Podcast
Morning Joe
The book, which took seven years to write, served as an effort to explain the extraordinary circumstances that transformed the lives of the author's rather ordinary foremothers in the Soviet Union. It explored how radical social experiments led to women achieving high professional status, contrasting this with the current far-right, revanchist Christian national state of Russia.
She's the author of the new book, Motherland, a feminist history of modern Russia from revolution to autocracy.
— Episode: James Comey wants 'vindictive' case drop...
Episode: James Comey wants 'vindictive' case dropped and Tr...
The book, which took seven years to write, served as an effort to explain the extraordinary circumstances that transformed the lives of the author's rather ordinary foremothers in the Soviet Union. It explored how radical social experiments led to women achieving high professional status, contrasting this with the current far-right, revanchist Christian national state of Russia.
She's the author of the new book, Motherland, a feminist history of modern Russia from revolution to autocracy.
How many years in the making is this book? Seven. Oh, that's amazing. Congratulations.
My little sister, an oncologist, is the fourth generation of women in our family to practice medicine. She follows our mother, a pathologist. Our mother's mother, a cardiologist. Our mother's mother's mother, a pediatrician.
Measured against the history of their own country, the Soviet Union, the women from whom I descend were perfectly average people. They were ordinary women who happened to be the subjects and products of one of the most radical social experiments in history, the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person.
This book is, in part, an effort to explain the extraordinary circumstances that transformed the lives of my rather ordinary foremothers.