When Women Rise — and When Nations Push Back

What Russia’s Lost Progress Teaches American Women in 2025

Dear Friends,

Some stories echo across continents. Some warnings travel through time. And some lessons arrive wrapped like a gift from history — the kind you open slowly, the paper trembling, because you know what’s inside might change how you see everything.

This month, I’ve been reading Julia Ioffe’s When Women Rise — and When Nations Push Back

Motherland, a powerful excavation of the women who built Russia, shaped its revolutions, held its families together, staffed its hospitals, and fought its wars — only to watch their rights dissolve under the weight of politics, patriarchy, and authoritarian nostalgia.

Russia’s history is not our history.

But the pattern?

The pattern feels uncomfortably familiar.

Let’s talk about it.

💥 When Women’s Rights Are Given — and When They’re Taken Back

In the early Soviet era, Russian women catapulted into professions the rest of the world still barred them from. Doctors. Engineers. Scientists. Ministers. Feminists rewriting the rules of social life.

It didn’t last.

Because rights granted from above can be revoked the moment power decides they’re inconvenient.

In the United States, our rights weren’t granted — we had to fight tooth and nail for every inch. But here too, in 2025, we are learning a chilling truth:

Rights won are not rights guaranteed.

Roe fell.

Contraception is under attack.

Title IX is a punching bag.

“Traditional values” are being polished like a weapon.

The backsliding may come dressed in red, white, and blue — but it is backsliding all the same.

⚙️ The Double Burden — Russia’s Version and Ours

In the USSR, women were told:

“You are free, comrade. Now go do all the work. At home AND at the factory.”

Sound familiar?

In America, we call it “leaning in.”

We wrap exhaustion in empowerment language and hand women a color-coded planner instead of affordable childcare or paid leave. We tell them burnout is a scheduling issue, not a political one.

Different countries.

Different methods.

Same outcome:

Women carrying the load of an entire society while being told they’re lucky.

📉 Collapse, Crisis, and Who Pays the Price

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, women were the first shoved out of the economy.

Jobs gone.

Childcare gone.

Healthcare gone.

Protections gone.Here in the U.S., economic shocks do the same thing — softly, quietly, with a smile.

2008 recession? Women’s employment cratered.

2020 pandemic? Mothers absorbed a national childcare meltdown.

2023–2025? Inequality widens, and guess who’s tightening the belt?

Crisis always rolls downhill.

And women are the bottom of that hill.

⚠️ When Authoritarians Rise, Women Fall

Putin’s Russia revived “traditional family values,” weakened domestic violence laws, and labeled feminists as foreign agents.

And here at home?

Christian nationalism is trying the same playbook:

• regulating uteruses instead of assault rifles
• elevating “biblical womanhood” over equality
• rolling women’s rights back one court decision at a time

Where authoritarianism grows, women’s rights are the first thing pruned.

They are also the last thing restored.

✨ So What’s the Lesson for American Women Today?

Russia’s women gained rights early, dramatically, and with promise.

American women gained rights slowly, stubbornly, and through collective muscle.

But whether rights come from revolution or activism, they can disappear the moment we stop guarding them.

The truth neither nation wants to admit is simple:

Women’s progress is never permanent. It is only ever protected.

We stand at a moment when the forces that rolled Russia backward are whispering — or shouting — through our own political landscape. And history, generous as ever, is offering us a gift:

A warning.

Let’s not wait to unwrap it until it’s too late.

📣 Keep Fighting, Keep Learning, Keep Rising

The women in Motherland survived revolutions, wars, famine, and political betrayal. They built entire worlds from scratch — more than once.

American women are made of that same steel.

And we, too, know how to rebuild.

Stay vigilant, stay connected, and above all — stay loud.

With strength and clarity,

Julie Bolejack, MBA - The Mindful Activist