Next week, Anastasia Mitrofanova will defend her undergraduate philosophy thesis on "ecofeminism" at Moscow State University, arguing that discrimination against women fuels environmental destruction.


If she passes, she will be the third Moscow State student to graduate in Women's Studies, an interdisciplinary field that aims to fill gaps left by what it sees as academia's traditionally male-oriented approach to history, politics, sociology and literature.


Women's Studies has blossomed in the West since the late 1960s, with over 800 university programs in the United States alone, but only began to take root in Russia in the late 1980s.


In a weekly philosophy class called "Women and the Modern World," Ivanova teaches a handful of students about women forgotten by conventional history -- women like Alexandra Durova, who, Ivanova said, masqueraded as a man for 45 years and rode off to battle Napoleon as General Mikhail Kutuzov's adjutant.


At the Center for Gender Studies, a four-year-old branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 15 women scholars focus the lenses of the social sciences on Russian women's current problems. Zoya Khotkina documents the psychological stress of highly educated women left unemployed, while Valentina Konstantinova is compiling an oral history of women politicians.


These scholars have no ivory tower.


"It's a paradox -- when I was studying, there was nothing to read, and now, when I can read whatever I want, there is no time," said Konstaninova, 46, who remembered sneaking peaks at Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics," a bible of Western feminism, in a specially guarded library before glasnost.


Konstantinova's colleagues run seminars from Minsk to Murmansk. After one, businesswomen in Ufa to banded together to defeat high taxes.


Ivanova heads a group called Women's Alliance, which plans to field a woman presidential candidate.


Ivanova complains of sexual bias in scholarship, noting that not even history is abstract. For example, historians have focused on the love affairs of the tough leader Catherine II while noting the statesmanship of the philandering Peter I, Ivanova said, "because they don't look at women as leaders."


As in the West, ideological differences simmer in Moscow's budding Wo-men's Studies world. Ivanova speaks of women's "special role" as "creator" and peacemaker and calls women who fail to bring a kinder, more humane perspective to politics "mutants."


Konstantinova says: "Those are the kinds of limiting stereotypes we try to fight against."


Introducing Women's Studies is a slow process in a country where Communist gender-equality dogma only seems to have reinforced gender stereotypes. Khotkina said that, at seminars, she has women tell personal stories of, say, shouldering all the housework.


"After hearing 10 other women in a row express the same exact problems," she said, "many say, 'I will no longer be a slave.' If I told them to say this straight away, they would say, 'This is not for us, this is Western.'"