This book, based on oral interviews and new material from the Communist Party Archive of the Tajikistan Republic, is an important addition to gender studies in Central Asia. Following in the footsteps of Douglas Northrup, Marianne Kamp, Adrienne Edgar, and Adeeb Khalid, who explored gender history in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Zamira Abman examines the fate of Muslim women in Tajikistan from the 1920s, a time when the Soviet regime sought to end sharia family laws, to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Paying special attention to the neglected post-war period, Abman convincingly argues that the regime unintentionally traditionalized gender roles in rural areas. The Soviet “liberation” campaign had some success in the cities, where women enjoyed more rights, such as equal access to higher education, and employment opportunities. However, in the 1980s the eighty percent of women who resided in the countryside did not enjoy the same privileges as their urban counterparts. What explains this discrepancy?

According to Abman, pragmatism and production, rather than liberation of women, shaped the regime’s policies from the very beginning. Bolsheviks understood that they could not win without the support of the poor peasantry. Going after early marriages or facilitating female initiated divorces would have jeopardized their supporters’ social cohesiveness and the success of the revolution. Likewise, collectivization and the unbridled development of the cotton industry reinforced patriarchal bonds. Women’s manual labor was needed in dairy farming, animal husbandry, the silk worming industry, and, because of the lack of mechanization, cotton picking. Even if one were willing to look for other opportunities, obtaining a written residency permit in the city was hard enough for men but even harder for women, who were still under their father’s, husband’s, or brother’s authority. Working in urban factories meant free interaction with men which would have shamed their families. By the same token, girls had more difficulties accessing secondary education than their male counterparts. Because of the paucity of secondary schools and lack of transportation, boys often travelled by foot to neighboring villages to complete their education, which for girls was more problematic because of their sexual vulnerability. Furthermore, the collectivization experiment reinforced close kinship ties in rural areas, as clans became the foundation for economic organization on collective farms, while elders in the community continued policing female mobility and behavior, favoring early arranged marriages, which in turn contributed to higher fertility rates and locked girls into free care giving at home. In short, mothers needed daughters to care for their younger siblings while the state needed cheap labor in its cotton fields. Later, post-war male migration to the cities for seasonal work led to earlier marriages for country girls, and even to a resurgence of polygyny (with some male migrant workers maintaining one family in the city and another in the countryside). In contrast, the beneficiaries of the Soviet liberalizing policies were orphans, divorcees, fatherless daughters, or wives of polygamists who had moved to the cities and broken away (often unintentionally) from the patriarchal family structure. They enjoyed university education and career choices. But even in this context, girls were taught traditional domestic values: they were expected to be model wives and mothers even as they became competent teachers, nurses, and engineers. Tajik male supervisors still questioned their expertise, and women still lacked access to political power.

The book’s strengths lie in its detailed exploration of post-war history, its effective use of oral history, and its ability to situate Tajikistan within a broader comparative framework, encompassing the Middle East, Turkey, and other Central Asian republics. The voices of her interviewees resonate clearly, offering a vivid picture of the limitations faced by women in rural areas and highlighting the perceived divide between Russian-speaking cities and the Tajik-speaking countryside, which hindered Soviet activists’ efforts. However, the epilogue could have delved deeper into the impact of the Soviet experience on women during the 1990s. While summarizing key points, it feels redundant. Given Abman’s effective explanation that rural women bore a triple burden—managing childcare, domestic tasks, private livestock, and plots while also working full-time on the kolkhoz—one is left wondering whether this partly contributed to the appeal of complementarian interpretations of Islam among women in the ex-Soviet Union. A longer timeline that would allow the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the continuing impact of past Soviet policies on the reconfiguration of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia would have strengthened Abman’s argument. Perhaps this will be the subject of the author’s next monograph.