Slavic Review 77, no. 3 (Fall 2018) © 2018 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.207 Why Women Protest: Insights from Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Olena Nikolayenko and Maria DeCasper Women played a pivotal role in the anti-government protests held in Ukraine from November 2013 to February 2014. Dubbed as the EuroMaidan or the Revolution of Dignity, these protests were initially triggered by President Viktor Yanukovych’s abrupt refusal to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), but rapidly grew into a protest campaign encompass- ing a wide range of political demands and attracting a cross-cutting coalition of citizens with a shared distaste for the current regime. 1 In line with Jack Goldstone’s defnition of a revolution, the EuroMaidan signifed “the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions.” 2 According to some estimates, women constituted nearly half of the participants in these protests marked by “the rapid concentration of protestors in urban spaces and the articula- tion of demands for political and civil freedoms.” 3 Citizens brushed of the 1. Scholars distinguish three phases of the 2013–2014 protest campaign: Student Maidan (November 21–30, 2013), with a high rate of student participation in protest events; Maidan Tabir (December 1, 2013–January 15, 2014) marked by the construction of barricades and the growth of the encampment on the Maidan; and Maidan Sich (January 16, 2014–Feb- ruary 22, 2014), signifying an escalation in police violence and the radicalization of protest tactics. For details, see Yuriy Shveda and Joung Ho Park, “Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity: The Dynamics of Euromaidan.” Journal of Eurasian Studies 7, no. 1 (January 2016): 85–91. 2. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2014), 4. 3. The Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF) and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted a survey of protesters on the Maidan on December 7–8, 2013 (n = 1,037), December 20, 2013 (n = 515), and February 3, 2014 (n = 502). Their fnd- ings indicate that the share of female protesters dropped from 42.8 percent in early Decem- ber 2013 to 11.8 percent in February 2014. See “Vid Maidanu-taboru do Maidanu-sichi: Shcho zminylosia?,” at http://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=226&page=2 (last accessed March 1, 2018). However, many women claimed their continuous engagement in the protest campaign despite an escalation in police violence and men’s attempts to turn them away from the barricades. On this point, see, for example, Tamara Martsenyuk, “Genderna sotsi- ologiia Maidanu: Rol zhinok u protestakh” (Electronic Archive of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2014), at http://ekmair.ukma.edu.ua/handle/123456789/3511 (last accessed March 1, 2018); Women of Maidan. Directed by Olha Onyshko and Petro Didula. Kyiv: OliaFilm, 2016; Daria Popova, “Seksizm na Maidani,” Spilne: Journal of Social Cri- tique 9 (2015): 78–82, at https://commons.com.ua/uk/seksizm-na-majdani/ (last accessed February 4, 2017). On the defnition of the urban civic revolution, see Mark Beissinger, “The Semblance of Democratic Revolution: Coalitions in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 3 (August 2013): 574–92, 574. We thank Harriet Murav, Dmitry Tartakovsky, and the anonymous reviewers for their enormously helpful comments. We are also grateful to participants in the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and the Gender and Transformation in Europe Workshop at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University for their valuable feedback, as well as to Iryna Bekeshkina, Direc- tor of the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, for generously providing access to the survey data. In addition, Nikolayenko gratefully acknowledges support of this research by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (Visiting Scholars Pro- gram) and the Ofce of Research at Fordham University (2016–17 Faculty Fellowship).