Jane Mcdermid - Women and Work in Russia, 1880-1930: A Study in Continuity Through Change

Women and Work in Russia
18801930

WOMEN AND MEN IN HISTORY

This series, published for students, scholars and interested general readers, will tackle themes in gender history from the early medieval period through to the present day. Gender issues are now an integral part of all history courses and yet many traditional text books do not reflect this change. Much exciting work is now being done to redress the gender imbalances of the past, and we hope that these books will make their own substantial contribution to that process. This is an open-ended series, which means that many new titles can be included. We hope that these will both synthesise and shape future developments in gender studies.

The General Editors of the series are Patricia Skinner (University of Southampton) for the medieval period; Pamela Sharpe (University of Bristol) for the early modern period; and Margaret Walsh (University of Nottingham) for the modern period.

Gender, Church, and State in Early Modern Germany:

Essays by Merry E. Wiesner

Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy

Women and Work in Russia, 18801930:

A Study in Continuity through Change

Women and
Work in Russia
18801930

JANE MCDERMID AND ANNA HILLYAR

First published 1998 by Addison Wesley Longman Limited

Published 2014 by Routledge
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Copyright 1998, Taylor & Francis.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-27986-5 (pbk)

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Set by 35 in 10/12pt Baskerville

This book would not have been possible without the dedicated work of librarians in a number of institutions and countries, and in particular those who work in the inter-library loan service. Staff at the Bodleian library in Oxford, the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at London University, the Russian State library in Moscow, the Saltykov-Shchedrin library in St. Petersburg, and Tomsk University library were generous with their time and expertise. Special thanks is owed to Dorothy Stratford of the Philip Lawrence library at LSU College, Southampton (now University of Southampton New College).

We are also grateful to those who read and commented on the manuscript: Hilary Shaw of Longman (whose patient encouragement and sympathetic understanding kept the book on track), Maggie Walsh of Nottingham University, Jan Rutter at LSU College, Frank Cogliano formerly of LSU now at Edinburgh University, and in particular James D. White at the Institute of Russian and East European Studies, Glasgow University. We have tried to incorporate all of their suggestions, from which the final draft has benefited substantially. Of course, this does not absolve the authors of responsibility for any remaining weaknesses.

This work is a collaborative effort, not simply because there are two authors, but also because, as the bibliography will show, we are indebted to the work of many American and British historians. Our intention was to build on their scholarship by shedding light on a specific area of the history of Russian women. We hope that our book will encourage newcomers to this field to turn to the work of those pioneers on whose shoulders we perch, such as Richard Stites, Barbara Alpern Engel and Linda Edmondson.

Finally, this work began when we were both employed at La Sainte Union College in Southampton. We feel tremendous gratitude to and affection for an institution whose staff and students throughout its existence (19041997) embraced a genuine community spirit. It is to them and to the religious order which established LSU that this book is dedicated.

The best relief from sad thoughts is work thought Vera Pavlovna, and she was quite right.

N.G. Chernyshevsky, What is to be done?, 1863

Alexandra Kollontai (18721953) is generally accepted, at least in the West, as a, if not the, central figure in the movement for the liberation of women in Russia and in the development of Marxist theory on sexual relations. In particular, Kollontai insisted that work and not emotion should be the centre of womens lives, and further that it was productive work, by which she meant paid employment outside the home, which would make women independent and personally fulfilled. She wrote that womans position, her rights, her recognition as an individual, her access to the storehouse of learning always follow from her role in the economy and in production.1

In practice, before the revolution of 1917, although marriage was the destiny of the majority of Russian women, the stress was on the productive as well as reproductive value which they could contribute to the family economy. That economy changed dramatically with the abolition of serfdom in 1861, which made the peasant womans ability to contribute to the household economy, whether by farming or through crafts, even more crucial for its survival, while it forced many upper-class women for the first time to support themselves. Thus the location of womens work after 1861 differed according to class, with the majority of peasant women tied to the home, and considerable numbers of gentry women pushed out of it. With the push for industrialisation from the 1880s, but especially from the 1890s, alongside growing impoverishment of the peasantry, more and more women were drawn to the towns in search of work. Often the type of employment which they found differed little from their village experience of work, especially domestic service, textiles, and cultivating kitchen gardens. However, as urbanisation developed and industry became more complex, women found a widening choice of jobs. Indeed, as the political opposition to the absolutist system of rule erupted into revolution in 1905, employers turned increasingly to women as replacements for male workers, who were considered less reliable, not just politically but also because of their indiscipline, reflected most commonly in drunkenness.