INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION

^1855–1914

From 1855 to 1914, the Russian economy grew rapidly and so did the cities. Peasants freed from serfdom crowded into factories; merchants and shopkeepers expanded their businesses; apartment blocks went up, as did tenements. Between 1811 and 1914, the percentage of Russia’s people living in urban areas rose from 6.6 to 15 percent, with much of this increase concentrated in the metropolises. Moscow had swelled to more than a million inhabitants by 1902; St. Petersburg was home to more than 2 million in 1914.¹ Now women of all ranks of life had to cope with the problems and the possibilities created by the Industrial Revolution in its Russian incarnation.

Women’s experiences of and participation in the economic and social developments of the last decades of imperial Russia depended on their social position, ethnicity, religion, place of residence, and individual experience. The standard of living rose for some women in the middle ranks of urban society, and the cities filled with new amenities, such as opera houses, theaters, and, by the early twentieth century, electric lighting. Influential noblewomen organized a feminist movement that set up charities and persuaded the government to admit women to higher education. Although, as in the past, improvements in education benefited the nobles first, they now spread to more girls from the middle ranks of Russian society, the working class, and the peasantry. Female graduates of the new schools then established a women’s presence in the growing professions, particularly teaching and medicine

Most of these changes seemed, once again, to leave peasant women behind. They made up 80 percent of the female population in the late imperial decades, and as the twentieth century dawned, most were still living much as their ancestors had, despite the fact that Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861. Their awareness of the outside world was expanding, though, for the menfolk, returning from jobs in the cities, told them about the latest styles in clothes, entertainment, even courtship. More significantly, poor women were playing a crucial part in industrialization. They filled in on the farms when the men went off to work in the cities, and they did a substantial share of the new cottage industry in the villages. Peasant women were also one‑third of factory workers and the great majority of the house servants in the growing cities. Russian industrialization depended on their labor in the late nineteenth century, as it would continue to do throughout the twentieth.