A Side Door to Women's History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Village Women in 20th Century Russia: Three Generations of Change
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2000
Research for this study began about ten years ago, and a book will appear this fall titled Village Mothers: Three Generations a/Change in Russia and Tataria (Indiana University Press, 2000). The first two chapters of the book trace the entry of Western medical discourse on reproduction into Russia from the eighteenth century onward and its transmittal to villages during the late imperial and Soviet periods. The remainder of the book follows the reception of the new ideas and practices by three generations of Russian and Tatar village women in the twentieth century. Their oral testimony was collected in 100 interviews conducted in the spring and summer of 1990 and summers of 1993 and 1994. The principal interview sites were in Novgorod, Smolensk, Moscow, Tambov, UI'ianovsk, and Sverdlovsk provinces. I did many of the interviews myself; Russian and Tatar collaborators conducted many others using my questionnaire. The chapters based on the oral interviews cover courtship and marriage, abortion and other means of birth limitation, birthing, baptism (and equivalent Muslim rites), coping with infant death, and early child care, including feeding, swaddling, and herbal and magical medical practices. What follows is an excerpt from the concluding chapter and constitutes a summary of the experience and stance of each of the three generations.
International Review of Social History, 2006
The history of women's work has long been dominated by the debate on ''continuity'' or ''change''. Following Alice Clark, some women's historians have described the preindustrial period as a golden age for working women. Work opportunities contracted over the course of time, under the influence of the rise of capitalism, industrialization, economic specialization, and the changing function of the family. Another cluster of historians criticized this interpretation and emphasized the continuity in the history of women's work. Patriarchal restrictions dominated, as did a gender division of labour. They argued that women's work had always been low valued, poorly paid, and low-skilled. Recently however, historians question whether women's labour participation can be characterized by either continuity or change. Marjorie McIntosh's book Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620 supports this view. McIntosh agrees with the argument that women had more economic opportunities in the post-Plague period (1348/1349-1500) than around 1600, but stresses that this does not imply that their situation was rosy. McIntosh comes to this conclusion after extensive archival research. She selects five market centres spread geographically and representing various economic patterns. Local records are supplemented with tax records and a large sample of petitions submitted by women to the equity court. These petitions are particularly valuable since they shed light on the economic activities of married women, who normally remain hidden because they have lost their legal identity under common law. Despite the disadvantages of the source, all of which the author carefully takes into account, the petitions provide both a quantitative basis and interesting insights into the personal lives of working women. Not all information is new. But as well as occupations studied before (servants, midwives, prostitutes, brewsters) this book addresses new types of work (taking in boarders, money lending, pawnbroking) thereby providing us with a very welcome overview of the wide range of activities performed by women in the market economy and with new explanations at the same time. The book is structured thematically and divided into three parts. After an outline of the general features of women's work, an introduction of the sources, and an overview of the historiographical debate (under the telling title ''How Have Scholars Interpreted the Sources?''), McIntosh identifies the main changes and areas of continuity in the period 1300-1620, based on literature and on her own research. The second part of the book covers women's work in the services sector. The third part is reserved for women's involvement in production and trade and the role of women as consumers. Women provided a wide variety of services for pay, either as servants, nurses, midwives, sex workers, cooks, cleaners, or less commonly known, by taking in boarders (children, orphans, sick people, pregnant women, the elderly). Most of these activities were closely connected to the domestic responsibilities of women, poorly paid, and did not enhance social credit. Therefore, women in the service sector were not perceived as a threat to male
Women's labor in Russian America, 2022
The topic of the use of female labor in the Russian colonies in the New World has not yet been fully studied, since researchers have usually been attracted only by the activities of women who came to Alaska from Russia and Europe. However, the bulk of the female population of Alaska at that time was not made up of them but rather of Unangan (Aleuts), and Alutiiq/Sugpiaq, and other Alaska Natives, and from the very beginning of Russian colonization Indigenous women were used in work by the newcomers, often in a forced way. The scale of the use of female labor increased sharply after the founding of permanent Russian settlements in America (from 1784). Only after naval officers came to power in the colonies (from 1818) did the labor of Indigenous women began to be regularly rewarded, albeit very insignificantly. The natives of the metropolis, of whom there were always very few in the colonies, mainly kept up the households and only occasionally worked as servants, livestock tenders, midwives, and caretakers of schools for girls. Their contribution to the general labor effort was not comparable to the scale of the work of Indigenous women.
Gender & History
This article looks to the societal and imperial margins to examine attitudes towards social welfare provision in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Drawing on archival material from the Empire's Estliand province (now northern Estonia), the article focuses on the self-representation of single mothers and official discussions of abandoned children. Society was in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration served to undermine traditional social structures, mentalities and identities. These changes were accompanied by the disruption of the traditional patriarchal gender order, as well shifting ideas about who ought to be responsible for taking care of vulnerable groups. In rural Estliand, Estonian-speaking unmarried women sought engagement with Russian imperial judicial structures to secure child maintenance. In the early 1900s, anxieties about the social impacts of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and the development of new currents in philanthropy, meant that care for foundlings and abandoned children became a burning issue in the minds of Estliand's provincial officials. Examining single mothers and child abandonment in Estliand illuminates tensions between empire-wide and local mechanisms for dealing with social issues, as well as shifting attitudes to gender, the family and charity in light of urbanisation and modernisation. In December 1910, a ticket inspector discovered an unaccompanied newborn baby in one of the third-class cars on the Pskov-Riga railway, a railroad line that cut through the region of the Russian Empire that comprises present-day Estonia. 1 The local police searched for the baby's mother and found Liza Laiden, who hailed from the Estonian countryside. Laiden admitted that she had given birth that day in a nearby town, but since the child was 'illegitimate' (nezakonnyi, literally translated as 'illegal') and the father refused to provide financial support, she made the snap decision to leave the child on the train in the hope that somebody else would take him to a foundling home. Laiden's child would have been classed as illegitimate under Russian imperial law because he had been conceived through the crime of fornication, defined in the criminal code as consensual sexual intercourse between heterosexual unmarried partners. 2 This article focuses on the two groups in the above case, single mothers and abandoned infants, to examine shifting perceptions about whose responsibility it was to take care of vulnerable groups in the final decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. Taking the case study of Estliand province (Estliandskaia guberniia,
Conception of Family and Motherhood In Soviet Russia (1917-1926) – A Rhetorical Analysis
Family in the Soviet Union held a special place in the hearts of the Bolshevik party, it represented the promise of the socialist future. In order for the International Marxist Revolution to succeed , the family had to be revolutionized , women had to be free from household drudgery and children had to be educated politically. Communist authorities took many steps to achieve this goal, to construct an altogether new way of life. This essay is aimed at analyzing the Bolshevik ideology on family , the rhetoric that the Bolsheviks used to make radical programmes related to family, marriage and perspectives they had on the role of family under socialism.It is an attempt to see how law influenced the family domain and to what extent , was law just a rhetorical device used by the state to create the ‘New Soviet Person’, were women seen as ‘militant’, ‘revolutionary’ or ‘caring mothers’. It will also explore why there was so much emphasis on motherhood and how hygiene as a propaganda was used to medicalise motherhood and professionalize childcare with new norms , authorities and institutions.