In the field of women’s and gender history in the Nordic countries, this geographic region has served as an important contact point for scholars since the interest in women’s history awakened in the 1970s. The Nordic point of view was placed at the centre when the first biannual Nordic women’s history conference was organized in 1983. The exchange of ideas has flourished since then, following the research trends within the field in the Anglophone world (e.g. Blažević, 2015; Kurvinen & Matilainen, 2021).

Despite the longstanding research networks on Nordic women’s and gender history, research has mostly been based on national case studies whereas comparative or border-crossing projects have been a rarity. This reflects the organization of historical research that necessitates archives as well as language and cultural knowledge to be performed. Nevertheless, national case studies have made an important contribution in increasing our knowledge of the variety of ways gender has affected the history of the Nordic countries. For example, previous scholarship has shown the differences in the history of Nordic women’s ways of organizing as well as their understandings of feminism, even though the Nordic countries—as a single entity—are often portrayed, in popular speech, as the leaders of gender equality in the world.

The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes - the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition - the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

The emancipation of the woman of the East constituted an important part of the Soviet cultural revolution campaign of the 1920s-1930s. This article has as its aim the exploration of the Soviet discourses and the practices of emancipation of the woman of the East, with a focus on the Muslim woman of the Volga-Ural region. I show that the Bolshevik attempts at transforming the everyday life of the woman of the East, in spite of their anti-colonial rhetoric, often followed the Russian imperial scripts and the logic of the civilizing mission. In contrast to Muslim modernism's ideas on the compatibility of modernity with Islam, the Bolshevik secular and declaratively ungendered modernity aimed for the destruction of the separateness of male and female spaces and their conversion to the common space of the communist collectivity. However, the discourse on the special backwardness and slave-like situations of the Muslim woman contradicted these aspirations and led to her Otherness rather than emancipation and equality inside the Soviet system.

This book examines the role of the Women's International Defense Federation (WIDF) in transnational women’s activism in the context of the Cold War, and in connection to the rights of women from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Combining a global history and postcolonial theory approach, this monograph shines light on an underrepresented organisation and its important role in the Cold War, Twentieth Century women's rights and Soviet history. Questioning whether the organization acted for women’s causes or whether it was merely a Cold War political instrument, the book analyzes and problematizes the place that the WIDF had in the politics of the Soviet Union, examining the ideology and politics of the WIDF and state socialist propaganda regarding women's equality and rights. Using Soviet archival documents of the organizations, the book offers a new perspective on the complexities of the development of global women’s rights movement divided by the Cold War confrontations.

This is an important study suitable for students and researchers in Women's and Gender History, Eastern European History and Gender Studies.

This article examines the work of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) with women from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It analyzes their role in the WIDF's decision-making process and activities during a period marked by decolonization and the intensification of women's rights activism outside Europe. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which the WIDF's official position on support for the rights of women in the Global South was translated into the practical work of organization. The article is based on materials from Moscow archives that have hitherto not been explored in research on the WIDF. It shows that, in spite of the WIDF's formal anti-colonial stance, women from the Global South were not always given a voice or able to insert their demands into WIDF policy.

This text is not an analytical article, nor a proper academic paper, but rather a conversation, a dialogue for three voices. It was originally presented at a seminar at Södertörn university and it has no intention of summing up things in any definitive way. On the contrary, we were writing about our observations in a free manner, discussing with each other in the process, reflecting on the critique from our colleagues, and commenting on each other contributions, supporting or questioning each other’s points of view in an informal manner. These mutual comments are linked to the text below in suitable places and marked with our initials. We are also including some pictures that we thought we needed for our presentations and that were very difficult to select in the ocean of visual images illustrating the case of Pussy Riot and the public’s reaction to it. After having produced about forty pages, we realized we have to stop if we do not want this conversation to continue indefinitely. But we do not consider that it is over. We hope that it will be continued by our readers.

The article is dedicated to the study of the cinematographic representations of two early Soviet emancipation projects: the emancipation of women and the emancipation of national minorities. In what ways did these two emancipation projects intersect? How were women of the “dominated” nations addressed and treated in the post-revolutionary years? In order to answer these questions I analyze three newsreels and six thematic films connected to the mentioned topics and produced between the mid-1920s and 1931. Films dealing with the “emancipation” of women not infrequently showed women from different regions, but, in addition to this intra-Soviet perspective on an all-Soviet dimension, I focus on several films dealing with the Volga-Ural region in particular. Soviet films from 1920 to the early 1930s give us more complex and multilateral information about both “emancipations” than do other Soviet documents. At the same time, they show that racialized images of “other” women were frequently used by Soviet filmmakers in order to emphasize the progress of the Soviet modernizing project.

The article explores the cross-section of gender differences and colonial/imperial differences on the example of the Soviet campaign of emancipation of the minority women in the Volga-Ural region during the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing from Soviet publications and archival documents on the Commission for the Improvement of Work and Everyday Life of Women, the article shows that in spite of its emancipatory potential, the official campaign censored alternative projects of women's emancipation that had emerged in the region before the Bolshevik revolution. At the same time, the institutionalized campaign for women's equality privileged female activists on ideological rather than ethnic grounds. However, the existing structure of socialization in reality promoted mainly those of Russian and in general, Slavic background, thus reifying the old colonial disposition.