The Women's Experience of the Holodomor: Victimhood or Capacity?
Although in the years of independence, there has been a great deal of public and scholarly interest in the history of the Holodomor of 1932-33, women's experiences of the tragedy remain virtually invisible to researchers. In commemorative practices, the image of a woman is often used to personify the suffering of the entire Ukrainian nation. Visual representations of the Great Famine usually include an emaciated or dead female body or a grieving mother, symbolising the totality of the tragedy. In this way, a stable discursive association between the concepts of woman and victim is formed and consolidated in the public consciousness. The persistent victimisation of women's experience automatically excludes the very possibility of recognising and analysing the various manifestations of women's agency in the face of total famine. A one-sided view of women as passive objects of history is incorrect and unfair. It is important to study women's gendered survival strategies. These effective daily life-saving practices, forms of active and passive resistance, or adaptation to extraordinary circumstances, will allow us to show the special everyday subjectivity of women in extremely unfavourable conditions of total restriction of rights, opportunities, and resources.
Why it is essential and appropriate to study women's experiences of the Holodomor
- Women's memoirs comprise most of the Holodomor eyewitness accounts (about 75%).
- Women constituted the majority of the adult population of the regions affected by the famine and bore the primary responsibility for the survival of their families.
- The mortality rate among women was lower than among men: women accounted for about 38.4% of total demographic losses.
Different women - different experiences of the Holodomor
- “Victims” - peasant women from forcibly dekulakised families, deprived of food, property, and housing.
- “Instigators” - participants in violent actions of ‘dekulakisation’ (activists of towing brigades).
- “Witnesses” - residents of the region who had the opportunity to observe collectivisation, “dekulakisation”, and famine.
*Dekulakisation refers to the Soviet policy of confiscating the property of wealthier peasants (kulaks or kulaks) and removing them from their land, implemented primarily between 1929 and 1932 during collectivization. It often involved forced relocation, imprisonment, or execution, and was part of the broader effort to consolidate collective farms (kolkhozes) and eliminate perceived class enemies in rural areas.
Women's ways of resistance
- Women's personal property as a resource - exchange and sale of quality women's clothing, jewellery, and food.
- Women's solidarity - selfless mutual assistance, food support, emotional support, and temporary custody of children.
- The dilemma of motherhood - survival of the mother against the survival of children, abandonment of children to save them, abandoned children, cannibalism.
- Women's bodies as resources and risk factors - women's bodies as food storage, forced prostitution for survival, sexualised violence, rape.
The study of the gender specifics of women's experience of the Holodomor reveals the complexity and contradictions of the experience, allows us to see women not only as disenfranchised and powerless victims of a totalitarian regime, but also as subjects who used certain forms of resistance to systemic violence daily, developed (relatively effective) survival strategies and ways to adapt to extraordinary conditions to save their lives.
The translation from Ukrainian was created with the help of DeepL.
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