Pioneering women in Ukraine

Margarita Vaysman’s research on nineteenth-century women writers underpins this collaborative project aimed at popularising women’s creative history 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. This project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, Scottish Funding Council and the St Andrews EDI Award, brought together a team of scholars and cultural practitioners, engaged in recovering Ukrainian women’s history across different fields.

The project has resulted in an online database and a reference volume of materials on women’s history, three network seminars hosted in 2020 and 2021, an online capacity-building workshop in 2021, and a fellowship for two project partners in St Andrews (hybrid, online and in person, 2021-22).

Developed in collaboration with Ukrainian partners, the project had two aims: firstly, to bring together women’s history educators (primarily schoolteachers and librarians) and those with historical, project-management and curatorial expertise. And, secondly, to create inclusive, accessible, and empowering public discourses in which Ukrainian women’s history is presented.

The first aim was achieved through setting up two fellowships, a knowledge exchange network and organising a capacity-building workshop. The second was achieved through creating the online database and reference volume ‘Pioneering Women in Ukraine’. The database consists of 15 profiles (including newly commissioned  portraits and investigative articles in Ukrainian and English) of Ukrainian women-pioneers in their fields (industry, science, politics, medicine, etc.). The database is accompanied by a hard-copy and e-book reference volume.

By December 2021, the database has gathered 10,000 views of the combined entries, and the reference volume has been nominated for a national publishing award, distributed to 263 regional community organisations, and presented to an overall audience of over 74,000 visitors at three national and regional book fairs in Ukraine (Kyiv, Dnipro, Mariupol’). Drawing on ongoing research on Ukrainian women’s history in St Andrews and partner institutions, it directly contributes to preserving, and making accessible to the general public, a segment of marginalised cultural heritage that is women’s history in postsocialist space.