Russia's Women

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.


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

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.

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