Since the mid-1980s—particularly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union—the study of women and gender has become a vibrant aspect of Russian social, cultural and historical research and intellectual discourse. Irina Iukina’s monograph is part of that remarkable and overdue opening up. While Russian readers will have their own perspectives on the issues raised in it, to an outsider like myself this study has a special significance. It both confirms and challenges the approaches and conclusions of the research of Western historians, social scientists and literary specialists since the 1960s and 1970s, a period when the study of Russian feminism and the “bourgeois” women’s movement was largely dismissed by the Soviet historical establishment. I should note, however, that scholars in Western universities had to fight their own academic establishment for recognition; in the West the reluctance to take women’s (and later gender) history seriously was less openly driven by ideology than in the USSR, but hardly less powerful.