Red Valkyries

April 18, 2022
In these informative if somewhat dry biographical sketches, Ghodsee (Taking Stock), a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the careers of five socialist women who fought for revolutionary change in Russia and Bulgaria in the first half 20th century and influenced women’s movements abroad. Soviet diplomat Alexandra Kollontai, “enigmatic” Russian political activist Inessa Armand, education reformer Nadezhda Krupskaya (who also was Lenin’s wife), WWII sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and Bulgarian scientist and politician Elena Lagadinova pushed for women’s equality while engineering a future socialist society. Some, including Kollontai and Pavlichenko, even toured in the West and became media sensations for their achievements. Ghodsee is careful to distinguish these women from many of their counterparts in the West, noting that “liberal feminism supports a worldview wherein everything is just fine as long as women have better access to wealth and power,” whereas her heroines “imagined a political project that challenged the exploitation of unpaid labor in the private sphere as part of a wider program to overcome the injustices perpetuated by a free market system that produces systemic forms of discrimination.” Though Ghodsee lucidly explains the era’s revolutionary politics, she struggles to convey these women’s lives beyond their résumés. Still, this is an eye-opening deep dive into an underexamined aspect of feminist history.

June 1, 2022

Ghodsee packs a punch in her short volume focusing on five different Red Valkyries. Resistant to the label "feminist" because of its close association with the western liberal feminist agenda, Ghodsee explores her socialist women activists one by one, tracing their lives and work as they respond to some of the most significant Russian and world events of the 20th century. As an expert in her field, she deftly covers vast amounts of history, political theory, and complicated personal relationships in an accessible way for all levels of informed readers. She invokes a large body of research, which can be seen in the extensive notes section and the "suggestions for further reading" pages. But her prose is never too academic, and the little-known stories of the women are captivating. The Red Valkyries' accomplishments, in everything from record-breaking sniper kills to the formation of several political institutions for women's emancipation, help challenge narrow views of what it meant to empower women in the twentieth century. Ghodsee ends the book with nine overarching lessons to take from the women's lives, which helps reframe their efforts for today's activists. VERDICT A timely and fascinating volume for those interested in Russian and socialist history.--Halie Kerns

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 20, 2022
American literature on influential feminists tends to drift towards women from the U.S. and Western Europe. Ghodsee, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the lives of five women from Russia and Bulgaria--less spoken of though no less important in the fight for equality--who pushed for feminism and revolution against oppression. The women covered are the acclaimed WWII sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; education reformer, revolutionary, and wife of Lenin Nadezhda Krupskaya; diplomat Alexandra Kollontai; Bulgarian scientist and women's-rights activist Elena Lagadinova; and political activist Inessa Armand. These underdiscussed women receive very thorough, though also rather dry, overviews that are more academic in nature than fluidly told biography. Ghodsee weaves these women's ideologies and feminist views into the larger picture of a time, that of multiple world wars, open revolution, burgeoning socialist societies, and the knowledge that extreme change was needed in dire circumstances. Readers already familiar with Eastern European politics at the turn of the twentieth century will get the most mileage out of Red Valkyries.

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