In recent years, the study of women and gender relations has become one of the most productive fields of research into Russian and Soviet society and this volume offers a fresh and interdisciplinary insight into the field. Written by leading Western scholars, it spans the last decade of tsarist Russia, the 1917 revolutions and the Soviet period. The essays reflect the original nature of recent research on women's studies and include chapters on women writers, women's work, women and politics, women as soldiers, female prostitution, popular images of women and women's experience of perestroika.