By ignoring gender issues, historians have failed to understand how efforts to control women—and women's reactions to these efforts—have shaped political and social institutions and thus influenced the course of Russian and Soviet history. These original essays challenge a host of traditional assumptions by integrating women into the Russian past. Using recent advances in the study of gender, the family, class, and the status of women, the authors examine various roles of Russian women and offer a broad overview of a vibrant and growing field.
Introduction, Barbara Evans Clements Accommodation and Resistance, Christine D. Worobec Women in the Medieval Russian Family of the Tenth through the Fifteenth Centuries, N.L. Pushkareva Childbirth in Pre-Petrine Russia: Canon Law and Popular Traditions, Eve Levin Women's Honor in Early Modern Russia, Nancy Shields Kollmann Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy, Valerie A. Kivelson Widows and the Russian Serf Community, Rodney D. Bohac Infant-Care Cultures in the Russian Empire, David L. Ransel Transformation versus Tradition, Barbara Alpern Engel The Peasant Woman as Healer, Rose L. Glickman Women's Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880-1900, Judith Pallot Abortion and the Civic Order: The Legal and Medical Debates, Laura Engelstein The Impact of World War I on Russian Women's Lives, Alfred G. Meyer The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-32, Elizabeth Waters Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36, Wendy Goldman Later Developments: Trends in Soviet Women's History, 1930 to the Present, Barbara Evans Clements
About The Editors
Barbara Evans Clements is Professor of History at the University of Akron. Barbara Alpern Engel is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado. Christine D. Worobec is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University.