1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456588203321

Autore

Engel Barbara Alpern

Titolo

Breaking the ties that bound [[electronic resource] ] : the politics of marital strife in late imperial Russia / / Barbara Alpern Engel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca [N.Y.], : Cornell University Press, 2011

ISBN

0-8014-6117-0

0-8014-7909-6

0-8014-6069-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (296 p.)

Disciplina

306.890947/09034

Soggetti

Marriage - Russia - History - 19th century

Marriage - Russia - History - 20th century

Divorce - Russia - History - 19th century

Women - Family relationships - Russia - History - 19th century

Women - Family relationships - Russia - History - 20th century

Family policy - Russia - History - 19th century

Family policy - Russia - History - 20th century

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction : marriage and its discontents -- The ties that bound -- Making marriage : romantic ideals and female rhetoric -- Money matters -- Disciplining laboring husbands -- Earning my own crust of bread -- Cultivating domesticity -- The right to love -- The best interests of the child -- Conclusion : the politics of marital strife.

Sommario/riassunto

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. Barbara Alpern Engel 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. In Breaking the Ties That Bound, Engel draws on exceptionally rich archival documentation-in particular, on petitions for marital separation and the materials generated by the ensuing investigations-to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia.Engel illustrates with unparalleled vividness the human consequences of the marriage crisis. Her research reveals in myriad ways 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. Engel 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. This remarkable social history is thus also a contribution to our understanding of the deepening political crisis of autocracy.