ABSTRACT
Feminism is an umbrella term for a wide range of approaches to the analysis of gender relations—spanning liberal, radical, neo-realist, Marxist, post-modernist and even post-feminist—and has thrown up a complicated and often contradictory body of research. The crucial contribution of feminist research is the transformation that the gender variable offers in revealing data that would remain obscure without a gender/feminist analysis, and the corresponding implications of this data in social science analysis. Related to the cultural differences of definitions, it is important to note that concepts of citizenship, ethnicity, and nationality are not only gendered culturally but are also politically relative. Western feminism has tended to understand men’s entitlement to public life as derived from public and private control over women. The public/private separation that is so central to the Western feminist struggle for freedom, justice, and recognition by the state is largely inexplicable to Former Soviet Union women.
