Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry

Download or read book Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry written by John Bushnell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-09 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bushnell's analysis of previously unstudied church records and provincial archives reveals surprising marriage patterns in Russian peasant villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. For some villages the rate of unmarried women reached as high as 70 percent. The religious group most closely identified with female peasant marriage aversion was the Old Believer Spasovite covenant, and Bushnell argues that some of these women might have had more agency in the decision to marry than more common peasant tradition ordinarily allowed. Bushnell explores the cataclysmic social and economic impacts these decisions had on the villages, sometimes dragging entire households into poverty and ultimate dissolution. In this act of defiance, this group of socially, politically, and economically subordinated peasants went beyond traditional acts of resistance and reaction.