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Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia

Online ISBN:
9780801460692
Print ISBN:
9780801449512
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia

Barbara Alpern Engel
Barbara Alpern Engel
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Published:
4 February 2011
Online ISBN:
9780801460692
Print ISBN:
9780801449512
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived “marriage crisis” had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. The book draws on archival documentation to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia. It illustrates the human consequences of the marriage crisis and reveals that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. The book captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia's rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law.

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