The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has recognized Professor Adrienne Edgar with its Annual Article Award for her article “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women in Pan-Islamic Perspective,” Slavic Review 65 (2006), 252-272. The award was announced in the December 2007 issue of Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association.
In her article. Adrienne Edgar shows that Central Asian Muslims under Soviet rule came to regard their family and religious traditions as central to their cultural and national identities in the face of the Soviet onslaught. Because the Soviet state was a multi-ethnic, universalizing Socialist state, Edgar argues, female emancipation and nationalism in Central Asia came to be seen as opposed to each other instead of forming mutually supportive components of modernity. In contrast, she shows, independent Muslim regimes in Turkey and Iran had national legitimacy that enabled them to develop policies that emancipated women in ways that the populace of these countries could accept and embrace.