Женское движение в Казахстане и Туве в 1920–1930-е годы

Гульзада Мукашевна Тленшина; Жадра Молдагалиевна Мухамеджанова

doi:10.25178/nit.2026.1.18

Authors

Gulzada M. Tlenshina Sh. Ualikhanov Kokshetau University https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3068-8454
Zhadrа M. Mukhamedzhanova Sh. Ualikhanov Kokshetau University https://orcid.org/0009-0007-7660-7916

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25178/nit.2026.1.18

Keywords:

Kazakhstan, Tuva, Tuvan People’s Republic, October Revolution, national liberation movement, woman question, women’s departments, socialism, gender policy

Abstract

The article analyzes the activities of women’s departments in Kazakhstan and Tuva in the 1920s–1930s. They are viewed as agents of gender policy that began operating within the framework of the socialist transformation of society. On the basis of archival and published sources, the authors examine the main directions, content, specific features, and contradictions in addressing the “woman question” in these republics.

Common and distinctive features of the gender policy of the two republics in the 1920s–1930s are identified. The main goals, forms, and methods of work of the women’s departments in Kazakhstan and Tuva were practically identical, since they were developed for the republics of the East and recommended by the Comintern and the RCP(b). Differences lay in the content of the activities of the women’s departments and were determined by the different legal statuses as well as the historical specificities of the two republics. Thus, women’s departments in Kazakhstan operated in the 1920s, during the NEP period, and involved women in small-scale artisanal cooperatives. Women’s departments in Tuva, which operated in the 1930s, when the Tuvan People’s Republic adopted a course toward collectivization, participated in the creation of collective farms and state farms.

The authors acknowledge the contradictory and inconsistent nature of gender policy in the two republics in the 1920s–1930s. At the same time, they demonstrate the historical significance of the first bodies of women’s activism in creating the preconditions for promoting gender parity in Kazakhstan and Tuva.

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