Review Article: Women in rural Russia from the tenth to the twentieth centuries

Abstract

Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel and Christine D. Worobec eds., Russia's women: accommodation, resistance, transformation. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1991.) Pages xi+300. £35.00 (hardback); £13.50 (paperback). (hereafter RW)

Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola eds., Russian peasant women. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.) Pages 304. £13.50. (hereafter RPW)

Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the fields and the city: women, work and family in Russia 1861–1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.) Pages xi+254. £35.00. (hereafter Between)

In 1995 a Russian scholar lamented that ‘Women's history as an autonomous sub-discipline of historical science does not yet exist in Russia’, and that it had been suppressed in the Soviet Union. In contrast, western historians have produced a great deal of work on Russian women over the last 20–30 years. Much of the early work concentrated on women radicals and the feminist movement. More recently, historians have turned their attention to the mass of the female population who lived in rural Russia. The books under review here are very good examples of both the range and the quality of the work on Russian women and of the new focus on peasant women.