SOURCE: “Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 20, No. 10, March 11, 1990, pp. 1, 10.

In the following review, Good offers a positive assessment of Soviet Women.

Displays of brightly painted wooden dolls decorate souvenir shops throughout the Soviet Union. Twist one at the waist and out tumbles a succession of smaller and smaller dolls, identical virginal women nestled one into the next. More than child's toy or quaint example of folk art, the “matrioshka” doll is a metaphor for what Francine du Plessix Gray terms “the sovereign matriarchies” that the twin forces of ideology and history have forged in contemporary Soviet society [in Soviet Women].

The Bolshevik regime of Lenin was the first government in history to declare women's emancipation as one of its primary goals. Lamenting in 1919 that women were no better than domestic slaves chained to barbarously unproductive and degrading lives of drudgery in kitchen...