Daria Dyakonova is a social historian. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on the international Communist Women's Movement during the interwar period of the 20th century.
Host University: Sapienza Universita di Roma, Italy
Host research group or department: Department of History, Cultures, Religions and Performing Arts
Co-host University: University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Secondment institution: To be defined
Advisor: Marco Di Maggia
Co-advisor: Maud Bracke
Secondment mentor: To be defined
My research
TNCWN - Transnational Networks of the Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1939
The project aims to assess the contribution of the Communist Women's Movement (1920-1939) to the general struggle for women’s emancipation and thus challenge the still persisting vision of feminist activism as a movement led by the upper and middle class, liberal, and predominantly white Western women. Using unpublished archival sources, the project will recover the numerous unknown facets of this revolutionary movement to advance both scholarship and the struggles related to women’s oppression that today’s feminists still pursue. Scholarly studies on Communist women and the Comintern’s gender policy still remain rare. Soviet history scholars have made important contributions on the work of the Women’s department of the Russian Communist Party and some outstanding women’s leaders. A few works have discussed interwar Communist Women’s efforts in separate countries, mostly in Europe. Fewer contributions have engaged with the history of the movement in a transnational perspective. These studies focused on published Comintern documents and press but did not use the unpublished archival sources available in Europe and Russia. The proposed project situates itself at the intersection of the still-developing fields of history of activism, transnational history, and gender studies. Its overarching objective is to assess communist women’s contribution to the struggle for women’s emancipation. As the studies on communist women in a transnational perspective are still limited and did not make use of the Comintern archival documents, the project will be on the cutting edge of this emerging field, bridging old and new source material. The study will at the same time advance women’s rights activists’ agenda by shedding light on Marxist blueprint and practice related to diverse factors of women’s oppression, such as reproduction, housework, childcare, political rights, gender roles, women in the labor force, equal pay for equal work, prostitution, violence against women, and much more.
Date started – Date End
01.04.2024 - 31.03.2026
