Female “Singleness” in the Urals around 1900

Abstract

This paper studies female “singleness”, which is defined as the status of being non-married, in the cities of Perm Province. Emphasis is placed on the two largest cities — Perm and Ekaterinburg — compared with the entire urban and rural population. The authors refer to aggregates from the city censuses taken in Perm and Ekaterinburg as well as the national censuses of 1897 and 1926 as the main sources. The study quantitatively analyses women’s marital status in relation to age, place of residence, ethno-religious, and social affiliation, and calculates the rate of women who never married and singulate mean age at marriage. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in Perm and Ekaterinburg, the authors observe stability in the marriage structure among the female population. Over 50% of urban women and 33.6% of rural women aged 15 and older were not married: in the group under 30 years old, female “singleness” was determined by the fact that some girls were unable to marry. By the age of 40, a significant part of those “single” women were widows, and in the age group of 40–49, they made up the majority. Divorce was significantly less likely to be the cause of female “singleness” than non-marriage while still fertile. The differences in the level of female “singleness” in the Perm cities were influenced by the in-migration of female servants, whose background was often rooted in the peasant class, and the presence of a large monastery. During the new Soviet reality, renunciation of marriage as a life trajectory became infrequent, while the proportion of divorced people among those “single” increased noticeably.