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17 - Women and the state

from Part II - Russia and the Soviet Union: Themes and Trends

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Barbara Engel
Edited by
Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny
Affiliation:
University of Chicago and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

By the early twentieth century, far-reaching changes had begun to challenge Russia’s traditional gender hierarchies. Industrialisation and the proliferation of market relations, the growth of a consumer culture and the expansion of education, among other processes, touched the lives of Russia’s rural as well as urban population. Economic change expanded women’s employment opportunities, while new cultural trends encouraged the pursuit of pleasure in a populace long accustomed to subordinating individual needs to family and community. At the same time, patriarchal relations served as both metaphor and model for Russia’s political order. The law upheld patriarchal family relations, as did the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast majority of Russia’s people. Religious institutions governed marriage and divorce, which the Russian Orthodox Church permitted only for adultery, abandonment, sexual incapacity and penal exile, and then only reluctantly. Marital law required a woman to cohabit with her husband, regardless of his behaviour.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, this system encountered a range of challenges. Liberal reformers sought to revise Russia’s laws, those governing the family in particular, as a means to reconfigure the entire social and political order. Among the challengers were women, who also strove to make their voices heard. Yet women were rarely in a position to influence decisively the discourse on women, or to exercise authority decisively on women’s behalf. Instead, as a revolutionary wave mounted, broke and receded, women’s voices grew muted, and a gendered hierarchy re-emerged that echoed pre-revolutionary patterns while assuming novel forms.

Keywords

Russian peasant womenRussia's political orderfemale labour forceBolshevik partyStalinist revolutionSoviet state
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Russia , pp. 468 - 494
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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