Fifteen Eighty Four

In recent decades, authoritarianism has been on the rise around the globe. Some countries experienced democratic backsliding, while others failed to build robust democratic institutions during a period of transition from a nondemocratic regime. Nonetheless, an escalation of authoritarian tendencies was met with resistance.

Women played a vital role in pro-democracy movements and contemporary revolutions worldwide. Over the span of the Arab Spring, Egyptian women rose against multiple forms of oppression. Similarly, women in Turkey protested against the entrenchment of authoritarianism and the encroachment on women’s rights during the 2013 Gezi Uprising. In Ukraine, women took an active part in the Revolution of Dignity, also known as Euromaidan. Women were also at the forefront of the 2019 Sudanese Revolution, bringing down Omar al-Bashir’s thirty-year rule. Likewise, women assumed a leadership role during the 2020 electoral revolution in Belarus. Yet, women’s engagement in contentious politics is often overlooked in the public discourse.

The book, Invisible Revolutionaries: Women’s Participation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan, develops a typology of women’s participation in a contemporary revolution. According to the patriarchal model, motherhood is a key driver of women’s activism, women primarily perform the so-called support tasks during mass mobilization, and female revolutionaries retreat into the private sphere in the wake of the revolution. The emancipatory model, on the contrary, views feminism as a catalyst for women’s activism, assumes women’s access to formal positions of leadership within the movement, and anticipates considerable progress in gender equality in the post-revolutionary period. Located between these two extremes, the hybrid model encompasses a variety of motivations for women’s engagement in a revolution, identifies the diversity of women’s roles over the course of mass mobilization, and acknowledges various degrees of success in gender equality in different spheres.

Using the case of Euromaidan in Ukraine, one of the largest countries in Europe, the book illustrates a hybrid model of women’s participation in a contemporary revolution. Drawing on data from large-N surveys and oral history projects conducted by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance and the Center for the Studies of History and Culture of East European Jewry at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the book uncovers various motivations for women’s involvement, identifies diverse forms of women’s participation, and traces the multifaceted outcomes of women’s activism.

In particular, the book demonstrates multiple domains of women’s activism during the Revolution of Dignity, including art production, crowdsourcing, food provision, legal aid, medical services, public order, and public relations. Female activists not only performed tasks critical to the viability of the protest movement but also shaped the movement’s tactics. Women assumed leadership roles in various civic initiatives, including the Art Squad, AutoMaidan, the Euromaidan SOS, the Night Guard, and the Hospital Guard.

Furthermore, the book tells a cautionary tale against viewing women’s physical absence from the encampment as an indicator of women’s withdrawal from the revolution. Currently, the ubiquitous use of information and communication technologies blurs the boundaries of participation in a revolution. Data from oral history projects reveal that many women who were physically absent from the encampment on Independence Square and the adjacent protest spaces in the capital city of Kyiv performed such critical tasks as crowdsourcing, legal aid, and public outreach. On-site opinion polls and participant observation might not capture the full spectrum of participants in a revolutionary movement. Instead, in-depth interviews with regime opponents might enable scholars to sketch a more detailed portrait of movement participants based inside and outside the main protest site.

One of the findings that emerges from this study is that women’s participation in nonviolent resistance has become a pathway to women’s involvement in armed struggle for national independence and democratic development in the aftermath of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Many women who provided urgent medical care during the Euromaidan protests volunteered to serve as paramedics on the eastern front. Yana Zinkevych, for example, founded The Hospitallers, a volunteer battalion of paramedics. In addition, the women veterans movement Veteranka pressed for changes in existing laws, granting women access to combat positions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Since the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, the number of servicewomen rose from 16,557 in 2014 to 45,587 in 2024. To date, Ukrainian women and men continue to fight for Ukraine’s freedom.