The New Woman in Uzbekistan

The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism. By Marianne Kamp. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 332 pp. Softbound, $25.00.

This book is an impressive undertaking. Marianne Kamp, Professor of History at the University of Wyoming, has added greatly to the study of the changing roles and the changing pressures exerted on women in predominantly Islamic cultures throughout the twentieth century. Kamp exhibits an incredibly nuanced understanding of the predicament of the Uzbek woman. She is attentive to the voices of her interrogators as well as the environment surrounding them. Kamp’s work brings to light a history of enforced social change. She displays a facile understanding of the implications of those changes and in engaging prose draws the reader in through the Uzbek women’s successes and failures in their society. The success of this study is only marginally undermined by the scope of oral history. Most certainly Kamp has done the groundwork but what fails to be heard in terms of an oral history review are the consistent voices of the women interviewed. This is not to say no voices are heard. It may only mean that the women’s stories are so provocative and interesting that this work leaves this reader wanting more. It would appear that Kamp has opened up the discussion to new limits.
The work itself is part of a series in the Jackson School Publications in International Studies and fits in well with works as diverse as a study of Serbian politics and society to a study of the Chinese labor movement. The New Woman in Uzbekistan brings to this series the first work explicitly dealing with women. Kamp’s study examines the pre- and early Soviet era in Uzbekistan in the beginning of the twentieth century. The foundation of her arguments resides in the oral interviews she conducted with women who experienced life in Uzbekistan from primarily their teens to their fifties; but these provide only the infrastructure, not the bulk of the work. Traditional histories have looked at this era in terms of an acceptance or rejection of Soviet modernization plans. Kamp’s work moves beyond this and explicates, via these women’s lives, the nuances of social, cultural, and political change. She argues that Uzbek women were active participants in developing notions of the Uzbek state. One of these ways is through the construction of meaning tied to the veil, or paranji. While most Western scholars have concerned themselves with only the hijab, the traditional term for the Islamic veil, Kamp clearly delineates the paranji as inclusive of Islamic meanings but not captive to it. She argues that the wearing of paranji is more culturally exclusive, which the society defines in part by communal relations. The paranji, or traditional covering for Uzbek women, is both a curse and a liberation, used to reinforce Uzbek identity and ultimately to alter the meaning of Uzbek identity.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Bolshevik calls for modernization to put pressure on communities to come into the new world. One of the signals of that modernization was the determination to improve literacy, end seclusion, and encourage women to remove the veil. Kamp’s chapters on the Soviet women’s magazine Yangi Y’ol and its publishers, the Women’s Division of the Communist Party, highlight the sometimes contradictory messages revealed to readers. While women were encouraged to modernize and reject seclusion and the veil via stories of liberation, stories about murders and violence in the aftermath of unveiling directed women to a legal system hesitant to act on women’s behalf.
In a largely well-argued and well-written work, some of the theoretical contextualization is rather odd. While interesting to note, the reach to Carol Smith Rosenberg’s study of American Victorians is misplaced. Victorian American women may have been restricted in movement, but public displays of extravagance and mixed gender salons were socially acceptable. The segregation of American women seldom reached the extent of Uzbek women. Kamp’s argument would have been better for the inclusion of theorists like Nawal Al Saadawi and Elizabeth Warnock Fernea who explicitly address the intersection of Islamic devotion and feminist yearnings. Kamp’s argument that the violent reaction to unveiling is comparable to lynching in the American South is likewise flawed. Moreover, while Uzbek men used violence to create or reinforce communal customs, southern lynching reinforced and codified not only custom but actual law. Lynching served as an extralegal enforcement arm of established power structures when the legal code was threatened. Fanny Lou Hamer’s house was burned because she questioned the established voting laws. In the end, these are small points of contention in a work that is a must-read for those interested in the lives of women in seclusion and the processes of Islamic modernization. Oral historians will be left wanting more but therein lies the price for a groundbreaking work.

Linda M. Baeza Porter
University of North Dakota
Source: The Oral History Review, Volume 37, Issue 2, Summer-Fall 2010, pp: 251-253