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Rentiers, teachers and workers: Greek women in late nineteenth-century Odessa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Evrydiki Sifneos
Evrydiki Sifneos*
Affiliation:
Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation
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Abstract

This article sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Greek paroikia of Odessa, its female component, in the late imperial period. By revisiting the 1897 All-Russian Census, it offers an insight into the demographic and social features of Greek women, and depicts their occupational position. It shows that middle-class and working women formed the majority of the Greek female workforce and suggests that their participation or non-participation in the labour market depended on the ability of the male breadwinner to support his household financially.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , 2010 , pp. 182 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2010

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References

1 Exceptions include Katsiardi-Hering, O., H ελληνική παροικία της Τεργέστης, 1750–1830, 2 vols. (Athens 1986)Google Scholar; Vlami, D., To #x03C6;ιορίνι, го στάχυ και η οδός του κήπου. Έλληνες έμποροι στο Λιβόρνο, 1750-1868 (Athens 2000)Google Scholar; Seirinidou, V., ‘Έλληνες στη Βιέννη, 1780-1850’, PhD Dissertation, University of Athens, 2002 Google Scholar; Sifneos, E. and Paradeisopoulos, S., ‘Όι’Ελληνες της Οδησσού στα 1897. Ξαναδιαβάζοντας την πρώτη ρωσική απογραφή’, Та Ιστορικά 44 (June 2006) 81–122 Google Scholar.

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4 See the contributions to the International Colloquium ‘Rival Pursuits, Common Experiences: Social Transformation and Mass Mobilization in the Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Cities (1900-1923)’ organized by the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/F.O.R.T.H. at Rethymno (Crete), 22-24 October 2009, as well as my paper ‘Indifference and/or egocentrism? The Greek paroikia of Odessa facing the twentieth-century social turmoil’ (forthcoming).

5 Historiography on the German and British communities has already offered some comparative paradigms. See, e.g., Henriksson, A., ‘Nationalism, assimilation and identity in late imperial Russia: the St Petersburg Germans, 1906-1914’, Russian Review 52.3 (July 1993) 341-53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 On the subject of assimilation or Russification in the Empire’s western provinces, see Weeks, T. R., Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb, IL 2008)Google Scholar.

11 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Odesskoi Oblasty (GAOO) (Odessa State Archive), opis 8, 9, 10. For a concise presentation of the results of the census see the published Pervaya vseobshchaya perepis naseleniya Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897g., vol. 47, Odessa (Moscow 1903).

12 The Russian population belonged to four social categories (soslovie ‘estates’): the nobility, the clergy, the townspeople and the peasants, each of which had its own role in the state. This social structure retarded the socio-economic development of Russia. By the Great Reforms of the mid-nineteenth century the old social order began to dismantle and allowed the transformation of estates into classes. Freeze, G. L., ‘The soslovie (estate) paradigm and Russian social history’, The American Historical Review 91.1 (Feb. 1986) 11–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 See Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Database Greeks in Odessa, 1897, henceforth Database Odessa 1897.

14 Skinner, F. W., Odessa and the problem of urban modernization’, in Hamm, M. (ed.), The City in Late Imperial Russia (Lexington, KY 1976) 209-48Google Scholar.

15 Vervaya vseobshchaya, 1.

16 Pervaya vseobshchaya, table XLVII, 2

17 Vervaya vseobshchaya, table XXIV, 300-301.

18 On the history of the city, see Odesskoe gorodskoe obshchestvennogo upr. K. stoletiyu goroda Odessa, 1794-1894 (Odessa 1895); Herlihy, P., Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 (Cambridge, MA 1986)Google Scholar; Herlihy, P., ‘Commerce and architecture in Odessa during the late imperial period’, in Brumfield, William C. et al. (eds.), Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861-1914 (Washington, DC 2001) 180-94Google Scholar; for a social history of Odessa see Sylvester, R. P., Tales of Old Odessa. Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb, IL 2005)Google Scholar.

19 Weinberg, R., ‘Workers, pogroms and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa’, Russian Review 46 (1987) 53–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Pervaya vseobshckaya, table XXIV, 303.

21 On Russian Germans in St Petersburg see Hendriksson, A., ‘Nationalism, assimilation and identity in late imperial Russia: the St Petersburg Germans, 1906-1914’, The Russian Review 52 (1993) 341-53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Database Odessa 1897, no. 208, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 703.

23 Database Odessa 1897, no. 235, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 1003.

24 Pervaya, Table XXIV, 303.

25 Pervaya, table XXIV, 303.

26 Paradeisopoulos and Sifneos, ‘ΌιΈλληνες της Οδησσού το 1897’, 86-7, 115.

27 Ibid., 118.

28 Grecheskaya (Greek Street) was inhabited initially by Greek citizens and ended at the Greek commercial centre, a round building that belonged to the Ralli family.

29 Database Odessa 1897, no. 38, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 560.

30 Database Odessa, 1897, no. 65, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 387.

31 Dir Odessa 1897, no. 1888 refers to GAOO fond 2, opis 8, delo.

32 The average rent for a room in an apartment in the Bulvarnyi quarter was 122 roubles, while in the outlying industrial Peresyp district it was 47 roubles. Odesskoe gorodskoe, 62-3.

33 Otchet sanitarnogo byuro Odesskogo gorodskogo obshchestvennogo upravlenniya za 1900 (Odessa 1902) 5.

34 Database Odessa 1897, no. 1779, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 1238.

35 Database Odessa 1897, no. 185, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 756.

36 Database Odessa, 1897, no. 687, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 734.

37 Paradeisopoulos, S., ‘To Ροδοκανάκενο Παρθεναγωγείο’, Istorika, Eleftherotypia 58 (23 Nov. 2000) 38–41 Google Scholar.

38 Herlihy, Odessa, 256-7.

39 On the same argument see the fundamental article by Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., ‘Women’s labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family, 1790-1865’, Economic History Review 48 (1995) 89–117 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See Tatiana Dimitriou in Table 3.

41 Database Odessa 1897, no. 48, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 387.

42 Database Odessa 1897, no. 110, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 564.

43 Database Odessa 1897, no. 197, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 702.

44 Viskovskii, K., Putevoditel po gorodu Odesse s podrobnym planom (Odessa 1875)Google Scholar.

45 Journal d’Odessa, 25 September 1875.

46 Database Odessa 1897, no. 1285, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 635.

47 Database Odessa 1897, no. 843, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 621.

48 Database Odessa 1897, no. 917, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 512.

49 The Tsironis family, which came from Syros in the early 1870s, worked in a tannery owned by a Greek in Peresyp district. Database Odessa 1897, no. 297-300, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 127.

50 Skinner, Odessa and the problem of urban modernization’, 231.

51 Database Odessa 1897, no. 137, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 534.

52 Database Odessa 1897, no. 279, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 130.

53 Database Odessa 1897, no. 1272, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 859.

54 Database Odessa 1897, no. 1809, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 387.

55 Database Odessa 1897, no. 908, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 468.

56 Database Odessa 1897, no. 683, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 734.

57 Cf. Mazis, The Greeks of Odessa, 93-113.

58 Bernstein, L., Sonia’s Daughters. Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley and London 1995) 2 Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 5.

60 Database Odessa 1897, no. 1066 and 1088, referring to GAOO, fond 2, opis 8, delo 810. The novelist Aleksandr Kuprin also describes the narrow winding streets near Odessa’s harbour, where beer-houses, eating houses and brothels, public or illegal, existed, and where citizens of the upper city preferred not to venture at night: Kuprin, A., Granatovyi braselet (Moscow 1911 Google Scholar) [published in English as The Garnet Bracelet and other stories (Moscow, n.d.)] 279.

61 Skinner, 242.

62 GAOO, fond 2, opis 477, delo 2483, 9 Nov. 1886.

63 See the claim of the mother, a Jewish chicken-trader who worked in the market, ibid.

64 Skinner, Odessa and the problem of urban modernization’, 151-2.