Abstract:

What did Kyrgyz women do when the Soviet regime arrived at the doorsteps of Central Asia in 1917 and began calling for socialist revolution? Some like Shairbubu Tezikbaeva and Zuurakan Kaynazarova enthusiastically joined the cause, both becoming one of the first female Kyrgyz deputies in the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1939. Their transformation from illiterate farmworkers into educated as well as politically active leaders served as a successful example for the ongoing Soviet liberation campaign that largely targeted non-Russian women of the region. Enacted as early as 1918, this state program sought to liberate the “woman of the East” (the so-called vostochnitsa) from her purported seclusion and eradicate centuries-old triple subjugation of class, religion, and gender.

My paper investigates this emancipation project, but it does this through the specific focus on the March 8th celebrations in Kyrgyz SSR conducted by the women’s departments (the zhenotdel) between 1927 and 1936. By tracing the social life of this international holiday in one nationalizing Soviet republic, it examines the ways in which local women activists interpreted, organized, and promoted the Bolshevik emancipation project. Like other modern holidays, March 8th represented not just the official values and goals of the state, it also served as an effective tool of mobilization and performed an important ritual of nation-building. I argue that for local women activists concerned with emancipation however, this particular celebration carried more than a symbolic and political function. In fact, the March 8th holiday acted as a tangible point of reference for measuring the revolutionary government’s success in matters of gender equality and women’s rights. It allowed local women activists a formal platform for voicing grievances over the emancipation project’s shortcomings, creating an opportunity to directly engage the state and sometimes negotiate their own ideas of gender equality.

To demonstrate this, my paper utilizes official and unofficial correspondences, newspapers and magazines, written by the zhenotdel activists of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, all held in the Central State Archives of the Kyrgyz Republic. The question of how local women found national expression under Soviet rule will shed crucial light on both the larger discussion of empire and the Kyrgyz story of local agency. My research thus draws from works by Adrienne Edgar, Douglas Northrop, Marianne Kamp, and Botakoz Kassymbekova among others, and contributes to the fields of colonialism and modernity studies, state-building, gender and women’s histories.