Review

General Books

This book analyzes women's activism in Petrograd in 1917. The authors argue that women's contributions to Bolshevik success as well as to the revolution itself have long been overlooked. To rectify this deficiency in Russian historiography, McDermid and Hillyar survey the background of the revolution, paying particular attention to discussions of the "woman question," the development of the working class, and the origins of Bolshevik women. They then summarize the activities of those women who spent 1917 in Petrograd. Midwives of the Revolution rests on research into published materials, most of them secondary. The authors defend this choice by arguing that the story of female participation in 1917 has already been recorded in published sources; one need only read them with a properly discerning eye. There is a good deal of truth to this claim, for in fact there is quite a rich historiography available now on Bolshevik women, as well as on the history of women in Russia and revolutionary politics. The authors draw heavily on this scholarship, and therefore their study should be regarded as a synthesis, the sort of book that can be quite handily used to introduce undergraduate students to important historical events or historiographical issues.	1
As a synthesis, however, this work has serious deficiencies. It takes as its subject a fairly specialized topic, the activities of female Bolsheviks and working-class women in Petrograd between February and October of 1917. Perhaps because these activities, however interesting, are too limited to serve as the basis of a broad, synthetic discussion, the authors actually devote a rather small percentage of their book—one chapter out of seven—to 1917. They concentrate instead on the background to the Russian Revolution. Had they successfully summed up that subject matter—the discussions of women's emancipation among the Russian intelligentsia, the development of the working class and female participation within it, the female composition of the Bolshevik party—one might argue that this book, however poorly titled, could serve as useful introduction to an extraordinary group of revolutionary women.	2
Unfortunately, the book falls short in this undertaking as well. The authors assume a level of acquaintanceship with Russian history that most undergraduates do not have, and they consequently provide only the sketchiest information on general political developments, particularly the upheavals of 1905 and 1917. Even more troubling, poorly written and hence misleading generalizations occur frequently. The authors allege repeatedly that the nineteenth-century intelligentsia "thought in social rather than political terms" (p. 25), never defining either "social" or "political." They also contradict themselves, arguing at some points that working-class women were motivated primarily by material concerns, but then on other occasions criticizing those who claim that working-class women could not see beyond their narrow self-interest. McDermid and Hillyar should have spent less time beating straw men resurrected from outdated historiography and more time presenting clearly the findings in recently published, original research. For even though they rely heavily on it, the authors are loath to admit that there is now a wealth of scholarship available on the women of the Bolshevik Party, their work in 1917, and the responses of working-class women to them. Those who wish to introduce their students to these fascinating subjects would be advised to assign selections from two monographs, Elizabeth Wood's The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997) and my Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The chapter on 1917 from the latter has recently been excerpted in The Russian Revolution: The Essential Readings, edited by Martin Miller (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000): 180-205. The bibliographies in these works also contain references to the article literature.	3
Barbara Evans Clements The University of Akron

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