Send message to Author

Abstract

This paper examines how Soviet modernity in Azerbaijan was “gendered” through the intertwined projects of unveiling and family-law reform between 1918 and 1937. It argues that women’s emancipation was not only a social programme but also a key technology of state power: by targeting the family, bodily visibility, and everyday morality, Soviet authorities sought to reorder society and consolidate legitimacy in a Muslim-majority borderland of Central Eurasia. Drawing on a multi-source methodology that combines legal and judicial records (marriage, divorce, alimony, and conflict cases), institutional documentation linked to women’s organisations and clubs (especially the Ali Bayramov Club), and Soviet women’s periodicals such as Sharg Gadini, the paper traces the mechanisms through which “the new Soviet woman” was constructed, promoted, and contested.

Rather than treating unveiling as a symbolic break with “tradition” or family law as purely administrative change, the analysis focuses on micro-level encounters where policy met practice—petitions, disputes, and community tensions that reveal women’s strategies of negotiation, compliance, and resistance. The paper also highlights the shift from early revolutionary experimentation toward Stalinist retrenchment, when legal and moral regulation increasingly re-centred the family while continuing to mobilise women as workers and citizens. By integrating discourse analysis with institutional history and case-based legal evidence, this study contributes to rethinking Central Eurasia as a space where modernity was produced through contested governance of gender, law, and everyday life.

Keywords: Soviet Azerbaijan; Central Eurasia; gender policy; unveiling; family law; state power; women’s organisations; Sharg Gadini; Stalinism; governance

Send message to Author

Abstract

Scholarly literature on Jadidism and gender mostly focuses on female education, new-method schools for girls, and women’s increasingly more active social roles in the society. With respect to women and gender, Jadidism is rarely discussed as a reform of women’s marital rights. Discussion on the reform of women’s marital rights during the 1917 Muslim women’s congress is almost the only scholarly discussion on the question. However, such discussion started much earlier, in the 1890s, with the initiative of a then-qadi of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Although such discussion was initiated by men, it was ordinary women who pushed for reforms. I argue that one important part of Jadid movement, about which the historiography is mostly silent, was an attempt to address and to institutionalize the marital rights of women. I suggest that, in this respect, Jadidism was rather a response to changes that were already going on in the society and women were active agents in this development.

Send message to Author

Abstract

The history of women in Central Asia is gaining increasing scholarly attention, particularly within the framework of postcolonial studies. However, scholarship that examines voices from the imperial peripheries through a “history from below” perspective, highlighting the experiences of ordinary subjects, is still not sufficiently extensive. The status of women is a recurring theme in studies of Central Asian History, particularly in research on the Soviet period.

However, the active voices of women remain significantly understudied, particularly in the period I intend to research, the late Imperial period.

By examining administrative documents, petitions initiated by women, press materials, and personal accounts, this study will provide insights into the forms of agencies women employed to negotiate marriage arrangements, property rights, mobility, and social authority within both customary (adat) and imperial laws.

Rather than portraying Kazakh women solely as passive subjects of patriarchal or colonial structures, the paper seeks to reconstruct the strategies through which they articulated grievances, tried to defend their interests, and participated in shaping family and social life. By situating these voices within the broader context of Russian imperial governance, Islamic reformist discourse, and emerging print culture, the research will demonstrate how gender relations in the steppe were changing.

This paper is based on published materials, including sources such as administrative reports, petitions (aryz), periodicals, literary texts, and aims to answer the following key questions:

How were the social identities of the Kazakh women shaped by kinship, customary law (adat), Islamic norms, and imperial governance, and how were they slowly changing?

What forms of agency did Kazakh women exercise in family, legal, and social contexts, and how did they articulate their interests through petitions, court cases, and oral traditions?

How were Kazakh women positioned within imperial and reformist discourses of “civilization,” modernization, and progress, and to what extent did these external narratives correspond to women’s lived realities?

By addressing these questions, the research aims to reconstruct the images of Kazakh women as they appear in existing sources. It will also explore the forces driving change in women’s status: the rise of Jadidism (albeit slower than in neighboring Turkestan) and its impact on girls’ education, imperial policies tied to the “civilization mission” of the Russian Empire and the influence of new settlers, such as Volga-Ural Tatars, who contributed to raise of Islamic education and the influence of the Tatar women as abystais (female teachers), shaping women’s circles in the steppe.