WOMEN‑CENTERED CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS

Soviet women began organizing civic organizations to address issues of particular concern to women in the late 1980s, as we have seen. To establish connections between groups, hundreds of these activists met at Dubna, outside Moscow, in 1991 and again in 1992. Their networking led to the creation in 1994 of the Moscow Information Center of the Independent Women’s Forum, an umbrella organization that maintained communications between groups, distributed information, provided grants, and sponsored regional and national conferences. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Baltics, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, members of the women’s auxiliaries of the pre‑1991 independence movements were creating civic organizations. They too coordinated their activities through national committees.³⁶

Most of the women‑centered civic organizations were small local groups set up to help women, including the volunteers themselves. The Ivanovo Committee of Single‑Parent Families, led by single mothers, lobbied that city’s government to fund programs and organized support groups. In Kiev, For Life worked with pensioners. In Armenia, women’s civic organizations helped families of men killed in the war with Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.³⁷

The number of professional organizations grew as well. Businesswomen in many cities, most in the European republics, set up clubs to share information about entrepreneurship. In Moscow, Tvorchestvo (Creative Work) did fund‑raising, held job‑training classes for unemployed artists, and, in a poignant echo of the 1860s, organized sewing workshops. Societies established by female academics sponsored conferences, published scholarly proceedings, and assisted their members in obtaining funding for research. Particularly influential was the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, organized in 1990 with the goal of “using the results of our own and foreign scholarship to overcome discrimination against women.” It and centers at universities in Kharkov, Minsk, St. Petersburg, Tver, and elsewhere promoted the development of gender studies and a lively critique of gender inequality.³⁸

This activism was not confined to the European successor states. In the Caucasus, Baku once again became a center of female activism. Women there established civic organizations to support female entrepreneurs and assist the poor and victims of domestic violence. In 2002, female academics set up the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center to serve as “the first informational, analytical, bibliographical, and documentary center of the women’s movement in the territory of the South Caucasus.” The organization’s website published articles on international activism and on the history of Azeri women. It publicized conferences, government programs, and sources of information on legal and psychological counseling and medical care.

Some women‑centered civic organizations undertook public advocacy. Many lobbied local, regional, and national governments for supportive legislation and increases in benefits. Sappho‑Petersburg published a newsletter for lesbians and held educational meetings to counter homophobia. Sestri (Sisters) ran a domestic‑violence hotline and held workshops on sexual violence for the general public as well as for safety forces. In the late 1990s its leaders worked with female attorneys and counselors across Russia to establish the Russian Association of Crisis Centers for Women, which acted as an informational clearinghouse for people helping victims of rape and domestic violence.³⁹