Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia
Author: Wendy Rosslyn
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1906924651

"This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia--from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia--discussing their interaction with the Church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic presence in Russia's culture and society"--Publisher's description.

A Woman's Kingdom

A Woman's Kingdom
Author: Michelle Lamarche Marrese
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501728512

In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.

The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia

The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia
Author: Richard Stites
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400843278

Richard Stites views the struggle for liberation of Russian women in the context of both nineteenth-century European feminism and twentieth-century communism. The central personalities, their vigorous exchange of ideas, the social and political events that marked the emerging ideal of emancipation--all come to life in this absorbing and dramatic account. The author's history begins with the feminist, nihilist, and populist impulses of the 1860s and 1870s, and leads to the social mobilization campaigns of the early Soviet period.

Russia Through Women's Eyes

Russia Through Women's Eyes
Author: Toby W. Clyman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300067545

Autobiografieën van vrouwen over hun jonge jaren in tsaristisch Rusland.

Peasant Icons

Peasant Icons
Author: Cathy A. Frierson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1993
Genre: Peasantry
ISBN: 9780195072945

In the thirty years after Russian peasants were emancipated in 1861, they became a major focus of Russian intellectual life. This text is the first to examine the revealing images of the peasant created by Russian writers, scholars, journalists, and government officials during that period, as the identity and fate of the Russian peasant became an integral component in the future of Russia envisioned by liberal reformers and conservatives alike. Frierson examines the persisting stereotypes created by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and other intellectuals seeking to understand village life, from the likable narod, the simple folk, to the exploitative kulak, the village strongman.

Mothers and Daughters

Mothers and Daughters
Author: Barbara Alpern Engel
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2000-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810117401

"The first psychosocial study of the female intelligentsia in Russia, Mothers and Daughters explains how and why women radicals of the nineteenth century diverged from their male counterparts, describes the forces that led women to rebel, and discusses their mixed legacy to future generations. Barbara Alpern Engel examines her subject on three levels: the traditional family system; early feminism and women's rebellion against the family; and the causes and consequences of women's revolutionary activity. She describes the impact this revolt had on the family and the lives of radical women and the movement's role in inspiring a new feminine mythology. Throughout, Engel brings nineteenth-century women to life, humanizing history as she presents a case study of how the personal became political in a time and place very different from our own." --Book Jacket.

Reinventing Romantic Poetry

Reinventing Romantic Poetry
Author: Diana Greene
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299191036

Reinventing Romantic Poetry offers a new look at the Russian literary scene in the nineteenth century. While celebrated poets such as Aleksandr Pushkin worked within a male-centered Romantic aesthetic—the poet as a bard or sexual conqueror; nature as a mother or mistress; the poet’s muse as an idealized woman—Russian women attempting to write Romantic poetry found they had to reinvent poetic conventions of the day to express themselves as women and as poets. Comparing the poetry of fourteen men and fourteen women from this period, Diana Greene revives and redefines the women’s writings and offers a thoughtful examination of the sexual politics of reception and literary reputation. The fourteen women considered wrote poetry in every genre, from visions to verse tales, from love lyrics to metaphysical poetry, as well as prose works and plays. Greene delves into the reasons why their writing was dismissed, focusing in particular on the work of Evdokiia Rostopchina, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Karolina Pavlova. Greene also considers class as a factor in literary reputation, comparing canonical male poets with the work of other men whose work, like the women’s, was deemed inferior at the time. The book also features an appendix of significant poems by Russian women discussed in the text. Some, found in archival notebooks, are published here for the first time, and others are reprinted for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century.

Women in Russian History

Women in Russian History
Author: Natalia Pushkareva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315480433

As the first survey of the history of women in Russia to be published in any language, this book is itself an historic event -- the result of the collaboration of the leading Russian and American specialists on Russian women's history. The book is divided in to four chronological parts corresponding to eras of Russian history: (I) Kievan/Mongol (10th - 15th centuries); (II) Muscovite ( 16th - 17th centuries); (III) 18th century; and (IV) 19th - early 20th centuries. Each part gives coverage to four main topics: (1) The role of prominent women in public life, with biographical sketches of women who attained prominence in political or cultural life; (2) Women's daily life and family roles; (3) Women's status under the law; (4) Material culture and in particular women's dress as an expression of their place in society.

American Girls in Red Russia

American Girls in Red Russia
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2017-04-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 022625612X

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

Finding the Middle Ground

Finding the Middle Ground
Author: Jehanne Gheith
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810117142

An examination of two influential women writers in the mid-nineteenth century which challenges many common assumptions about the development of the Russian literary tradition