Women's Glasnost vs. Naglost

Yeltsin is certainly not the Sakharov of the Democratic Movement. Russian people sarcastically call his burning the Parliament an October Revolution of 1993. In Women's Glasnost vs. Naglost we finally hear the voices of the Russian women on what it means to be female and Russian in the tumultuous climate that is modern Russia. The founder of the Russian women's movement, Tatyana Mamonova was the first Russian woman exiled from the Soviet Union for publishing the underground samizdat, Woman and Russia. Now lauded as the Simone de Beauvoir of Russia, Mamonova has interviewed 17 Russian women on the subject of the C.A.S. as it relates to glasnost. Women from all walks of life are asked about changes with respect to their roles and expectations as women. Artists, professionals, dissidents, lesbians, doctors, writers, and civil servants tell their stories in candid terms showing that there is still a long road ahead. Revisions and elaborations of speeches delivered on Mamonova's American tours, poetry in her own hand, and line drawings in her own eloquent and prolific style compliment her essays and the women's interviews.

TATYANA MAMONOVA was born in Russia and exiled to Europe in 1980. She was invited to the U.S. from Paris by the Bunting Institute at Harvard University to be Scholar-in-Residence. She is a public speaker as well as an accomplished artist and writer and is now publishing a magazine, Woman and Earth, in both Russian and English. Her first two books, Woman and Russia, and (Russian Women's Studies) Essays on Sexism in Soviet Culture, were both highly acclaimed and have been reprinted many times.