Vol 18, No 2 (2019): Russian history in the gender dimension
- Year: 2019
- Articles: 13
- URL: http://journals.rudn.ru/russian-history/issue/view/1191
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.22363/2312-8674-2019-18-2
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Heuristic value of autobiographies for specialists in gender and female studies (based on the comparison of theoretical results of Russian and international autobiographical studies). The article discusses the qualitative changes in the study of autobiographies in historical works. The author focuses on the importance of gender studies in the field of complex relations between various approaches, including the philosophical, psychological, and linguistic way of analyzing life histories, in general, and women’s autobiographies, in particular (which comprises using the theory of female writing created by French feminist philosophers), as well as old and recent literature in the field of autobiographical research. The gender approach to the analysis of documents makes it possible to conclude that men report less about their family and private life and tend to give this life a different meaning and place in the system of value hierarchies. The second conclusion when comparing male and female autobiographies is the individualized and independent representation of the ego in life stories. Analysts point out that when collecting material about men’s lives, it is the gender of the story collector that is important. When talking to a female interviewer, the narrator presents the same life events in a different way than to male interviewer. When reading an egotext, a male analyst immediately forms a male community and, at the same time, hierarchies typical of relations between men. Keywords: autobiography, women, gender, gender history, history methodology, biographi- cal research, memory psychology, historiography
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The article analyzes the problems and prospects of using written sources of World War I period for a gender studies approach to Russia’s past, in line with the history of emotions in cultural-historical anthropology. The terms “emotions” and “feelings” are viewed as synonyms. The article states that what the historian encounters in the sources is mostly an emotional state or mood (personal or collective) as well as experiences, passions or sensations, rather than “pure” emotions and feelings. The corpus of “gender-marked” written sources of the 1914-1918 period is huge and varied, and includes materials from archives, collections of party commissions, published memoirs, letters, diaries, the women’s press, as well as profile documents (“self-census”) of female students. However, these sources unevenly reflect the feelings and the emotional background of the era. Following the conceptual framework developed by Barbara Rosenwein, we can speak of several emotional communities defined by the social affiliation and the “audibility” of the particular voices in history, i.e. the representativeness of the sources. The first category of emotional communities comprises the women of the Romanov family and noblewomen more broadly. Russian and foreign archives boast extensive collections of their personal documents. The second category includes “frontovichky” - frontline women-soldiers. Urban women belong to a third category, and are represented by memory-based stories, the women’s press, female students’ profiles, and documents from regional archives. From the point of view of emotions, the biggest yet least represented community were peasant women. While their everyday life and values have been well researched, only very few notes and diaries from their hands have survived. Letters to the front were partially preserved (esp. those intercepted by the authorities) and are now stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation). For the identification of the psychological matrix of the era it is crucial to use the full set of these sources.
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The article reviews the works of gender studies published over the past 30 years, with the aim to show and generalize what is proposed in historiography and special literature about the relationship between historical sciences and gender studies. Firstly, the paper offers an updated concept of gender in relation to the different periods of the country’s history - tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet. Secondly, the paper discusses the formation and gradual development of gender studies and gender discourse. The study reveals an uneven growth in the number of descriptive and empirical gender studies, which can be explained in correlation with socio-economic and political changes throughout Russia’s historical path. The correlation between the dynamic evolution of gender and the peculiarities of the historical path of the country has not been sufficiently studied; its analysis offers historians the opportunity to describe and explain the unique models of male/female (gender) relations and their evolution. So far gender studies have little to offer that would help identify, describe and explain the national specificity of gender, correlated with the specifics of national history in chronological and spatial-territorial terms. Future historians should also focus on developing methodological tools and a language that can foster interaction between historical, post-structuralist and feminist approaches. This will require a drastic transition in historical research to previously ignored topics and to more innovative, in-depth and qualitative research methods, such as the history of the life of ethnic groups and peoples of Russia at different stages of development of state and society next to case studies of gender and discourse analysis.
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In this article, the author discusses a new social group within the Tatar secular intelligentsia - the female teachers ( mugallima s) of the national primary schools. The study is based on personal documents, in particular memories and autobiographies. At the turn of the 20th century, the issue of female education became particularly important in Tatar society. The author shows the transformation of the role of the ostazbika - the imam’s wife who traditionally used to teach the girls of the Muslim community - and presents an overview of the first Tatar girl schools. Pointing out the sources of the formation of mugallima as a separate social group, the author also identifies an intermediate variant of this social group. Furthermore, attention is paid to the problem of advanced training of the mugallima, the legal regulation of Tatar female teachers’ activities, and to their official duties as well as their material conditions. The author studied the mugallima’s position in the Muslim society in relation to the gender role of an average woman, considering the everyday behavior of the mugallima, the mugallima’s image in Tatar literature as well as the way different social groups perceived this profession. The author concludes that in Tatar society the professional status of the mugallima was legalized only during World War I, and the social perception of the mugallima remained ambivalent. While traditional Muslim society continued to disapprove of independent women, the national intelligentsia supported a positive image of the mugallima. However, the issue of combining pedagogical work and family remained open. Tatar feminists of the revolutionary epoch considered the work of the mugallima as an alternative to family life and put the interests of the nation before their private life.
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The proposed article investigates the specifics of social status of urban female domestic servants in post-reform Russia. On the basis of a wide range of sources, including statistical materials, printed press, household manuals and ego-documents, the author distinguishes between two groups in this category of population that were fundamentally different in their status in the master’s family. In the post-reform period in Russia, the work of maidservants was not standardized, there were no guarantees from hirers regarding both working conditions and cases of dismissal and disability. Widespread sexual harassment and abuse seriously worsened the position of maidservants. A significant influx of peasant girls, who considered themselves fully prepared for the work of domestic servants, into the city, created a gigantic supply At the same time, the overwhelming majority of the job seekers did not have any idea about the activities that they were to carry out. Making endless blunders, the clumsy peasant girl acquired professional skills and learned to live in the master’s family, suffering insults and harassment and working hard only to avoid being kicked out. As a result, those girls who had been able to endure several years of torment, acquired not only professional skills, but were trained to live in the city, to use their position to earn money, to protect themselves from encroachment, or to use their attractiveness as a weapon. With the growth of education of female peasant youth, their increasing familiarity with judicial institutions, and the intensification of the activities of various organizations involved in helping those women with education and employment, female domestic servants felt more secure and ready to defend their rights. As a result, despite the seemingly gigantic supply, it was, in fact, extremely difficult to find a suitable maidservant for the household. The choice available to the owners was limited to two options - a docile slouch, or a maid knowing her worth and requiring consideration of her interests.
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The article deals with the issues related to the evolution of the use of women in the civil service at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries on the example of the Maritime Ministry on the basis of previously unpublished documents stored in the Russian state archive of the Navy and periodical press materials. The study of gender issues can be of scientific interest on the basis of its documents, as practically not in demand in research related to the women’s issue. As a result of the struggle of the public, there were some concessions on the part of the authorities related to the expansion of women’s access to fill certain positions in a number of areas that experienced a lack of certain qualifications, including public service, in the conditions of intensive bourgeois development. The article analyzes the legal acts regulating the work of women, especially in the public service. it is shown how the changes that took place in the Russian Empire influenced the transformation of the socio-economic situation of women in General, and, also, became a reflection of the social policy of the state. The article reveals the attitude of the heads of departments of the Ministry to the admission of women to the public service, as well as their opinion on the degree of necessity for the service itself in attracting women to it. The article deals with the arguments of men − heads of departments of the Ministry, related to the impact of women’s work on home life, on the family and on itself, which differed largely by philistine assessments, rather than progressive views. In fact, on the part of the authorities, concessions to women were more imaginary and forced than the result of an objective assessment of their equal opportunity to serve in the public system.
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This article discusses the emergence of the Russian working woman employed in skilled labor from the second half 19th century until the 1930s. In Russia, educated women entered the sphere of socially significant labor during the Great Reforms. The subsequent development largely explains the position of the working woman in modern Russia - hence the topicality of the present paper. Sources for this article are record-keeping documents of tsarist and Soviet institutions, statistical information, press materials as well as memoirs. Among the factors that influenced the formation of the Russian female working class in the pre-revolutionary period were a social movement for the development of female education, the emergence of special vocational schools for women, the Zemstvo reforms, industrialization and, eventually, World War I. The article shows changes in the nature of the employment of women after the 1917 Revolution. The authors document the rapid growth of women’s participation in all spheres of the USSR’s national economy in the 1930s, in particular health care, education, and work in the apparatus of state, party and economic bodies. As a result, during this period the professional traits of the three main types of Soviet female workers were formed: the woman-doctor, the woman-teacher and the womanfunctionary. At the same time, the authors come to the conclusion that Soviet rule brought no fundamental changes in the conditions of everyday life, so that the Soviet woman-intellectual turned out to be a “fighter of two fronts” - labor and domestic.
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This article based on the large body of archival materials and considers the gender aspect in the activities of agricultural communes of the period of the early Soviet society. Created almost exclusively by men (as part of a team), they most often had about half or slightly less able-bodied members from among the women. This significantly influenced the psychological climate in the commune and its economic indicators. The absence of special works on this issue actualizes an appeal to the problem of the ratio of male / female in the agricultural team of the period under study and its significance for quantitative and qualitative indicators of production. It is also of interest that the agricultural labor commune was the site of a socialist social experiment to create a “new” Soviet person, a “new” Soviet woman. Traditionally, the woman determined the psychological and emotional readiness of the family to perceive the “new”, which the Soviet authorities actively used to strengthen their ideological influence in the village. Within the framework of the Bolshevik project “commune”, the tasks were set to raise the social status of women in society through wide access to education, occupying production, state and party leadership positions. New opportunities, in turn, expanded the space for women’s self-realization beyond their usual roles in the patriarchal structure. The study of the dynamics of the development of these processes in the early Soviet period makes it possible to identify natural boundaries in the implementation of the “new Soviet woman” concept, to establish the results of social planning in this area. The study proved that when joining the team, women pursued primarily pragmatic goals. The author of the article found that, despite the support by the state and the party in the process of raising the status of a peasant woman, society retained the traditional idea of its place and role in the family and social life. As a result, the involvement of women in managerial functions was carried out slowly, however, increased the possibility of their self-realization.
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The objective of this article is to study the social and economic mechanisms that enabled the emergence of a female heroism at the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan. The article analyzes its realization of the Soviet gender project at the local level. This approach allows to investigate the relations of the authorities and workers at a particular factory and show the interdependence of their interests. The article’s primary sources include periodicals, documentation of central and local authorities, as well as the works of a journalist and historian T. Leshukov. Intensification of production at the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan required mobilization of labor forces, stimulation of workers’ enthusiasm and modernization of factories’ looms. Professional competitions, designed to increase productivity while controlling product quality, became part of the campaign for increased output. However, the material and technical crisis did not allow the textile industry to fulfill the planned targets prescribed from above and coincided with the food crisis, which led to the largest workers’ protests in the Ivanovo Industrial region in 1932. By the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan, the textile industry was lagging far behind the planned indicators for production automatization, while the factory staff opposed increasing productivity with the help of a “seal” which meant working with more looms per weaver. The article about the record of the female weaver Vinogradova published in the Light Industry promoted new professional standards, according to which a young girl could be a technical expert, and an increase in labor productivity was possible with the help of the “seal”. In addition, the young female shock worker was a response to experienced workers who participated in the protests of 1932, therefore it signified the superiority of the Soviet education system and the new organization of labor. Biographical data of those involved in the organization of the record shows that they were representatives of the first Soviet generation, whose interests were closely intertwined with those of the party.
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This article examines the evolution of priorities, main directions and conditions of the Russian Federation’s cooperation with Syria and Vietnam in the sphere of education, and it analyzes the historical experience of the cooperation between these states. The authors analyze the main tasks and areas of research for the cooperation of the Russian Federation with other states, the contextual priorities of their development, the needs of the labor market and the characteristics of the higher education systems. Particular attention is paid to a comparative study of the institutional and regulatory resources for the development of higher education systems of the countries under consideration. The authors emphasize the relationship between higher education and the national economy. The novelty of the research lies in rethinking the conceptual framework, objectives and key areas of interaction between countries that can together form the necessary basis for understanding the basic essence of cooperation between the Russian Federation and Syria and Vietnam in the field of educational policy, its state and development prospects. The authors identified features of the cooperation of the Russian Federation with Syria and Vietnam in the field of educational policy in the 2000s, which are expressed in their orientation to common priorities as expressed in international higher education documents, and the development of a consensus on the need to increase the volume of cooperation in the field of training highly qualified personnel in accordance with the requirements of the modern labor market.
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