SOURCE: “Glasnost for Women?,” in Nation, Vol. 250, No. 22, June 4, 1990, pp. 773–79.

In the following mixed review, Vanden Heuvel places Soviet Women within the changing political, cultural, and socioeconomic context of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century.

Seventy-three years after the Russian Revolution, Soviet women are confronting a powerful backlash against its emancipation of women. Glasnost is allowing Soviet citizens to voice patriarchal prejudices once banned as bourgeois or counterrevolutionary. The state-controlled news media, for example, frequently blame “overemancipated, masculinized women” for social ills from juvenile delinquency to divorce. And Mikhail Gorbachev's ambivalent positions on the role of women in political and economic life, along with the social policies proposed by the Communist Party and the Congress of People's Deputies earlier this year, further strengthen the view that only women are responsible for children and housework.

So far, perestroika has failed to change Soviet women's secondary position in...