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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

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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.