‘HERSTORY’ IN HISTORY: A PLACE OF WOMEN IN UKRAINIAN URBAN TOPONYMY

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of gender equality in urban toponymy – the equal right of women along with men to be commemorated in urban streetscape and thus to be perceived as a full-fledged actor of history. Today, the process of street naming typically reflects masculinist bias resulting in far fewer streets being named in honour of women than men. Despite a growing interest in examining how street naming and related toponymic practices are implicated in the gendering of urban space, toponymic gender inequalities still remain understudied in different cultural and geopolitical contexts. Focusing on the case of Ukraine, geopolitically-divided post-Soviet country with contingent and contradictory memory policy, we show that contemporary toponymic gender disparities in the cities in Ukraine are similar to those observed in other European countries, but the specificity is expressed in a different structure and historical dynamics of female urbanonyms. The study of Ukrainian female street names was carried out on the basis of 41 largest cities covering all administrative regions. A number of indicators were calculated to evaluate the changes in the quantity and share of female urban toponymy in the period after the Soviet Union collapse. The structure of commemorated female personalities by professions and activities was determined as well. Special attention, including in-depth historical overview, was paid to the three cases representing different historical and cultural background – Lviv (west), Kyiv (centre) and Kharkiv (east). Existing regional differences are explained by (geo)political divisions as well as economic and cultural factors. Recent policy of decommunization has had ambiguous effect on the gender proportions of urban toponymy: although a lot of new female names were introduced, Communist female names have disappeared contributing to growing toponymic gender imbalance in some cities.