The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism

by Marianne Kamp

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize

Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award

Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

This groundbreaking work in women's history explores the lives of Uzbek women, in their own voices and words, before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Drawing upon their oral histories and writings, Marianne Kamp reexamines the Soviet Hujum, the 1927 campaign in Soviet Central Asia to encourage mass unveiling as a path to social and intellectual "liberation." This engaging examination of changing Uzbek ideas about women in the early twentieth century reveals the complexities of a volatile time: why some Uzbek women chose to unveil, why many were forcibly unveiled, why a campaign for unveiling triggered massive violence against women, and how the national memory of this pivotal event remains contested today.

Genres: History, Islam, Grad School, Soviet Union, Nonfiction, Academic

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Dr. Marianne Ruth Kamp is an associate professor in Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University. She is a social historian of modern Central Asia, with a focus on gender, social change, and the history of Uzbekistan.

Reviews

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting but latent thesis on how state control over religious dress developed in the 1920s was mirrored in Karimov's anti-veiling and secular dress mandates of the post-Soviet era. Kamp uses a lot of oral history to compensate for a lack of data on veiling and female education in the 20th century which I can honestly take at face value. Would love to see that part as like a 40 page paper instead.

What I found most interesting was how the sexual revolution of pre-Stalin Russia never took off in Central Asia because the main Soviet goal was to liberate women from oppressive styles of dress and therefore enable them work, study, etc. In short, no state intervention was pursued into re-defining gender norms nor was there a definitively feminist movement at any point in Uzbek history. Kamp doesn't weigh on whether or not that *should* have been pursued, though I'm not even sure how that would be done if not for something of WWII-level economic upheaval (which dealt a definitive blow to the paranji).

I also thought the comparison of the social role lynching played in Southern US to ritual murders of unveiled women to be really well argued. Kamp doesn't sugarcoat Soviet intervention but criticizes certain Central Asian scholars for blaming state policies for ritual murders of daughters and wives. She puts it well: no one forced a father to murder his daughter for taking off the veil. But the Soviet Union *can* be faulted for letting communist class purges skew routine justice from being served for such transgressions.

In the epilogue, Kamp writes that the failure of greater social progress in Soviet Uzbekistan can be interpreted as Central Asia being a spectre of empire in a way Muslim territories in Russia or the Caucuses were not. Academic theses aside, she writes that all the elderly women she interviewed saw their lives as having improved in a post-Hujam world and that such accounts matter more than what was achieved in Iran, Turkey, or elsewhere at the time. All of this to say, I'm awaiting an updated edition of what to make of mass veiling in Fergana Valley today.

[Anne Haack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brava! The oral histories here are really wonderful and lend nuance. (In 100 years I would like to read Marianne Kamp's assessment of today's vaccine vs. anti-vaccine movements.) She really addresses the nuances and forces around unveiling well. "Veiling in Uzbekistan in 2000 required as much individual fortitude as unveiling did in 1927."

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Importantly presents Uzbek women as active agents and symbols for both traditional and modernists movements. Kamp draws from oral histories and takes a comparative approach by examining Turkey and Iran.

[evie · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for uni, unprompted, and used entirely for the worst essay i’ve ever written

[Bonnie Wichtner-Zoia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but read very much like a textbook.

[Jacob Dunning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women in Islamic nations is far from my area of expertise or study, but Kamp provides an interesting glimpse into history that is not discussed on a broad scale. Very informative.