. 18. One of the leading members of the society, and a member of the oldest and most important of Russian families, Shakhmatova, was as disgusted with the decision not to grant the vote to women as the American women activists had been in the nineteenth century. Shakhmatova complained that the Constitutional Democratic Party would give the vote to “all the Samoeds, Chukchi, Tungus and lakuts, but deny it to women.” ibid., ed. khr...1, p. 50. The peoples are all Siberian natives, most of the time still preliterate. 19. The men in the whole liberal camp did not see the need, nor did they see the need for the right of the women to vote. The moderate women’s movement, lacking all support, disintegrated. An attempt to establish a Feminist Party based primarily upon urban educated Russian women failed — the base was too weak and the ideology too limited. 20. Karen Offen’s attempt at defining ’’relational feminism,” to characterize women’s activity that is not necessarily articu lated is especially relevant for the study of Eastern European women’s movements, see her “Defining Feminism: A Compara tive Historical Approach,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. XIV, no. 1, 1988, pp. 119-198. 21. The headquarters of the whole organization, whose aim was to combat prostitution by giving poor women alternative means of income was in London. The Russian society had been founded in 1900 for the same purpose, but the Kievan branch of the society quickly became a broad organization with direct involvement of working women. It subsidized a cafeteria and a cheap dormitory from the profits earned by a sewing school and a sewing cooperative. It also ran an employ ment service, legal aid, and a literacy school. It had a sound financial base and quickly expanded into cultural activities. Full documentation in the Central Historical Archives [Kiev], f. 442, op. 442, 643, a fuller discussion in Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves, pp. 36-37. 22. Even such an experienced writer as Francine du Plessix Gray, when writing about women in her book Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope [New York: Doubleday, 1989] does not use the critical insights developed by scholars of women’s stu dies, but rather slips into the manner in which the Russian middle class viewed women’s issues. She conflates Soviet women into the Russian mode, and relies heavily on Russian mythology to which she was introduced by her caring grand mother for the paradigm on her subject. There are elements of autobiography in the analysis, despite the fact that Gray is not Soviet. The reporter reverts to the paradigm of her childhood- spent as a Russian emigre in Paris surrounded by strong Rus sian women—for a key to the contemporary woman. Hence she misinterprets the alleged power of Russian women in Soviet society. Women with less self knowledge look for language and concepts to describe themselves in the modes they have learned in school and in society. 23. Western Ukrainian territories encompassed Galicia and parts of Bukovyna. The area passed into the Habsburg lands during the Partitions of Poland and remained there after the defeat of Napoleon. After the failure of the Ukrainian war of liberation and the failure of the Bolshevik takeover of the area, it was mandated to Poland, under whose rule it remained until the outbreak of the Second World War. We could also include Volhynia, but that area had been under Tsarist rule until 1919, and its population was primarily Orthodox. 23a. The Union of Ukrainian Women was founded in 1921 from the fusion of various women’s clubs. Within the decade it spread to include about 100,000 members, most of them peasants. ^ , . Cont. m next issue Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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