THE WESTERN BORDERLANDS

Industrialization and urbanization surged through Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine in the late imperial period, producing many of the same effects for women as in central Russia. The small city of Gomel in Mogilev province, in the southeast of today’s Belarus, is a case in point. There were no large factories in Gomel, but its location at a railroad junction made it a regional commercial center, and by 1900 its population had swelled to thirty‑seven thousand. The amenities of the new economy followed. In the first decade of the twentieth century, middle‑class women in Gomel entertained themselves with dinner parties and visits to restaurants, the opera, and the theater. The tango was the current rage. Shopkeepers sold sewing machines, complete with lessons on how to do the latest stitches. The town also offered newspapers, magazines, libraries, and public lectures. There were five schools for girls, including a gymnasium headed by a woman, and two music schools. Most of Gomel’s women were housewives; the female paid‑labor force consisted of forty‑three teachers, twenty‑seven doctors and feldshers, and a small working class of servants and service workers. The city had several brothels staffed by Jewish, Belarusian, Russian, and Polish women. Ethnicity was the major divider of Gomel’s population: 60 percent of the city’s people were Jewish, followed by far lesser percentages of Belarusians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.⁶⁶

THE JEWS

The great majority of the Jews in the Russian Empire lived in the western borderlands, because that was where their ancestors had lived and because the government limited Jewish settlement in the Russian heartland. Most were urban folk who worked as artisans, entrepreneurs, and traders. In major cities such as Kiev, Odessa, Vilnius, and Warsaw, as well as in smaller ones such as Gomel, Jews made up a third or more of the population. Men were the religious and community leaders; women worked alongside their menfolk to provide for their families. Among the most devout Jews, wives often were the main breadwinners, while husbands devoted themselves to religious study.

Jewish women’s lives were similar to those of their Christian neighbors. The small numbers of rural women did the same sort of farming as other peasants. Urban women worked in family businesses. Jewish women were less likely than non‑Jewish ones to become factory workers. They preferred seamstressing and shopkeeping. Women who could afford not to work outside the home became housewives, but the late nineteenth‑century cult of domesticity, with its emphasis on mothering and the decorative arts, did not make much headway among the Jews of the Russian Empire. Rather they continued to give high priority to work skills, much as did Christian working people.

The expansion of education opened up new opportunities for Jewish women. Because Jewish religious schools admitted only boys, girls went to public elementary and secondary schools, as some boys did also. There they studied the arts, humanities, and science of the dominant Christian culture. This may explain the fact that more Jewish women than men converted to Christianity as adults. It definitely explains the large percentage of Jewish female students in the medical schools noted earlier.⁶⁷

Some of these students joined revolutionary parties. Waves of anti‑Semitic persecution pulsed through the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, inspiring some Jews to emigrate and others to join the Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Most Zionist organizations did not welcome female members; the socialists, who advocated gender, religious, and ethnic equality, did. By 1900 the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party contained an all‑Jewish organization, the Bund, based in the western borderlands. One‑third of its members were women. There were also many Jewish women in the Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats and in the Socialist Revolutionary Party. These small, illegal organizations grew in significance as revolutionary sentiment spread.

THE POLES AND UKRAINIANS

Alexander II and his successors oppressed the peoples of the western borderlands and so provoked nationalist responses that affected the lives of women and shaped gender ideas. The government was particularly hard on the Poles because they had rebelled so often. After the 1863–64 uprising, it tightened bureaucratic controls in Polish lands and required that Polish schools teach, in Russian, a curriculum stressing Russian history and Russian intellectual and cultural achievements. The Poles resisted this “Russification” by organizing a campaign to preserve their culture, in which women played central roles. Mothers were enjoined to teach their children the history, language, and values of their people and to maintain Polish customs, rituals, and religion in their homes. This conception of women as nurturers of national identity was not original with the Poles. Nationalists across Europe were promoting it in the nineteenth century.⁶⁸

The effects on women were mixed. The drive to maintain Polish culture enabled energetic women to organize charities and private, Polish‑language schools. But the nationalist ideas in the cult of Polish womanhood also slowed down the dissemination of feminist ideas from Russia. Because the woman question was a major concern of the Russian intelligentsia, it was automatically suspect among Poles, so any criticism of patriarchy could be denounced as a betrayal of heroic, beleaguered Polish men and a threat to the preservation of the nation. Reformers and conservatives alike, backed by the church, inveighed against improved education for girls, on the grounds that it would undermine women’s devotion to their families.

The development of nationalism among Ukrainians had similar consequences for elite women. Some organized higher women’s courses; others participated in philanthropy; still others set up hromada (community) societies that promoted Ukrainian cultural studies and vernacular literature. All justified their activism as motherly efforts to preserve the culture of their people. Ukrainian women in Galicia, a province of Austria‑Hungary, where the political climate was less oppressive, were able to advocate for women’s rights without incurring as much resistance from their male allies in the nationalist movement.⁶⁹

SIBERIA

The greatest change to Siberia in the late nineteenth century was a massive influx of migrants from the western part of the empire. Between 1896 and 1912, almost 2 million people moved from European Russia to Siberia, with the result that, in 1900, native people constituted only 11.5 percent of the 9.4 million inhabitants of Siberia. Many of the new people came seeking freedom and economic opportunity in a land that was too vast and far away to be controlled by the central government. Similar dreams called pioneers to the American West in the nineteenth century, and the American frontier nourished more egalitarian gender relations, with the result that women gained political rights first in Western states. Some of the immigrants to Siberia believed the same about their frontier, that the women of their families were more independent and the men less controlling than those in patriarchal Old Russia.⁷⁰ This greater autonomy for women did not translate into an energetic feminist movement, perhaps because the great distances and brutal climate inhibited communication of ideas and the building of organizations.

The relationship that developed between native women and European immigrants is comparable to that between natives and immigrants in North America. In both immense regions, the native people were a tiny and shrinking minority confronting an influx of European settlers. In both Siberia and North America, the immigrants were mostly men until late in the century, when families of farmers started coming. We know very little about the interactions between the peasant newcomers and the native women in the Siberian countryside. Did the natives help the arrivals cope with the demanding environment by teaching them how to use medicinal and edible plants, as native women did in North America?

More can be said about the women who came to Siberia’s growing cities. Most were the wives of government officials, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They occupied themselves with housework and childrearing, and many also undertook, as women were doing in North America, to “civilize” the frontier. This was a well‑established role for European women in colonial areas. The cult of domesticity in its imperial version called on European women of upper‑class origins to serve as agents of European culture in non‑European areas. They were to model feminine virtue in their family lives and promote European values in the community at large. In so doing, they would lift up the native people, whom Europeans perceived as inferior intellectually and morally. They would civilize as well European men, who were especially prone in colonial or frontier areas to go astray.

Privileged women in Siberia took this mission to heart. They built well‑appointed homes in the cities and worked together to organize libraries, literary societies, public lectures, opera houses, and theaters. They supported the establishment of primary and secondary schools, staffed by male and female teachers. They lobbied successfully for the building of medical schools that trained female feldshers and physicians. These projects created agreeable European enclaves in Siberian cities such as Irkutsk and strengthened cultural connections between Siberia and the European heartland. They improved education for girls and promoted women’s employment in the professions. They also promoted the dissemination of European gender ideas among the native people.⁷¹

The natives applied their well‑honed coping skills to their interactions with the rising tide of Europeans. Peoples in the remotest regions moved father into the fastnesses of mountains or tundra. The Buryats, Yakuts, Tungus, and some of the smaller tribes in the south continued their generally harmonious relationship with the Europeans. Those who lived in cities became more Russified, and some sent their daughters to the newly opened elementary and secondary schools. They also welcomed manufactured goods, such as needles and fabrics, which were coming east from Russian factories.

Christianity continued to spread among Siberians living close to European settlements, because of energetic missionary efforts by the church. Muslims and Buddhists resisted the priests, but many animists took the Christian saints into their pantheon of spirits, worshipping both Christ and the spirits of the forest. This syncretism was one in which native women played an active part, while keeping their ancestral beliefs alive. In 1900, female shamans were still ministering to their people among the Tungus, the Nivikh, and many other tribes.