Tatiana Mamonova

Tatiana Mamonova, born on December 10, 1943.

Tatiana Mamonova is an award winning leader of feminist thought in Russia. She is the founder of the modern Russian women's movement, as well as an author, journalist, poet, human rights activist, artist and public speaker. She was among the first women to be exiled from the Soviet Union in 1980 for their feminist ideology.

Her feminist journey started when she was 15 years old, when she forced her mother to divorce her alcoholic father for abusing her and her family. She began a career in journalism, where she contributed to a women's program at a television network. She traveled across the Soviet Union conducting interviews with women, lesbians, mothers, intellectuals, labor workers, etc. who all seemed to have similar concerns about their place in the Union itself. Many of them felt that women were not taken seriously and the response from the editors at the television station where she worked only furthered that notion; her interviews were never aired because she was told women only care about beauty and fashion. From those interviews, she learned that intersectionality was a key component to a feminist ideology.

Her experience of childbirth is one that has changed her forever, and is the reason she reignited the women's movement in Russia. Having a child in the Soviet Union was a nightmare at the time, women were severely neglected and ignored. Mamonova shares her experience in a Washington Post article from 1984:

"Precisely nothing happened in that maternity ward, and that is the most horrifying thing. What happened to me happens to hundreds of millions of women in the Soviet Union . . . in my opinion women there are treated like animals. You see a room with 10 women all screaming and bloody. There are too few personnel, and the ones there don't attend to the women."

When she asked her doctor for an anesthetic for the pain, she was told that it was too much of a luxury. 

The Soviet Union labeled her as a trouble-maker in the late 1960s, when she started making waves by speaking publicly about her feminist beliefs. Before her exile, she spawned an underground publication for disseminating valuable information to women across the Union. This underground magazine included personal essays, art and literature from women all over the vast land that the Soviet Union occupied. This gave the magazine varying perspectives which Mamonova found very viable to her inclusive message.

She founded then called Women and Russia, the first organization to promoting human rights to women in the Soviet Union. Mamonova published over 20 works which mirror her early endeavors with her underground feminist publication. She published the Women and Russia Almanac, an art and literary journal containing the first collections of Soviet feminist writings. Now known as the Women and Earth Almanac, it is primarily an ecofeminist publication. In 1987, she became an associate of Women's Institute for Freedom of Press, a non profit publishing organization which aims to increase communication between women and the public through media.

"But the goal of feminism is not just to criticize the socialist system of the Soviet Union, but to find some optimal solution for all countries. The mutual permutation of our systems is an absolute necessity, because women in the Soviet Union don't know a lot about the West. That is why they very often idealize the West, and why many in emigration find themselves in positions not necessarily easier but harder," - Mamonova.

Growing up with an alcoholic father, Mamonova focuses a large portion of her work on fighting violence against women. She insists that the alcohol epidemic that still plagues Russia today is a key factor in the act of violence against women and children.

Tatiana Mamonova is still doing work to make changes to the treatment of women on a global scale, she is 75 years old.


Work cited:

Tucker, Elizabeth. “Feminism in the U.S.S.R.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Aug. 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/08/29/feminism-in-the-ussr/bb884fe2-0ca0-420f-a253-f753697b4673/.

Klemesrud, Judy. “EMIGRE TALKS ABOUT FEMINISM IN THE SOVIET UNION.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 June 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/17/style/emigre-talks-about-feminism-in-the-soviet-union.html.

“Mamonova, Tatyana 1943.” [WorldCat Identities], 1 Jan. 1993, http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n83183058/.