THE EMANCIPATION
The Emancipation Statute of 1861 established procedures for making the peasants independent farmers and incorporating them into the political system as free people. State and crown peasants—those in bondage to the government or royal family—received title to the acreages they had tilled before Emancipation. The division of farmland between landlords and peasants proved more difficult. Negotiations mediated by government agents resulted in most Russian villages of seigniorial peasants—those in bondage to landlords—receiving a little less than half the landlords’ land. Ukrainian peasants received still less. In Belarusian and Polish provinces, where most nobles were Polish, the government, angry over the Polish uprising of 1863–64, granted the peasants a larger share. The government paid the landlords for the land they had lost, then required the peasants to reimburse the government with what were called “redemption dues,” essentially a publicly financed, forty-nine-year mortgage.
In central Russia, land ownership was transferred to the village commune, not to individual households. Families continued to farm collectively and to repartition the fields periodically. In areas without communal traditions—Ukraine, parts of Siberia, the Urals, and the northwestern borderlands—individual families owned their own fields. Taxes were still assessed by household, and if a man went to work in the city, he remained on village tax rolls and had to contribute his share to his family’s payment. Everywhere, the tasks of tax collecting and governance that had fallen to the landlords under serfdom were assigned to village assemblies composed of senior men. Elected peasant courts were established to resolve disputes that could not be handled within the community.
The Emancipation, so long dreamed of by Russia’s serfs, did not end poverty in the countryside. Agricultural productivity rose; by the turn of the twentieth century, 20 percent of the wheat on the world market and 43 percent of the barley came from Ukraine.18 But this growth did not lift most peasants out of poverty, because the government had burdened them with high taxes, and the landlords, many of whom were also hard-pressed, paid them as little as possible for their labor and charged them as much as possible for the land they leased. At the same time, an expanding peasant population meant more mouths to feed. And so, in 1900, Russia’s rural people were still coping with grueling labor, periodic food shortages, and epidemic diseases.
For women, this meant the old ways of doing things continued little changed. Across the empire in the early twentieth century, peasant women were still stooping over the land in the fall to gather the dropped grain. Wife-beating was still an everyday occurrence. The poverty and the patriarchy endured even as the sort of work women did expanded, schooling became available, and ideas and products made in the industrializing cities showed up in the villages. These changes marked the beginning of a long transformation in the lives of peasant women that would continue into the second half of the twentieth century.
PEASANT WOMEN AND THE LAW
Emancipation did not alter peasant women’s property rights. Throughout European Russia, peasants stuck to the custom of giving sons equal shares of whatever property the family possessed and daughters far less—sometimes nothing at all. Shortly before World War I the national law was revised to grant daughters equal rights with sons in their families’ moveable property. The rule that women were entitled to inherit only one-seventh of the land was retained until the Revolution. A widow who had lived for a long time in her in-laws’ household could expect continuing financial support from that family, but she had no claim to any of her husband’s patrimony, unless he had made specific provisions for her in a will. Only a widow who had lived with her husband in their own household, instead of in his parents’ home, was entitled to receive a share of his property, usually between one-seventh and one-fourth.19
Peasant women’s property consisted mainly of their dowries, which now often included cash and factory-made goods, their tools, clothes, linens, bedding, personal items such as combs, and storage chests. Peasants in most of European Russia also believed, as did many Europeans, Americans, and Canadians, that women owned the money they made selling handcrafts and foods such as mushrooms, fruit, eggs, and dairy products. Many women in Russia saved the small amounts they earned this way for their daughters’ dowries. In keeping with long-established precedents, local and national courts consistently upheld peasant women’s rights to their property, even ruling on occasion that a wife could not be forced to pay her husband’s debts out of her own resources.
The reforms gave peasant women access to the civil and criminal courts, which led to surprisingly large numbers of them appearing before the judges as plaintiffs. To the township courts, women brought complaints about their neighbors and their relatives. Christine Worobec has shown that, “in the provinces of Vladimir, Iaroslavl, Moscow, and Tambov, … 64 percent of the inheritance cases… involved women.” Beatrice Farnsworth’s study of township courts in four provinces between 1866 and 1872 found that women participated in 32 percent of all cases. Most of these disputes concerned debts peasants owed to one another. Women also brought claims against their neighbors for theft, damage to property, and physical and verbal assault. The medieval notion that women could, and should, seek legal remedy for insults to their honor was still quite alive in the Russian countryside in the late nineteenth century. Some women also dared to sue their husbands and in-laws. Farnsworth has found that almost one-third of the family disputes involved a daughter-in-law accusing her in-laws of mistreating her. A few women sued their husbands for nonsupport or, more commonly, for physical abuse. Some also filed petitions for divorce with the church courts.20
The church denied most of these, and peasant judges often refused even to consider women’ complaints against their husbands. But notable instances have been found of judges acting on the ancient notion that the law should protect women. Ethnographer Olga Semenova Tian-Shanskaia recorded, “Not long ago a woman from a remote village was able to have her husband flogged at the township office for his refusal to live with her.” To make such an appeal required going to higher authorities than the village elders, an audacious move few peasant women were willing to make. That any did so testifies to the fact that some women were not as submissive and long-suffering as the stereotypes proclaimed them to be.21
EDUCATION
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the church, local governments, and the zemstva opened primary schools in the countryside. There was much to be done, for Russia, progressive in its education of elite women, lagged far behind more prosperous countries, such as Germany, in providing schooling for the poor. For their part, peasants resisted the idea of formal education for boys because they thought it was a waste of money. Boys should be working, not studying. In the last decades of the century, many peasants came to understand that literate sons would get better jobs in the cities and promotions in the army. They could also help their parents handle their financial affairs. So by 1900, the number of poor boys attending primary schools had grown considerably.
Peasants thought that daughters, on the other hand, could learn all they needed to know from the women of the village. “If you send her to school, she costs money; if you keep her home, she makes money,” one man observed in 1893. School administrators also believed that the education of boys was a priority. Most were supportive of enrolling girls, but, when faced with overcrowded facilities, they granted preferential admission to boys. Consequently, far fewer girls than boys enrolled in primary schools, and those girls that did so were likely to drop out before completing the three-year course of study in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This disparity weakened as the century drew to a close, as parents became less resistant and more schools were built. Ben Eklof estimates that by 1910 perhaps 40 percent of peasant girls had had some formal education.22
HEALTH CARE
Village healers still provided most of the health care in the countryside in the late nineteenth century, and the rates of maternal and child mortality were among the highest in Europe. Peasant mothers died in childbirth more frequently than women in the cities, where better care was available, and more suffered from the chronic illnesses, such as prolapsed uterus, that resulted from multiple pregnancies. For children, the consequences were still more dire: half of them died before their fifth birthdays. The healers, most of whom were women by this time, could treat some injuries and minor illnesses effectively, and they knew how to help with uncomplicated childbirths. But they understood very little about the causes of disease and infection, and therefore remained powerless to stop epidemics that occasionally swept through the villages. They also promoted unhygienic customs. Midwives encouraged mothers to soothe their infants by giving them rags stuffed with solid food to suck on. Although the midwives did not invent these microbe-laden pacifiers, which spread gastro-intestinal infections, they encouraged their use and thereby contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of babies every year. By contrast, David Ransel has found far higher survival rates among babies born to Muslim mothers, who fed only breast milk to infants.23
The attempts by the government and the zemstva to improve rural health care were insufficient to the huge task and were impeded by public resistance. Kashevarova, the country’s first woman doctor, struggled to earn her patients’ trust, because most peasants did not believe that doctors could help them. In fact they were often correct; nineteenth-century “scientific” medicine was almost as inefficacious as the traditional sort. Peasant women were particularly suspicious of midwives trained at programs like the one Kashevarova attended. And Kashevarova herself found the courses oversimplified and too short. The young, inexperienced graduates then came into the villages as strangers and tried to convince peasants that they knew more about birthing babies than the grannies who lived there. They also refused to help out with the housework while the new mother recuperated from childbirth, as traditional midwives did. So peasants often refused the services of the few professionally trained midwives that ventured into the countryside; in 1900, village women were still assisting in 98 percent of rural births.24
NEW WORK FOR PEASANT WOMEN
Industrialization and urbanization expanded markets and created new kinds of manufacturing that enabled peasant women to increase the amount of non-agricultural work they did. For centuries, some had been making handcrafts for sale; now production of those goods rose rapidly. By 1912, 8 million women, children, and men were engaged in this work. Women and girls specialized in beadwork, embroidery, and the making of gloves, lace, straw hats, and knitted goods. It was not uncommon for an eight-year-old to knit a pair of socks a day. Many women did more than one craft, switching from straw hats in the spring to embroidery in the fall, as the demand for products changed with the seasons. There were also enterprising peasant businesswomen who bought machinery to knit socks or stitch gloves and then set up small workshops staffed by neighbors. Some of these women prospered.25
Women and girls also worked in cottage industry, that is, manufacturing performed in the villages for city-based companies. This practice had developed in Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; there women had made up the majority of the work force. Men were more involved in Russia, but the specialties employing women were similar across the continent. They were particularly likely to be engaged in weaving cotton cloth and bleaching linen, and they also wound thread onto bobbins for use in textile mills, assembled the paper mouthpieces of cigarettes, and made bootlaces.
The division of labor and the pay scales of cottage industry were gendered across Europe. In Russia as elsewhere, men worked in more mechanized manufacturing; in the textile industry, they ran the power looms, women the hand looms. The hours were long—thirteen or more per day for weavers—the pay was low, and women were even more poorly paid than men. In cottage industry, as in handcrafts, some peasant women became entrepreneurs who supplied the raw materials, supervised workers in the villages, and then delivered products to buyers in the cities. The income from all this work was a welcome contribution to the family pot, and it could be earned while the families continued to farm.
Other peasant women fostered children abandoned by their parents to state orphanages. The numbers of such children grew hugely in the second half of the nineteenth century across Europe, because the booms and busts of industrializing economies left many people unable to provide for their children and because urban women were having more out-of-wedlock births. There were years when as many as 17,000 children were turned in to the central orphanage in Moscow. The facility in St. Petersburg handled thousands of babies and young children as well. After 1870, zemstva-established orphanages in the countryside were also sheltering abandoned children. To ease the strain of caring for so many, administrators organized foster-care programs that placed children with peasant families. In the peak years, the Moscow orphanage alone was supervising the foster care of 40,000 youngsters.26
Foster mothers were paid for their labors, which included breast-feeding the babies and rearing older children along with their own offspring. Here too, enterprising peasant women provided the intermediary services on which the system depended: they collected abandoned children for delivery to the orphanages, recruited women as foster mothers, brought babies from the orphanages to the countryside, and delivered the foster mothers’ monthly stipends. Although the stipends were low, there were villages in the poorer regions around Moscow that derived most of their non-farm income from caring for abandoned children. Elsewhere, taking in a child supplemented the family income and provided extra hands to work in the fields, if the children survived. Most did not; victims of neglect from birth, foster children were very vulnerable to the diseases that carried off peasant children.27
Many peasant women also worked away from their villages after Emancipation. In Poland by the first decade of the twentieth century, an estimated hundred thousand women were doing field labor on other people’s farms. Across the empire, such women made up 25 percent of the female paid-labor force. Some of these field hands were young, single women whose relatives could work the family plots without them. Others were widows and wives of men who were disabled or absent; they leased their land to others so that they could work full-time for wealthier employers. This made more sense than farming alone or with young children, even though the demand for field hands was seasonal and women were paid less than men.28 Other women became house servants or nannies, jobs that often paid better and were less wearing.
MIGRATION TO THE CITIES
More men than women left their home villages looking for work, particularly before 1900. In Moscow province, one of the most industrially developed in Russia, 76 percent of men were working away from their villages in the years 1898 to 1900, compared to 32 percent of women. Forty-eight percent of the women who had left their villages took jobs within their own district; 63 percent of the men had gone to jobs farther afield.29
This was a continuation of customs developed under serfdom, when it had been common for young men to do artisanal work such as carpentry away from home during the winter and to travel around selling handcrafts at fairs. Emancipation freed the peasants to leave without the landlord’s permission and industrialization and urbanization opened up many more jobs, with the result that young men left for longer periods than in the past. Most planned to work in the cities, send the bulk of their earnings back home, and after some years return to farming. Their wives and children stayed in the countryside and worked the land with older family members; the migrants came home at least once a year to help with the harvest and to renew their passports. This arrangement—men on the move to better-paying jobs, families keeping the farms going in the ancestral village—was common across Europe in the nineteenth century and it occurs in many places around the developing world today.
The consequences for women in Russia were mixed. The males’ departure meant that women who stayed behind had more work to do. Data collected in several Moscow districts in 1910 showed that women had taken up plowing and mowing, traditionally men’s chores.30 Some absent husbands defaulted on their promises to send money home or disappeared from their families’ lives altogether. On the other hand, migrants who kept their promises made very important contributions to the family income, and women who lived in areas of large out-migration may have enjoyed better health because they had fewer pregnancies.
IMPORTS FROM THE CITIES
The flow of people between city and countryside gradually changed peasant attitudes and village life. Rural folk had long believed that cities were places where treacherous strangers lay in wait to cheat them. Now they also knew that the factories were producing useful and attractive things. Peasant women liked the soft, colorful cotton cloth and thread, the sharp pins and needles, and the sturdy pots and pans. In a good year they could spend a little of the money they made with their handcrafts on luxuries such as ribbons, hats, shawls, mirrors, combs and brushes, toys, printed pictures to hang on the walls, and musical instruments. Tea, though expensive, became a favorite drink.
Migration also affected the social life and power structure of the villages. Being on their own bolstered the self-confidence of some of the migrant workers and made them feel superior to country folk. When they, and army veterans as well, came home, they were less willing to accept the authority of village elders and of peasant customs. Some migrants insisted on choosing their own brides, rather than having their mothers choose for them. Young husbands pressed for a division of family property before their fathers died so that they could move out of their parents’ houses into ones of their own. Younger women welcomed the assertiveness of the young men, because it weakened the control of mothers and mothers-in-law as well as patriarchs.
These were small changes when measured against the considerable power the elders still possessed in the last decades of the imperial period. Fathers and mothers continued to command obedience from their adult sons and to watch closely the behavior of their daughters. Girls had to be careful how they flirted with stylish young men from the cities, lest they wake up one morning to find the boys departed and their family’s gate smeared with dung or tar, a message to everyone in the village that here lived a girl who had ruined her reputation. Furthermore, the man who defied his parents would not necessarily brook defiance from his wife. In many provinces the marriage ceremony still ended with the bride affirming submission to her new husband by kneeling at his feet.