A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IFFICULT though it may be to conceive of a Suffragette movement in reverse, something very like it has been going on for years all over Soviet Central Asia, where many- of the women perversely decline to revel in the joys of emancipation. A painstaking survey of this situation, based on material from Russian sources, appears in the current Issue of Central Asian Review, a quarterly published jointly uY the Central Asian Research Centre, which is rather surprisingly located in the King's Road, and a group of experts at St. Antony's College, Oxford. The women of the Central Asian Republics cling obstinately to the traditions which relegated them for centuries to the status of chattels. There are constant complaints that they do not attend school, refuse to go into industry, will not even fill the vacancies allotted to their sex in official establishments and representative bodies. when I was last in those parts, two decades ago, they were Still concealing their faces behind the regulation black veils Ilv[Pven of horse-hair, though these were supposed to be illegal. hese accessories, as I suppose a fashion-writer would call them are no longer made in Russia, but an Uzbek writer who !,Ft Out to study the women's movement' in Uzbekistan found u2at, even in the comparatively sophisticated surroundings ut a new industrial town, the ladies were wearing perforated table-cloths instead; at a meeting of women activists,' most °I Whom were veiled in this way, the chairwoman, after being e,eeted against her will, sat with her back to the audience. `-0Y, perhaps, and hard to please; but not all that uncertain. The Byways of Culture
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