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Engendering Russia's History: Women in Post-Emancipation Russia and the Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Barbara Alpern Engel
Barbara Alpern Engel*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Colorado
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Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 309 - 322
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

I would like to thank Diana Greene for her advice and assistance in the preparation of this essay.

1. Shashkov, S. S., htoriia russkoi zhenshchiny (St. Petersburg: O. N. Popova, 1898).Google Scholar

2. Likhacheva, Elena, Materialy Alia istorii zhenskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1899-1901)Google Scholar. Most early works in English, while useful introductions to the past of Russia's women, often lacked both scholarly rigor and scholarly apparatus. See, for example, Selivanova, Nina, Russia's Women (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923)Google Scholar.

3. Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.Google Scholar

4. In my introduction to Mothers and Daughters, I acknowledge the personal element explicitly; so do the editors of a recent collection on Soviet women. See Engel, Barbara Alpern, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth CenturyRussia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983 Google Scholar; and Holland, Barbara, “Introduction,” Soviet Sisterhood, ed. Holland, Barbara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.Google Scholar

5. On “contribution” history, see Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: A 1975 Perspective,” in Liberating Women's History, ed. Bernice Carroll, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 358, 360. Works on Russian history that conform to this characterization are to be found in the note that follows.

6. Bergman, Jay, Vera Zasulich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar Broido, Vera, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (New York: Viking Press, 1977 Google Scholar; Clements, Barbara, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979 Google Scholar; Engel, Barbara and Rosenthal, Clifford, eds., Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1975 Google Scholar; Farnsworth, Beatrice, Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980 Google Scholar; Koblitz, Ann Hibner, A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary(Boston: Birkhauser Boston, Inc., 1983)Google Scholar; McNeal, Robert, Bride of the Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Cathy, Fathers and Daughters: Russian Women in Revolution (London: Virago, 1976 Google Scholar; Lapidus, Gail, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 Google Scholar. The pioneering collection Women in Russia, (ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977]) contains essays that extend beyond these subjects, as doesThe Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (ed. David Ransel [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978]).

7. Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel and Christine Worobec, eds., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

8. See, for example, Aleksandra Efimenko, hsledovaniia narodnoi zhizni (Moscow: V. I. Kasperov, 1884); Maria Gorbunova's study of peasant women's crafts, published as Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po moskovskoi gubernii, t. 7, vyp. 4 (Moscow: Izd. moskovskago gubernskago zemstva, 1882) and the numerous articles by Maria Pokrovskaia.

9. Rose Glickman, The Russian Factory Woman: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

10. For a discussion of recent scholarship on women's work culture, see Sandra Morgen, “Beyond the Double Day: Work and Family in Working-Class Women's Lives,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 53-67.

11. On the basis of very different evidence, Anne Bobroff draws the same conclusion. See “Russian Working Women: Sexuality in Bonding Patterns and the Politics of Daily Life,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 206-27.

12. Rose Glickman, “Women and the Peasant Commune,” in Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, ed. Roger Bardett (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 321-38; and “The Peasant Woman as Healer” in Russia's Women, 163-85.

13. Judith Pallot, “Women's Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880-1900,” inRussia's Women, 163-85.

14. Christine Worobec, “Customary Law and Property Devolution among Russian Peasants in the 1870s,” Canadian Slavonic Papers XXVI, nos. 2 and 3 (June-September 1984): 220-34.

15. Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Litigious Daughter-in-Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Slavic Review 45, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 49-64.

16. David Ransel, “Abandonment and Fosterage of Unwanted Children: The Women of the Foundling System,” in The Family in Imperial Russia, 189-217.

17. Barbara Alpern Engel, “The Woman's Side: Male Out-Migration and the Family Economy in Kostroma Province,” Slavic Review 45, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 257-71.

18. Nancy Frieden, “Child Care: Medical Reform in a Traditionalist Culture,” in The Family in Imperial Russia, 236-59.

19. Worobec, Christine, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991 Google Scholar; “Accommodation and Resistance,” inRussia's Women, 17-29; and “Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and Patriarchy,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921, eds. Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 177-206. See also Farnsworth, Beatrice, “The Soldatka: Folklore and Court Record,” Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 58–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matossian, Mary, “The Peasant Way of Life,” in The Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russia, ed. Vucinich, Wayne, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 1–40 Google Scholar; and Antonina Martynova, “Life of the Pre-Revolutionary Village as Reflected in Popular Lullabies,” in The Family in Imperial Russia, 171-85. The annotated bibliography at the end of this edited volume surveys important primary, secondary and bibliographic literature on women and the family.

20. See the contributions by Ellen DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg to “Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 26-64. On the basis of her reading in secondary sources, Temma Kaplan applies this argument to the February revolution. See Temma Kaplan, “Women and Communal Strikes in the Crisis of 1917-1922,” inBecoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), 430-38.

21. William Wagner, “The Trojan Mare: Women's Rights and Civil Rights in Late Imperial Russia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, eds. Olga Crisp and Linda H. Edmondson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65-84.

22. David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

23. Johanson, Christine, Women's Struggle for Higher Education in Russia, 1855-1900 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. For a survey of women students, see Dudgeon, Ruth, “The Forgotten Minority: Women Students in Imperial Russia, 1872-1917,” Russian History 9 (1982): 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Rose Glickman discusses the lives of factory women; material on the life of domestic servants can be found in David Ransel, Mothers of Misery. Domestic service, which employed the largest proportion of urban working women at least until 1914, merits further study.

25. On village controls, see Engel, Barbara Alpern, “Peasant Morality and PreMarital Relations in Late Nineteenth Century Russia,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 695–714 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Worobec, Christine, “Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society,” Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 227–38.Google Scholar

26. David Ransel, “Problems in Measuring Illegitimacy in Prerevolutionary Russia,” Journal of Social History 16 (Winter 1982): 111-27.

27. On prostitution in Russia, see Stites, Richard, “Prostitute and Society in Pre-Revolutionary Russia,” Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 31, no. 3 (1983): 348–64Google Scholar; and Engel, Barbara Alpern, “St. Petersburg Prostitutes in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Social Profile,” Russian Review 48, no. 1 (1989): 21–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. On the “yellow ticket,” see Laurie Bernstein, “Yellow Tickets and State-Licensed Brothels: The Tsarist Government and the Regulation of Urban Prostitution,” inHealth and Society in Revolutionary Russia, eds. Susan Gross Solomon and John Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 45-65.

29. Laura Engelstein, “Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 169-208.

30. Wagner, “The Trojan Mare,” 84.

31. -Ibid.

32. Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rapein Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes,” Journal of Modern History 60, no. 3 (September 1988): 458-95.

33. Laura Engelstein, “Morality and the Wooden Spoon.”

34. Brenda Meehan-Waters, “From Contemplative Practice to Charitable Activity: Russian Women's Religious Communities and the Development of Charitable Work, 1861-1917,” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy and Power, ed. Kathleen McCarthy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 142-57.

35. Christine Ruane, “The Vestal Virgins of St. Petersburg: School Teachers and the 1897 Marriage Ban,” Russian Review 50, no. 2 (April 1991): 163-82.

36. Linda Harriet Edmondson, The Feminist Movement in Russia, 1900-1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); and Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement.

37. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Surprisingly, this book has rather little to say about the role of women or about gender in post-revolutionary Utopian visions.

38. On Kollontai, see Clements, Bolshevik Feminist; and Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai. For Kollontai's writings, see Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, ed. Alix Holt (Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1977); and the analysis in Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 44-57.

39. On the Zhenotdel, see Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement, Carol Hayden, “The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party,” Russian History, 3 (Fall 1976): 150-73; and Buckley, Women and Ideology.

40. Elizabeth Waters, “The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-1932,” in Russia's Women, 225-42 and Victoria Bonnell, “The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art,” Russian Review 50, no. 3 (July 1991): 267-88.

41. Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 6.

42. Barbara Evans Clements, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, eds. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 220-37.

43. Wendy Goldman, “Women, the Family, and the New Revolutionary Order in the Soviet Union,” in Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, eds. Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn Young (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), 59-81.

44. Barbara Evans Clements, “Working Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution,” Signs 8, no. 2 (1982): 215-35; and “The Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations,” in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, eds. Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 105-22.

45. Excerpts from the debates are reproduced in The Family in the USSR: Documents and Readings, ed. Rudolf Schlesinger (London: Routledge and Paul, 1949).

46. Beatrice Farnsworth, “Bolshevik Alternatives and the Soviet Family: The 1926 Marriage Law Debate,” in Women in Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson et al., 139-66.

47. Wendy Goldman, “Freedom and its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926,” Russian History 11 (Winter 1984): 362-88.

48. Barbara Clements, “The Birth of the New Soviet Woman,” in Bolshevik Culture, 220-37.

49. Lynne Viola, “Bab'i bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectivization,” Russian Review 45, no. 1 (January 1986): 23-42.

50. Wendy Goldman, “Women, Abortion and the State, 1917-36,” in Russia's Women, 243-67.

51. The most well known of these are Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, Hope Against Hope (New York: Atheneum, 1970 Google Scholar; and Eugenia, Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967)Google Scholar. Orlova, Raisa in Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983 Google Scholar provides a thoughtful recounting of the Stalin years. Kochina, Elena in Blockade Diary (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990 Google Scholar provides a harrowing account of the siege of Leningrad.

52. Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women's Roles in Rural Development in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

53. See Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society; Dodge, Norton, Women in the Soviet Economy: Their Role in the Economic, Scientific and Technical Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966 Google Scholar; Sacks, Michael, Women's Work in Soviet Russia: Continuity in the Midst of Change (New York: Praeger, 1976 Google Scholar; Buckley, Women and Ideology; and the essays by Sacks, Dodge, Chapman and Moses in Women in Russia, eds. D. Atkinson et al.

54. Mollie Rosenham, “Images of Male and Female in Children's Readers,” in Women in Russia, eds. D. Atkinson et al., 293-306; Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and the essays by Attwood, McAndrew, Peers, Holland and McKevitt in Soviet Sisterhood.Even Soviet writers who seem “feminist” in other respects endorse stereotyped views of women as is clear from the essays in Women, Work, and Family in the Soviet Union, ed. Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

55. On Soviet feminists, see Alix Holt, “The First Soviet Feminists,” in Soviet Sisterhood, 237-65; and Rochelle Ruthchild, “Sisterhood and Socialism: The Soviet Feminist Movement,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 7, no. 2 (1983): 4-12. In 1987, a new feminist samizdat entitled Women's Readings (Zhenskoe Chtenie) appeared in Leningrad, edited by Olga Lipovskaia. See Barbara Alpern Engel, “An Interview with Olga Lipovskaia,” Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989): 6-10. Some feminist dissident writings have been collected and published in Women and Russia. Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union, ed. Tatyana Mamonova (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). An earlier collection of feminist writings was published in England: Woman and Russia. The First Feminist Samizdat (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1980).

56. Buckley, Women and Ideology, is especially good on recent developments in Soviet thinking about women.

57. Elizabeth Waters, “Restructuring the ‘Woman Question': Perestroika and Prostitution,” Feminist Review, no. 33 (Autumn 1989): 3-19. A prime example of the invocation of gender is Valentin Rasputin, “Women Mirror our Entire Culture,” Perestroika, no. 3 (1991): 32-39.1 am very grateful to Elizabeth Waters for sending this article to me.

58. For example, in February 1991, a conference on “Feminism in Russian Culture” was held in Leningrad. A substantial portion of the papers was provided by historians. A similar conference was planned for January 1992 but canceled.

59. References to women of the clerical estate can be found in Gregory Freeze, “Caste and Emancipation: The Changing Status of Clerical Families in the Great Reforms,” inThe Family in Imperial Russia, 124-50.

60. For the impact of grandmothers, for example, see Ludmilla Alexeyeva, and Goldberg, Paul, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), 11–12.Google Scholar