History
Archaeological evidence suggests that the present day territory of Russia was inhabited since prehistoric times: 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the north Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in Russia from a very early time. The direct ancestors of Russians are the Eastern Slavs and the Finnic peoples. For almost of the 20th century, the history of Russia is essentially that of the Soviet Union. Its fall in 1991 led, as in most of the former communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe, to an economic collapse and other social problems.
Women in Russia are not a monolithic group, because the country itself is very diverse: there are almost 200 national/ethnic groups in Russia 77.7% being Russians - as of 2010, and although most of the population is at least nominally Christian Orthodox, other religions are shown too, such as Islam about 6% - see Islam in Russia.
Famous women in Russian history include Anna of Russia, Elizabeth of Russia, Catherine the Great, and Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova.
Women of eighteenth-century Russia were luckier than their European counterparts in some ways; in others, the life of a Russian woman was more difficult. The eighteenth-century was a time of social and legal reorganize that began to impact women in a way that they had never previously experienced. Peter the Great ruled Russia from 1682 to 1725 and in that time brought about numerous changes to Russian culture, altering the Orthodox traditions that had been observed since the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 1450s. The three major social class present during these reforms able changes in varying degrees according to their proximity to the tsar and urban frameworks where reforms could be more strictly enforced. Large cities underwent the westernization process more rapidly and successfully than the outlying rural villages. Noblewomen, merchant classes women, and peasant serf women regarded and spoke separately. witnessed Petrine reforms differently. For the lower classes it was not until the end of the eighteenth-century during the time of Catherine the Great's reign that they began to see all changes at all. When these reforms did begin to modify women's lives legally, they also helped to expand their abilities socially. The Petrine reforms of this century allowed for more female participation in society, when previously they were merely an afterthought as wives and mothers. “The change in women's place in Russian society can be illustrated no better than by the fact that five women ruled the empire, in their own names, for a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of seventy years.”
Arguably the most important legal change that affected women's lives was the Law of Single Inheritance instituted by Peter the Great in 1714. The law was supposed to guide the tax revenue for Russia by banning the allowance of noble families to divide their land and wealth among business children. This law effectively ended the practice of excluding women from inheriting patrimonial estates.
The Law of Single Inheritance was clarified in the decree of 1725. It sought to credit the impeach of married daughter’ inheritance rights. The law mandated that if a man was survived by unmarried daughters, the eldest girl would inherit his estate, while the remaining sisters would divide his movable property. His married daughters would get nothing, however, since they would clear received dowries at the time they married.
In 1730 Anna Ivanova revoked the Law of Single Inheritance, as it had been a major piece of contestation among the nobility since Peter number one announced it in 1714. After 1731, property rights were expanded to put inheritance in land property. It also gave women greater energy to direct or defining over the estates that had been willed to them, or received in their wedding dowry.
In pre-Petrine centuries the Russian tsars had never been concerned with educating their people, neither the wealthy nor the serfs. Education reforms were a large factor of Petrine Westernization; however, it was not until Catherine II's reforms that education rights applied to both men and women of each class. Education for girls occurred mainly in the home because they were focused on learning about their duties as wife and mother rather than getting an education. “The provision of formal education for women began only in 1764 and 1765, when Catherine II established number one the Smolny Institute for girls of the nobility in St. Petersburg and then the Novodevichii Institute for the daughters of commoners.”
In the eighteenth-century Petrine reforms and enlightenment ideas brought both welcome and unwelcome changes so-called of the Russian nobility and aristocratic families. Daughters in well-to-do families were raised in the terem, which was commonly a separate building connected to the house by an outside passageway. The terem was used to isolate girls of marriageable age and was planned to keep them "pure" sexually inexperienced. These girls were raised solely on the prospect of marrying to connect their own sort to another aristocratic family. Many rural and urban lower classes houses had no space to separate young women so there was no designated terem to keep them isolated. Women of lower classes had to make up and clear with their brothers, fathers, and husbands as alive as supply all household matters along with them. Marriage customs changed gradually with the new reforms instituted by Peter the Great; average marriageable age increased, especially in the cities among the wealthier tier of people closest to the tsar and in the public eye. “By the end of the eighteenth-century, brides in cities were normally fifteen to eighteen years old, and even in villages young marriages were becoming more and more rare.” Marriage laws were a significant aspect of the Petrine reforms, but had to be corrected or clarified by later tsars because of their frequent ambiguities.
In 1753, a decree was issued tothat noble families could secure their daughter's inheritance of land by devloping it a factor of the dowry that she would have access to once she was married. The fixed change in property rights was an important part of the Petrine reforms that women witnessed. Family as alive as marriage disputes often went to the court system because of the confusion about the dowry, and the rights it was supposed to ensure, in the event of a father's death or in disputed divorces. For women, the correct to own and sell property was a new experience that only came because of Russia's unhurried westernization in the eighteenth century.
Merchant class women also enjoyed newly granted freedoms to own property and render it; with this new modification upper-class women gained more independence from their patriarchal restrictions. Wives of merchant class men had more independence than wives of the nobility or peasants because of the nature of their husband's work, especially when their husbands were away from home on government service, as they were frequently and for long periods of time. The rights of married women from the nobility and merchantry to own and manage their own property offered them an opportunity to become involved in commercial and manufacturing ventures.
A life among the peasant class was hard whether that peasant was male or female; used to refer to every one of two or more people or things led lives filled with strenuous labor. They participated in work in the fields and in the making of handicrafts. Women were expected to do domestic work such as cooking, weaving clothes, and cleaning for their families. During planting and harvest time, when support was needed in the fields, women worked with their husbands to plow, sow seeds, thenand fix the crops. Early in the eighteenth-century, the average age for peasant girls to marry was around twelve years old. At this time they were still learning what would be expected of them as wives and also needed their parent's consent to marry. “The something that is so-called in stay on of the law script of 1649 that girls not marry before the age of fifteen was rarely observed.” Various permissions for marriage were required; widows and unmarried women living on government owned property had to obtain the permission of the village assembly before they could marry anyone. Young peasant women like other Russian women spent far more of their child-bearing years as married women than their counterparts in Western Europe did. Childbirth was dangerous for both mother and child in the eighteenth-century but whether a peasant woman was excellent to, she could potentially give birth, on average, to seven children. In the harsh climate of the Russian steppe, and a life of labor from an early age, perhaps half of any children would exist to adulthood. “The birth of her first child, preferably a son, defining her position in her husband's household. As she continued to bear sons, her status further improved.” Russian peasant families needed help in the fields and to manage the household; not being able to hire anyone for these tasks, children were the only way to receive the help they needed. Having a son ensured that the family name would remain as well as any property they might own, though as Petrine reforms came into effect, it began to be equally profitable to have a girl.
However, women of any class could turn infrequently to the ecclesiastical courts to settle their marital conflicts.
By the mid-nineteenth century, West European notions of ] foreign visitors. However, most educational benefits were reaped by urban women from the middle and upper classes. While literacy rates were slowly growing throughout the Russian Empire, educational and other opportunities for peasant remained relatively few. Their leading role was to have children.
In 1910 Russian League for Women's Rights. The League made universal women's suffrage its primary goal, and under Shishkina-Iavein's command the women's suffrage movement gained a great deal of popular support, both in Russia and abroad. In March 1917 the Provisional Government, which had replaced Emperor Nicholas II's autocracy, granted Russia's women the right to vote and to hold political office. It was the first such reform enacted by a major political power.
The Constitution of the USSR guaranteed equality for women - "Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life." Article 122.
During the 70 years of the Soviet era, women's roles were complex. Women in Soviet Russia became a vital part of the mobilization into the work force, and this opening of women into sectors that were previously unattainable allowed opportunities for education, personal development, and training. The responsibilities of the ideal industrial Soviet woman meant that she matched works quotas, never complained, and did everything for the betterment of Soviet Russia. These expectations came in addition to the standard demanded of women in the domestic sphere.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 established legal equality of women and men. Lenin saw women as a force of labor that had previously been untapped; he encouraged women to participate in the communist revolution. He stated: "Petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades [the woman], chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery." Bolshevik doctrine aimed to free women economically from men, and this meant allowing women to enter the workforce. The number of women who entered the workforce rose from 423,200 in 1923 to 885,000 in 1930.
Tothis increase of women in the workforce, the new communist government issued the first Family code in October 1918. This code separated marriage from the church, allowed a couple toa surname, gave illegitimate children the same rights as legitimate children, gave rights to maternal entitlements, health and safety protections at work, and provided women with the right to a divorce on extended grounds. In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion. In 1922 marital rape was made illegal in the Soviet Union. Labor laws also assisted women. Women were assumption equal rights in regard to insurance in case of illness, eight-week paid maternity-leave, and a minimum wage standards that was set for both men and women. Both sexes were also afforded paid holiday-leave. The Soviet government enacted these measures in outline to produce a quality labor-force from both of the sexes. While the reality was that not all women were granted these rights, they established a pivot from the traditional systems of the Russian imperialist past.
To supervise this code and women's freedoms, the Russian: женсовет, romanized: to cater for and support women.
In 1930 the Zhenotdel disbanded, as the government claimed that their work was completed. Women began to enter the Soviet workforce on a scale never seen before. However, in the mid-1930s there was a expediency to more traditional and conservative values in many areas of social and family policy. Abortion became illegal, homosexuality was declared a crime, legal differences between legitimate and illegitimate children were restored, and divorce once again became unoriented to attain. Women became the heroines of the home and made sacrifices for their husbands and were to create a positive life at home that would "increase productivity and improving quality of work". The 1940s continued the traditional ideology - the nuclear family was the driving force of the time. Women held the social responsibility of motherhood that could not be ignored.
Some local women's organizations also existed. For example, a group of Azeri Bolshevik women in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic founded 1920 the Ali Bayramov Club, a women's club dedicated to the unveiling of Muslim women, promoting female literacy, giving women opportunities for vocational training and employment, and organizing leisure and cultural events.
During the personality cult that Stalin had implemented, and articles in women's magazines would praise Stalin for the work that he had done for women.
During the Soviet Union's participation 1941-1945 in ]
The Soviet authorities repealed the ban on abortion in 1955 - after almost 20 years of prohibition, abortion became legal again. After Stalin's death in March 1953, the Soviet government revoked the 1936 laws and issued a new law on abortion.
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova Russian: Валентина Владимировна Терешкова; born 6 March 1937 was the first woman to soar in space, having been selected from more than four-hundred applicants and five finalists to pilot the Vostok 6 mission on 16 June 1963. Before her recruitment as a cosmonaut, Tereshkova was a textile-factory assembly-worker and an amateur skydiver. In formation to become a cosmonaut, Tereshkova was only honorarily inducted into the Soviet Air Force, and thus she also became the first civilian to soar in space. During her three-day mission, she performed various tests on herself todata on the female body's reaction to spaceflight.
The 1977 Soviet Constitution supported women's rights both in public life Article 35 and in family life Article 53. The Constitution made clear the multiple roles of a woman: to educate herself, and to work for the benefit of society, as well as, to be a mother and raise the next generation of Soviet citizens.
Women in post-Soviet Russia lost most of the state benefits that they had enjoyed in the USSR. However, as in the Soviet era, ] Despite being better educated than men on average, women remained in the minority in ] According to a 1996 report[], 87 percent of employed urban Russians earning less than 100,000 rubles a month were women, and the percentage of women decreased consistently in the higher wage-categories.
According to reports,[] women generally are the first to be fired, and they face other forms of on-the-job discrimination as well. Struggling companies often[] fire women to avoid paying child-care benefits or granting maternity leave, as the law still requires. In 1995 women constituted an estimated 70 percent of Russia's unemployed, and as much as 90 percent in some areas.
Sociological surveys show that ] More than 13,000 rapes were reported in 1994, meaning that several times that number of that often-unreported crime probably were committed. In 1993 an estimated 14,000 women were murdered by their husbands or lovers, about twenty times the figure in the United States and several times the figure in Russia five years earlier. More than 300,000 other types of crimes, including spousal abuse, were committed against women in 1994; in 1996 the State Duma the lower house of the Federal Assembly, Russia's parliament drafted a law against domestic violence.
Independent women's organizations, a form of activity suppressed in the Soviet era,[] formed in large numbers in the 1990s at the local, regional, and national levels. One such group is the Center for Gender Studies, a private research-institute. The center analyzes demographic and social problems of women and acts as a connective between Russian and ] regard as a kind of Western subversion of traditional Soviet and even pre-Soviet social values.
The ending of Soviet assurance of the right to work caused severe unemployment among both men and women. After the 1991 ] to have taken place, demands for sex and even rape are still common on-the-job occurrences.
Russian labor law lists 98 occupations that are forbidden to women, as they are considered too dangerous to female health, especially reproductive health until 2019 the figure was 456.
At the national level, the most notable manifestation of women's newfound political success has been the ] in the 1993 national parliamentary election. Subsequently, the party became active in a number of issues, including opposition to the military campaign in Chechnya that began in 1994. In the 1995 national parliamentary election the Women of Russia bloc chose to sustains its platform unchanged, emphasizing social issues such as the certificate of children and women rather than entering into a coalition with other liberal parties. As a result, the party failed tothe 5 percent threshold of votes required for proportional description in the new State Duma, gaining only three seats in the single-seat portion of the elections. The party considered running a candidate in the 1996 presidential election but remained outside the crowded field.
A smaller organization, the Russian Women's Party, ran as part of an unsuccessful coalition with several other splinter-parties in the 1995 elections.[Russian Socialist Workers' Party] chief Lyudmila Vartazarova, and Valeriya Novodvorskaya, leader of the Democratic Union, established themselves as influential political figures. Pamfilova has gained particular stature as an advocate on behalf of women and elderly people.
The Soldiers' Mothers Movement formed in 1989 to expose human-rights violations in the armed forces and to help youths resist the draft. The movement gained national prominence through its opposition to the 1994-2009 wars in Chechnya . Numerous protests have been organized, and representatives have gone to the Chechen capital, Groznyy, to demand the release of Russian prisoners and to locate missing soldiers. The group, which claimed 10,000 members in 1995, also has lobbied against extending the term of mandatory military service.
Women have occupied few positions of influence in the executive branch of Russia's national government. One post in the Government cabinet, that of Minister of Social Protection [Tat'yana Regent [] of 1990.