Elusive Female Subjectivity in the Russian Empire in the Second Half of the 19th — early 20th Centuries: Socio-Medical Practices of Women's Religious Communities

Abstract

This article examines women's charitable ministry in the Russian Empire using the example of social and medical practices of women's religious communities. This phenomenon was not publicly covered in the post-reform Russian society, but, as the authors managed to establish, it was widespread throughout the Empire. The social and medical ministry of the women's convents helped to solve the urgent problems of local and rural communities. Nuns and novices provided social, spiritual and medical assistance to the most vulnerable groups — widows, unmarried elderly women, crippled and poor people, orphans. The authors expand the concept of “women's charitable subjectivity” through the use of interdisciplinary methodology, which implies the optics of the “mutual influence” of medicine and religion in historical research. In the study of women's charity, we involve the historiography of the social history of medicine and the history of women's religiosity in the Russian Empire. This perspective allowed us to discover and research the socio-medical practices of women's communities (cloisters). The authors tried to fit this plot into the social context of the history of zemskaya (“zemstvo”) medicine, social reforms and the specifics of the secularization of post-reform Russian Empire. The search-problematic nature of the article allows us to examine the place of female subjectivity — both medical and religious — from the perspective of the complex processes of modernization of society in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries.