15 women – EN - Гендер в деталях

Pioneering Women in Ukraine

Women’s achievements are often devalued or unnoticed because of sexism and the social conditions of patriarchy. Their contributions to history are forgotten and erased. The activities of our contemporaries are covered with stereotypes and conjectures.

This exhibition aims to tell the stories of women who have accomplished something unique in the past and those who are doing this now, those who have built up their communities and unlocked new pathways for the next generations of women. Today, some of these trailblazers are getting more public recognition in Ukraine: for example, women’s movement’s founder Nataliya Kobrynska and feminist scholar Solomiya Pavlychko. Other figures remain obscure.

We chose seven heroines from Ukraine’s past whose stories we would like to make widely known, and seven contemporaries who tell their own stories during interviews. The fifteenth text presents an imaginary portrait of the “unknown Ukrainian woman”.

Ievheniia Iaroshynska

What would have she achieved if not for her premature death at the age of 36? The researcher Iryna Mocharnyk explores the little-known life of this feminist trailblazer, placing it in the context of the struggles for women’s emancipation as well as national and class liberation in Ukrainian territories under the late-imperial rule.

Olena Stepaniv

Olena Stepaniv is considered the first servicewoman in the world to be promoted to the officer rank. During the First World War, she joined the Legion of Sich Riflemen and was decorated for bravery. However, Stepaniv’s story is not limited to her experience in the army. After the war, she received a PhD in history and geography, organised health cooperatives, taught in schools in the Galician province of Western Ukraine, lectured at the Lviv University, and served ten years in the Gulag as a political prisoner. The historian Mariana Baidak explores the life of this legendary Ukrainian woman beyond her popular image.

Sofiia Parfanovych

The first Ukrainian female student to study medicine at the Lviv University, the author of the first Ukrainian nonfiction about sexuality, the founder of a private gynaecological practice and of a school of midwifery, Sofiia Parfanovych was undeniably a trailblazer in the Lviv of the 1920-30s. However impressive the list of her achievements in the field of medicine, she was more than that. The literary scholar Iryna Nikolaichuk looks into the creative side of the self-proclaimed ‘humble health care worker’, discussing Parfanovych’s scientific publications and public health activism alongside her imaginative memoirs and short stories.

Shefika Hasprynska

Indigenous to Crimea, Crimean Tatars are a people of Sunni Muslim faith who have been reduced to a minority by the Russian colonisation from the eighteenth century onwards. Shefika Hasprynska was born into a family of progressive educators, publishers, and activists. In 1905, she founded the first Muslim journal for women that was published in the Crimean Tatar language. She was among the four women elected to the first Qurultay, the supreme representative body of the Crimean Tatar people. The political science scholar Natalia Malynovska revives Hasprynska’s legacy, which was erased during the Soviet era, and positions it within the Crimean Tatars’ and Muslim women’s liberation movements.

Khrystyna Alchevska

Having founded the first free Sunday school for women in the Russian Empire, she became responsible for educating 17 000 eastern Ukrainian women by 1919. Her success was underpinned by the support of her husband, a prominent businessman after whom the city of Alchevsk is named. And yet, ‘they say that each person has their own point of madness. Mine is the desire to make as many women literate as possible’, explained Khrystyna Alchevska, one of the key Ukrainian educationalists. Iryna Nikolaichuk discusses Alchevska’s choice to prioritise women’s emancipation at the expense of her loyalty to the Ukrainian national project under the Russian imperial and later Soviet rule.

Debora Fogel

For her contemporaries, Debora Fogel epitomised the New Woman type. She was an independent thinker and poet, essayist and polemicist at the intersection of artistic circles in the interwar Lviv. She became one of the first women internationally to receive a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1926. She wrote experimental modernist poetry in Yiddish while living far away from the capitals of world literature. She witnessed the rise of totalitarian regimes and became one of their countless victims during the Holocaust. The poet and literary scholar Iryna Starovoyt analyses Fogel’s complex linguistic and national identity and the way she subverted the gender stereotypes of her time.

Olha-Maria Franko

She was married into an illustrious Ukrainian family. Her husband was the son of a canonical Ukrainian writer, a lieutenant, an organiser of military aviation in the western Ukrainian province of Galicia, an engineer, and a museum director. And Olha-Maria Franko was the mistress of the house and the author of best-selling culinary books. For decades, her legacy has been in the shadow of her husband’s fame. The literary scholar Natalia Tykholoz shows how the seemingly patriarchal model of Kinder, Küche, Kirche provided a means for creativity and self-realisation for this grand mistress of Galician cuisine.

The project’s aims are reflected in the design of the exhibition, which utilises vytynanka, a form of artistic papercutting that has long been a way of creative self- expression for women.In vytynanka, the image is created through the combination of filled and empty spaces, a brilliant metaphor for women’s history which is shaped by endless blind spots.

To a certain extent, the selection of figures for this project is arbitrary. Although we consciously chose the heroines from diverse ethnic backgrounds and professions, the exhibition claims to be neither representative nor canon-shaping. We hope that this is just one among many activities celebrating women’s achievements.

The Unknown Ukrainian Woman

Women constitute one half of humanity. Yet, we do not see them represented in history books. Written as a chronicle of military conflicts and revolutions, our history excludes women’s experience. Embracing women’s perspectives can prompt us to reconsider everything we know about humanity. Moving from his-story to her-story, the historian Oksana Kis explains how women’s exclusion has shaped our view of the past and the present. The lack of female representation in history has forced generations of women to reinvent the wheel. The status quo has been shattered by women writing the history of women: from the fin-de-siècle writer Ievheniia Iaroshynska to the contemporary historian Olena Stiazhkina.

Anna Sharyhina

What does it mean to be a lesbian and a feminist in Ukraine? How does one combine the identities of a single mother, a highly recognisable LGBT activist, and a Ukrainian patriot in a biased society? Anna Sharyhina is not only the founder of the first lesbian and feminist organisation, and organiser of the first Women’s and Pride marches, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv but also an instructor for the reformed Ukrainian police. In her interview with Hanna Sokolova, she reflects on her experience of emancipation and on the change of the cultural and civic landscape in Kharkiv in the past ten years — the change for which she herself is responsible to no small extent.

Maria Berlinska

At the start of the Russian invasion in 2014, Maria Berlinska went to the front. She founded an organisation that taught the Ukrainian volunteers and military to fly drones and flew them herself, campaigned against gender discrimination in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and initiated Women’s Veteran Movement. Ukrainian media were bent on romanticising the young woman’s image, while Berlinska used her publicity to address the army’s problems. The historian Olesya Khromeychuk talks to Berlinska about these achievements and the less canonical experiences of childhood poverty, the teenage hippie trail, and applying to the Jewish Studies programme at a top Ukrainian university to overcome her own biases.

Lesia Lytvynova

In Ukraine, Lesia Lytvynova is famous for devising solutions where none were thought possible. The mother of five, she runs a charity which supports patients in need of palliative care and their families. During the Revolution of Dignity in 2013, she served as the protest’s logistics queen. At the onset of the Russian aggression in 2014, she co-founded a vitally important centre for displaced people. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, she began supplying the country with oxygen concentrators. The journalist Natalia Bushovska interviews the famous volunteer about her life in the state of emergency and work with those who are dying and those who are grieving.

Alyona Kazanska

Alyona Kazanska comes from a Roma background and advocates for the rights of women and LGBT people within the Roma community in Ukraine. She co-authored the script of Chacho, a film about a Roma gay man, and had to hide after receiving death threats from Roma traditionalists. What does it mean to campaign for the rights of minorities within an already marginalised ethnic group? The journalist Alyona Vyshnytska interviews Kazanska about her growing up as a Roma girl, her activism, and the importance of breaking taboos. They examine some of the violent traditions that finally made Kazanska cut ties with her community.

Olena Masalitina

Ten years ago, inclusivity was an outlandish idea for Ukrainian education. However, an educational approach centred on anti-discriminatory principles has been implemented in Ukraine after the Euromaidan revolution of 2013-14. The change has become possible thanks to the researcher, gender policy expert, and activist Olena Masalitina. She created one of the first academic centres focused on gender, co-authored the New School reform, and instigated pioneering anti-discriminatory policies in Ukraine. The sociologist and gender scholar Oleh Marushchenko talks to Masalitina as well as her colleagues and family about the professional and personal path of one of the most influential women in Ukrainian education.

Svitlana Roiz

Without a doubt, she is the most famous child and family psychologist in Ukraine. The author of nine books, a practicing therapist, a scriptwriter, a UNICEF consultant, and a blogger with a readership of 90,000, Svitlana Roiz is routinely listed among the most influential women in Ukraine. How does she resist social pressure to present an idealised version of herself to the public? What are the challenges of being a divorced family psychologist? The psychoanalytic therapist and journalist Iana Sasina has interviewed Roiz about her personal journey, from dreaming of becoming a psychologist as a Soviet kid, to working on TV and then switching careers and realising the dream of her childhood.

Olia Hercules

A rising star on the international culinary scene, Ukraine-born and London-based chef Olia Hercules is a Guardian Food columnist and the author of three best-selling books of recipes: Mamushka, Kaukasis, and Summer Kitchens. First and foremost, she is a storyteller. Hercules has enchanted hundreds of thousands of readers around the world with her stories about Ukrainians’ everyday snacks, pickles, and homemade pies. What is it that makes Hercules’s recipes so attractive? The scholar of gastronomy Olena Braichenko foregrounds Ukrainian culinary traditions that are trending globally today: the combination of sustainability, ecological consumption, and appreciation for local produce.

Команда проєкту

Кураторка — Тамара Злобіна
Консультантки — Маргарита Вайсман, Анна Довгопол
Організаційна підтримка — Creative Woman Space
Авторки — Оксана Кісь, Інна Мочарник, Анна Соколова, Мар’яна Байдак, Олеся Хромейчук, Ірина Ніколайчук, Наталія Бушковська, Наталія Малиновська, Альона Вишницька, Олег Марущенко, Ірина Старовойт, Яна Сасіна, Наталія Тихолоз, Олена Брайченко
Літературні редакторки — Ярина Цимбал, Дарина Важинська
Переклад — Маргарита Вайсман
Дизайнерка-ілюстраторка — Олена Марчишина
Програмування — Студена ІТ

Проект реалізується за підтримки:

Pioneering Women in Ukraine

The project’s aims are reflected in the design of the exhibition, which utilises vytynanka, a form of artistic papercutting that has long been a way of creative self- expression for women. In vytynanka, the image is created through the combination of filled and empty spaces, a brilliant metaphor for women’s history which is shaped by endless blind spots.

The Unknown Ukrainian Woman

Ievheniia Iaroshynska

Ievheniia Iaroshynska was born into the family of a village teacher in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bukovyna (now Ukraine) during a time when women were routinely denied access to education. And yet, she became a successful writer, an award-winning ethnographer, and a progressive educator. She was also a committed activist of the Women’s Movement. What would have she achieved if not for her premature death at the age of 36? The researcher Iryna Mocharnyk explores the little-known life of this feminist trailblazer, placing it in the context of the struggles for women’s emancipation as well as national and class liberation in Ukrainian territories under the late-imperial rule.

Anna Sharyhina

Olena Stepaniv

Maria Berlinska

Sofiia Parfanovych

Lesia Lytvynova

Shefika Hasprynska

Alyona Kazanska

Khrystyna Alchevska

Olena Masalitina

Debora Fogel

Svitlana Roiz

Olha-Maria Franko

Olia Hercules

Команда проекту

Кураторка — Тамара Злобіна

Консультантки — Маргарита Вайсман, Анна Довгопол

Організаційна підтримка — Creative Woman Space

Авторки — Оксана Кісь, Інна Мочарник, Анна Соколова, Мар’яна Байдак, Олеся Хромейчук, Ірина Ніколайчук, Наталія Бушковська, Наталія Малиновська, Альона Вишницька, Олег Марущенко, Ірина Старовойт, Яна Сасіна, Наталія Тихолоз, Олена Брайченко

Літературні редакторки — Ярина Цимбал, Дарина Важинська

Переклад — Маргарита Вайсман

Дизайнерка-ілюстраторка — Олена Марчишина

Програмування — Студена ІТ

Проект реалізується за підтримки: