PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The strongest sections of Motherland derive from Ioffe’s own family history. Her great-grandmothers, grandmothers and mother benefitted from Soviet-era policies that enabled women – including Jewish women from the Pale of Settlement, like all four of her great-grandmothers – to become educated and independent ... Ioffe also offers insights into the policies of Nikita Khrushchev, who sought to foster a postwar Soviet baby boom ... The paradox of what the author calls \'the Soviet feminist experiment\' is that it ended up producing women who aspired to \'a romantic, Western ideal of a stay-at-home wife supported and protected by a rich and masculine man\'.
