XXXII Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 26–28 апреля 2023 г.

242 XXXII Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Секция VI economic and political system in the Soviet era led to a privileging of private over in the acquisition of power and meaning. Women`s closer associations with domestic life and greater authority within the family were therefore important empowering factors within the private domain that were also reflected in social life, given the particular positioning of the private in the late Soviet period. However, the contradictory expectations of femininity and ideals of womenhood that emerged from state-sponsored official discourse on the one hand, and community-based discourse on religious and ethnic prescriptions and local forms on the other, led to paradoxes and ambiguities in women`s public, domestic and work responsibilities and their presentation of self. What is particularly significant here is that for SovietAzeri women, ethnicity became an overriding marker of their identity politics. Indeed, on a societal level, Azeriness itself was closely associated with attributes of femininity, rendering women primary beares of ethnic identity. The link between gender, ethnicity and nationalism, and women`s role as guardians of traditional order and beares of tehnic-national identity have been discussed for many societies around the world. In the case of Azeri women the overriding importance of ethnicity was partly due to the Soviet nationalities policy which highlightened the significance of ethnic affiliation, despite being coupled with the repression of political expressions of nationalism.