Gender Roles In Imperial Russia

781 Words2 Pages

For most of recorded history, the central focus has been on men and their actions in the society they belong to. They are the military men fighting wars to expand their country’s territory or fighting against an enemy of the country. Men for the longest time ,until the twentieth century, had been in government positions. Working class men, peasants, and slaves were vital for the economy in the country they reside in as they provided the food supply for the population and worked in the various industries that supplied the country with steel, clothing, etc. Religion, such as the Abrahamic religions, centered around a relationship between man and the Divine. Imperial Russia was no exception to this patriarchal trend as was the case with mostly …show more content…

In the case of domestic servants and factory workers, the women working as the former were not better off than the women working as the latter. It was believed that domestic servants enjoyed better working conditions since it was strongly believed that housework could not be bad compared to having to work with dangerous machinery in the factories. Although industries require at least a hundred workers to work the machineries, most domestic servants served middle-class urban families whose income can only pay one servant. Not only did the work pile up for one servant, but also these women were also required to work for eighteen hours every day compared to factory women. While factory work was seen as a unisex job, the job of domestic servants had been feminized and only a small number of men worked as …show more content…

These women were able to have autonomy through their dowry and the estates in the dowry remained under their personal property after marriage. Prior to Peter the Great’s ascension to the throne, elite women often lived in specialized quarters reserved for them in order to seclude them from participating in a male-base society. In these quarters [or terems], women were able to perform tasks such as forging alliances for their family members and negotiating marriage arrangements. When Peter the Great ended the seclusion of all elite women in Russia, he required them to integrate with men of the same status at parties and French-inspired assemblies. Alongside Peter’s obsession with European fashion, elite women no doubt indulged in Western fashion and dressed in the latest trends at the

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