“Good Mothers”, Nations and Nationalisms

Yulia Gradskova is Associate Professor in History, Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research interests include postsocialist gender history, transnational history and women’s internationalism during the Cold War as well as decolonial perspective on Soviet politics of emancipation of “woman of the East”. She is the author of East-South Women’s Internationalist at the Cold War Periphery (Bloomsbury 2025); The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War. Defending the Rights of Women of the ‘Whole World’? (Routledge 2021) and of Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Women. Natsionalka (Springer, 2018) and co-editor of several books.Ieva Bisigirskaite is a Research Fellow and a Lecturer at Vilnius University. Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist sociolinguistics, critical motherhood studies, nationalism, and maternal activism, as well as queer onomastics within post-socialist contexts. She earned her doctorate in Gender Studies and Eastern European Studies from the University of Zurich (2020) with her dissertation “Choosing a surname of her own: non(neo)-traditional femininities in contemporary Lithuania.”Soheyla Yazdanpanah is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Södertörn University and holds a PhD in Economic History from Stockholm University. Her research focuses on inequalities in the context of livelihood, working life, and migration. With particular attention to marginalized group of women’s living and working conditions, she investigates how economic, social, and cultural processes generate and reproduce inequality—especially through the intersections of gender, class, and race/ethnicity in Sweden.

• Chapter 1. “Good Motherhood” in a Time of “Demographic Anxieties” and Femonationalisms: Introduction Chapter 2. Mothers We Care For and Mothers We Care About: Redefining “Good Motherhood” through Maternal Activism in Contemporary Lithuania Chapter 3. “Preservation of the Nation Needs Women’s Care”: Authoritarianism, “Demographic Anxiety,” and Mediated Religion in the Russian Federation Chapter 4. What Is the “Problem” with Migrant Mothers in Sweden? Politicians’ Femonationalist Narratives on Migrant Mothers and Mothering Chapter 5. Being a “Good Mother”: Navigating “National” Motherhood Ideals and Realities among Postsocialist (Muslim) Migrant Mothers in Sweden Chapter 6. Femonationalism, Militarism, and Resistances to Authoritarian “Good Motherhood” in Russia Afterword