Open Access Edition of "American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream" by Julia L. Mickenberg

FAIN: DR-272610-20

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)
Alan Thomas (Project Director: March 2020 to October 2022)

This project will publish the book "American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream," written by Julia L. Mickenberg (NEH grant number FA5576111), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream
Year: 2022
ISBN: 9780226256269
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Editor: Timothy Mennel
Abstract: If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.
Primary URL: http://bibliopen.org/p/bopen/9780226256269
Primary URL Description: Bibliopen
Secondary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63440
Secondary URL Description: OAPEN
Type: Single author monograph

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