Political Participation of Women in the Soviet Union and Russia: From State-Sponsored Feminism to Putin’s Machismo

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206.

media release: What happens when women’s political quotas are implemented in non-democracies? In this lecture, Umanets focuses on understanding the political and social meaning and manipulation of gender in the Soviet Union which held informal women’s political quotas for almost 75 years. Specifically, this talk focuses on the political engagement of women in the Soviet legislative bodies and local councils and their consequences today. Umanets argues that women’s higher and municipal representation produces different outcomes. The former is associated with being ultimately a performative organ and the latter is involved in the actual creative decision-making. Thus, the effects of women’s quotas should be considered through the lens of how authoritarian states see and control representation and uncertainty because it explains variation in the access of women to power.

About the speaker: Valeria Umanets is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include women’s representation and political participation, political parties, post-Communist states, and Russian politics. In her dissertation, Valeria studies the effects of Soviet state-sponsored feminism on women’s political participation in Russia using archival resources. Prior to joining UW–Madison, Valeria completed her MPhil degree in Comparative Government at the University of Oxford.