Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia

This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English; it fills a significant gap in the existing literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century Russia and is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. The book offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history. The lives of rural women were even more demanding than those of other Soviet women, and even during the Khrushchev 'Thaw' in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from reforms and liberating policies it promoted.The author, Luibov Denisova, is a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia. She includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives in Moscow, St Petersburg, Archangel, and Vologda; also interviews and sociological research conducted in thirty different Russian villages, alongside oral traditions such as folk songs and chastooshkas among peasant women in Russia. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes; it paints a unique and complete picture of rural women's life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.