The Everyday Life of Murmansk Women in the Late 1980–Early 1990 Through the Eyes of Researchers and Journalists

10.33876/2311-0546/2024-1/198-211

Abstract

The article analyzes publications that reflect the recent history of Russian everyday life — the everyday life of Murmansk and partly the entire Russian Polar Region in the 1980s–1990s. It reveals the extreme scarcity of studies devoted to the everyday life of women in this city and region, while it is of interest as one of the first cities where independent women's public organizations emerged from below, which later merged into the «Congress of Women of the Kola Peninsula». The aim of the article was to identify a general trend in the coverage of the everyday life of women in this little-studied region of the Russian Federation, to generalize all the information that can be collected in modern Russian scientific literature on this issue over the past 35 years. The analysis has led to the conclusion that despite the high social activity of women in the Kola region in general and Murmansk in particular in the time under study, women's everyday experience in various social spheres has not been thematized in the scientific literature. The author believes that periodicals and "women's oral history" — the narratives of women activists, their publications and speeches, and eyewitness accounts — can serve as promising sources of research into the everyday life of Murmansk women in 1985–2000. The article highlights the importance of this kind of research.