Source: TW
Things I learned from “Village Life In Late Tsarist Russia”, the first-ever systematic ethnography of a Russian peasant community, done in 1902 by Olga Tian-Shanskaya but never published in her lifetime (A warning: it’s extremely depressing.).
Anti-natal attitude
The single most surprising thing by far was how anti-natal peasant attitudes were. Central Russia may have had the highest fertility of anywhere in Europe, to the point where it was facing a Malthusian crisis, but it wasn’t because peasants wanted a lot of kids.
The conventional narrative I read is that the obshchina promoted overpopulation, by removing the economic incentive to restrict fertility to avoid splitting up land. Instead, having more children would get the family allotted more land.
But, per the author, the peasant women she met “usually begin to feel burdened by a third child”. She quoted a woman who, when her third child was born, lamented, “There’s just going to be too many kids”. And note that the woman (an informant’s mother) was remembered as saying this in the early 1860s, immediately after the abolition of serfdom.
Despite many cultural changes between 1860 and 1900, the desire to restrict fertility was already there. To make it clear that economic motives (as opposed to mothers wanting to preserve their health) were key, it was common for mothers-in-law to viciously berate their daughters-in-law for bearing too many children.
“You bitch with your litter of puppies! I wish they would die!”
Abortion
The main method used to limit fertility was infanticide via ostensibly-accidental suffocation while co-sleeping. No women admitted to doing this intentionally. But the fact that, on average, every woman would suffocate at least one of her children strongly suggests it. Abortion via various herbal concoctions was also practiced, but less commonly.
The men in the community generally had no idea what was going on, but, when they knew, were happy to leave the sordid business to the women. But there arises the question: Why, if they wanted to limit fertility desperately enough to resort to systematic infanticide, did they not emulate their Western European peasant counterparts and engage in coitus interruptus? The depressing answer seems to have been endemic alcohol-fueled marital rape. The author talks about the sex lives of married peasants, and says that men were sexually insatiable when drunk, and would beat their wives if they refused them. I read a paper on abortion among Communist-era Polish peasant women, and it said that this dynamic played a role in high abortion rates. A couple would agree they didn’t want any more children, but the man would get drunk and demand sex from his wife, leaving her pregnant.
Young marriage
The marriage pattern of Russian peasants was akin to that of China: both men and women married equally young. There was a strong norm that spouses ought to be equal in age.
Marriages where the wife was older were fairly common, but the reverse was practically unknown. Alas–and providing evidence for @datepsych ’s argument about the benign nature of age gaps–spouses being equal in age didn’t make marriages any more egalitarian. (And, of course, traditional Chinese marriages weren’t exactly egalitarian.)
The author actually says older men were better fathers than younger ones, gentler and more actively-involved with their children. Despite this, a woman would be mercilessly ridiculed by her peers if she married an older man.
Courtship
By the 1900s, most peasant women did have some freedom to choose their husbands. But in some villages the older custom of two young teenagers being betrothed by their parents, and the girl immediately moving in with his family (before reaching the legal age of marriage at 16) was still occasionally found.
In general, though, young people met and courted at village dances and festivals. Girls apparently preferred a well-dressed suitor above all else. This was one of a number of significant social changes that took place between 1860 and 1900.
Both sexes married later, in their late teens or even early twenties rather than mid-teens. There was still a general norm that women should marry before 20, however. And there was a rising tolerance for premarital sex. Formerly, they’d had the custom of displaying the bloody marriage-bed sheets to prove the bride’s virginity, but were increasingly abandoning it. Couples who’d already had sex would ‘cheat’ with other sources of blood.
Property rights
One relatively cheerful thing I learned is that peasant wives did have some genuine property rights.
They had no concept of ‘community property’: all possessions belonged to one spouse or the other, and it was considered theft for the other to take it. Wives controlled whatever they had brought with them in their dowry, plus some household possessions acquired after marriage–notably, chickens and cows–belonged to them by custom. Wives also controlled their own wages and piecework earnings from outside the summer harvest season (when, of course, most of the wages were earned…)In this village–though not others–they also controlled wages from the harvest season, though not piecework earnings.
If a married woman died, her own property would be inherited by her birth family or her daughters. (This is the same rule applied to married women’s property in traditional Hindu law.) There’s a dark side to this, however: Unlike in Islamic law, which obliges a husband to financially support his wife even while guaranteeing her property rights, Russian peasant women had to provide for many necessities out of their own money… E.g., a wife had to buy all the flax to make her family’s clothes with her own (generally meager) income.
Labor after birth
I wonder if the separate-property regime, with wives having to earn their own money via paid work outside the home, played a role in the fact that women had to return to hard physical labor, not just in the house but outside in the fields, very soon after giving birth. 5-7 days was normal in 1900, but under serfdom women had to resume agricultural labor 3 days after childbirth. (I should note that, while ‘Time On The Cross’ attributes high infant mortality rates among US slaves to women having to do heavy agricultural labor right up until birth, it says enslaved women were generally given time to recuperate afterwards. Russian landlords were worse.)Uterine prolapse was ubiquitous in the village due to heavy work right after childbirth.
Husbands also normally ignored the religious prohibition on sex within 40 days of birth, and demanded it within 2 or 3 weeks if sober and 1 week if drunk. This makes me appreciate the utility of customs–like those followed in some highland regions of Georgia–which physically seclude postpartum women during their period of ritual impurity in a separate hut.+++(4)+++ It may be the only way to get their husbands to leave them alone.
Lack of support
The most noteworthy thing is how little help the extended-family household seems to provide to postpartum women. I would have assumed it would be easier to recuperate when household chores could be shared with other women. And it doesn’t seem to provide much help with childcare, either.
New mothers, the author says, generally lost their first couple of children due to their lack of experience in caring for them. And this disproportionate mortality of firstborn children seems unlikely to be deliberate infanticide, because it was overwhelmingly later children who were unwanted.
Wife-beating
Wife-beating was just as horrifically common as you would expect, but seemed to be rare when the husband was sober. Cross-culturally, alcohol consumption rates are a better predictor of domestic violence than are patriarchal cultural values.+++(4)+++
There were, however, horrific cases of violent abuse perpetrated by sober husbands. The ones the author describes all seemed to be motivated by suspected infidelity, or by a husband discovering his wife had been sexually active before marriage. In one of these cases, he stopped tormenting his wife when she became pregnant, because he feared imprisonment for abusing a pregnant woman. I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that at least some domestic abusers in Tsarist peasant villages had a serious chance of prosecution. The author implies that wife-beating was just one aspect of a much-broader culture of violence among peasants. She notes that drunken men often beat their elderly fathers as well as their wives, and there were multiple cases she heard of where drunken men killed their mothers.
Aggression encouraged
Her description of how young peasant boys were actively encouraged to be aggressive by their families recalls “Albion’s Seed” describing how Scotch-Irish boys were encouraged to be “spirited” in a similar way. In both cultures, a certain amount of open defiance toward parents–in particular, mothers–was encouraged in boys. E.g., a boy calling his mother a bitch and having everyone, including the mother, praise him for his assertiveness; boys hitting their mothers with sticks. @Evolving_Moloch Have you seen this in forager cultures? Young boys encouraged to be defiant and disrespectful toward parents, in particular mothers, as a sign of valued aggressiveness?
Bride-price
One last interesting thing:
The village was currently in the process of switching from a bride-price to a dowry culture. Bride-prices had been falling, and cash dowries–unlike the household items for the bride’s use that had been given earlier–were coming into use. Dowries were especially large when the bride was seen as undesirable in some way–older than her husband, physically unattractive, sexually-experienced, etc. But brides controlled their own dowries, so the shift probably meant a rise in women’s status. The older bride-price culture clearly showed how useful women were seen as being.
Parents didn’t want their daughters to marry young because they feared losing their labor, but had to marry them off before 20 because they wouldn’t be able to find a good husband afterwards. And the reason often men married younger than women was because parents wanted their sons to marry as young as possible so they could acquire daughters-in-law to help with work. It’s an illustration of how appreciating women’s labor as valuable doesn’t always lead to respect for the women themselves.
Fathers still lamented the birth of daughters, despite their wives consoling them by pointing out all the work she would do. If you want to read it for yourself: Village life in late tsarist Russia : Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Olga, 1863-1906
European folk Christianity
Another point:
The author’s portrayal of peasant religion confirms what I’ve read in “Peasants Into Frenchmen” and “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” about the overwhelmingly this-worldly, non-ethicized, and in general ‘Pre-Axial-Age’ nature of European folk Christianity. She says God was conceived essentially as a harsh and distant giver of this-worldly boons like rainfall, with saints as capricious and temperamental lesser deities. To the limited extent that religion was ethicized at all, it was in wholly negative terms of divine wrath and punishment, with no hint of divine love or mercy.
While younger people took no thought at all for the afterlife, older people began to fear Hell. But they were consumed by religious doubt–by worries about which was the true path to salvation, the state church, Freemasons, or Molokans? They also resented postmortem divine judgment as fundamentally unfair, because of how the rich could buy their way into heaven by giving money to the church.
The poor were seen as objectively morally superior to the rich, but less likely to go to heaven. In this regard, they do seem less secularized than the 1950s Neapolitan peasants, none of whom believed in any kind of ethicized afterlife. But they don’t seem to have been consoled at all by the hope of heaven.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast two distinct responses to religious teachings favoring the rich:
- Thai peasants, like Russian peasants, lamented their own inability to generate enough good karma as a sad objective fact about reality whereas 1970s.
- Bengali Dalits ridiculed the idea that they could be reborn in a higher caste through good behavior as a lie invented by the higher castes, in positively Marxist fashion.)
The way in which the Christian message was twisted 180 degrees, into declaring that it’s easier for a rich man than a poor man to get into heaven, is just unspeakably depressing. Reading about this kind of folk Christianity always makes me much more sympathetic to the Reformation. I get people looking around at actually-existing pre-modern Christianity and seeing it as thinly-rebranded paganism.
And the particular emphasis here on giving money to the church as the single most important thing for salvation makes me think of Luther’s war on indulgences. And it makes me think that Marx and other leftist critics of religion as an anesthetizing opiate, which consoles the poor for their misery by promising them heaven, have actually given pre-modern religion too much credit. Rather, it seems like pre-modern popular Christianity either ignored the afterlife altogether, or delivered only threats of hell to those who violated the social order.
The peasants weren’t consoled by the hope of divine justice being visited on the landlords/merchants/officials that they hated for oppressing them. Their wickedness only mattered in this-worldly terms. The Protestant religiosity of US slaves, by contrast, seems to have played a much more consoling role, through both hopes of heaven and hopes of divine punishment for oppressors. I suppose the reversal of Jesus’ message about the rich is no more surprising than the existence of forms of folk Buddhism which have animal sacrifice as a central ritual (Laotian folk Theravada, some historic forms of Central Asian Tantrism).
Beauty standards
On a much lighter note, the author notes the difference in beauty standards between the peasantry and the upper classes. Peasants, like the peasant son Khrushchev, preferred their women thicc.