Українознавство (Jan 2020)
Women in the Struggle for Ukrainian Sovereignty in 1917–1921
Abstract
The article deals with the issue of women’s participation in military actions during the national liberation revolution of 1917–1921; analyzes the biographies of the UPR Army and Galician Army soldiers and the role of women in the struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. The topic of women in the Ukrainian armies of the early 20th century comprehensively covers only the period of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and partly, of the Galician Army. Nowadays, there is no statistics about women in the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. There is only fragmentary information about the lists in separate military units and the memoirs of participants of that historical period with separate biographies and names. Until today it has not been determined which drills women had, which exact qualifications they received, as well as their total number in the Ukrainian armies. In this research, we have covered biographies of Iryna Shmyhelska-Klymkevych, Svitlana Kharchenko, Kharytyna Pekarchuk, Khrystyna Sushko, Vira Babenko, Yozefa (Yosypyna) Lysohor, Anastasiia Lynkova, Liusia Hurska, and the data about 47 other women who took part in the military struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty in the UPR and Galician Armies. We have considered conditions in which these women were fighting, and have established that almost all women who served in the UPR Army had multifunctional roles, however, legally registered at traditional female positions, mostly as mourning sisters. Research about women’s participation in the Ukrainian War for Independence in 1917–1921 constitutes a part of several areas of the related analysis: the service of women in the UPR Army (their quantity, job responsibilities, biographical explorations, psychological portraits); participation and role of women in insurgent movements in the period of 1917–1921; development of the female veteran movement of the first half of the 20th century; influence of women’s organizations on the course of the national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian nation during that time, etc.
Keywords
