Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award
Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)
This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.
Marianne Kamp is assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
"Kamp's work represents the best of a new crop of scholarship on Central Asia. This is surely a book that will set the standard in Central Asian women's history for a long time to come." - Paula Michaels, author of Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia
"Through Kamp's well-written account, we learn to view Central Asian women not just as victims--of patriarchal societies and the Soviet coercive apparatus--but also as agents in their own right." - Edward Schatz, University of Toronto