Luxury Homes Research Articles

"Hearing a Woman's Voice": Female Perspectives on Change in Russia and the Former Soviet Union

Review Essay: "Hearing a Woman's Voice": Female Perspectives on Change in Russia and the Former Soviet Union Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Marie Barker, Maya Koreneva, and Ekaterina Stetsenko. Dialoques/Dialoqi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (ex) Soviet and American Women. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1994. xvüi + 415 pp. ISBN 0-8223-1375-8 (cl); 0-82231390 -1 (pb). Mary Buckley, ed. Perestroika and Soviet Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xiii + 183 pp. ISBN 0-521-41442-1 (cl); 0-52142738 -X (pb). Anna Horsbrugh-Porter, ed. (with interviews by Frances Welch and Elena Snow). Memories of Revolution: Russian Women Remember. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. ix +138 pp.; map. ISBN 0-415-08806-2 (d); 0^15-08807-0 (pb). Tatyana Mamonova. Women's Glasnost vs. Naqlost: Stopping Russian Backlash . Westport, Conn, and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. xx + 184 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-89789-339-5 (cl); 0-89789-340-9 (pb). Larissa Vasilieva. Kremlin Wives. Translated by Cathy Porter. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992. xviU + 251 pp.; Ul. ISBN 1-55970-260-5 (cl). Lynne Attwood These five books are new additions to the growing Hiterdisdplinary Hterature on women Hi Russia. They differ considerably in style and content, encompassing women's history, women's writing, and women's sodal, poHtical, and economic roles in contemporary Russia. However, they do have one thing Hi common. In the past, when Soviet writers were constrained by censorship and Western writers by limited access, books about Soviet sodety presented its dtizens on the one hand as paragons of offidal moraHty and on the other as objeds of academic enquiry. Each of these books, in contrast, endeavors to give women in the former Soviet Union voices of their own. Memories of Revolution, edited by Anna Horsbrugh-Porter, consists of a series of interviews with ten women whose childhood experiences were lived against the backdrop of revolution and, in all but one case, exüe from Russia. As the editor notes, the study breaks one of the traditions of oral history by focusing not on the underprivileged but on the daughters of the © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 2 (Summer) 182 Journal of Women's History Summer most privUeged class of Russian pre-revolutionary society, but the fortunes of this dass were rapidly overturned. As the tales unfold, they provide an interesting picture of changing class relations in revolutionary Russia as seen through the eyes of a particular sodal group. Irina Sergeevna Tidmarsh describes pre-revolutionary summers spent at the family's country estate as an endless round of swimming and horseback riding, interrupted only by a succession of sumptuous meals consumed in various locations "according to the weather and [Aunt] Masha's will.... We often had lunch under the oak tree or under the pine tree, or by the flower garden in front of the house. The poor maids had to carry enormous trays with all the crockery and all the silver and all the food outside. But it wasn't too bad," she insists; "they didn't really mind" (p. 49). It is doubtful, of course, that they were ever asked. She also tells of a peasant woman working on the estate of a family friend who bore her employer four children (we are given no clue as to whether she minded), who were given over to the care of his sister, Maria: "The poor peasant mother . . . was only allowed to come and see them at Christmas and Easter.... She sat in the chamber hall on a little chair and thaf s where the chUdren came to see her... Maria only aUowed her to see the chUdren for haff an hour or so" (p. 57). The young aristocrats do deserve some sympathy themselves, however . One, whose mother died in childbfrth, was given away to a complete stranger by her indifferent father when his mother got too old to care for her (p. 9). Others were brought up by a succession of foreign governesses, periodically replaced to ensure that the children reached the polyglot proficiency expeded of the aristocracy. After the revolution the aristocrats' luxurious homes were requisitioned by the state...

Court Cavendish acquire luxury retirement homes

Court Cavendish acquire luxury retirement homes

A Quaker's Antislavery Crusade: Anthony Benezet

A QUAKER'S ANTISLAVERY CRUSADE: ANTHONY BENEZET By Roger A. Bruns* In October 1780 Francois Jean de Chastellux wrote of the old Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet,1 "This Mr. Benezet may rather be regarded as the model than as a specimen of the sect of Quakers."2 Benezet's intense and passionate abolitionist crusade during the period of the American Revolution, asserting the humanity and intellectual equality of the black race and demanding the natural rights of freedom for the black slave, was also a call to the Society of Friends for reform and rededication to Quaker principles . Benezet's numerous books and pamphlets, his unremitting correspondence with legislators and religious leaders and, indeed, his entire antislavery propaganda effort was a forceful challenge to members of his sect to abandon the riches of the counting house. His fight for the black slave was a fight for the Quakers' ideals as he saw them. It had been long ago that Quakers had withered in prison for their beliefs. Individuals still wore the plain clothes; they still said "thee" and "thou"; they still held simple meetings in simple buildings . The fervor, however, of a George Fox or a Robert Barclay was not generally evident among the socially respectable eighteenth- *Assistant Executive Director, National Historical Publications and Records Commission. 1.Andiony Benezet's influence in the eighteenth-century abolition movement was vital. His numerous pamphlets and books established him as the most prolific propagandist against slavery in this period, and his importance was not only felt within the Society of Friends and in America but extended to the British movement to end slavery. There is still a need for a careful treatment of Benezet's antislavery work. The most recent biography of Benezet, George Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia, 1937), is most notable for its excellent selection of Benezet's correspondence. A very early biography, Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the life of Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia, 1817), has minimal value. 2.Francois Jean de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the years 1780, 1781, and 1782, Vol. 1 (Dublin, 1787), 276. 81 82QUAKER HISTORY century Quakers.3 Benezet remarked, "It's amazing what an Influence the Love of the World, its Esteem & Friendships, and the Desire of amasing Wealth, living themselves and Children in Delicacy and Shew, in Conformity to the World, has upon so many in our Society . . ."4 To Benezet they had become "quite unquakered,"5 and he even suggested that some were no better than thieves.6 The Society of Friends had become a very rich community. The self-disciplined honesty of the Friends and their testimony against idleness and waste had brought commercial success. The Quaker merchant, manufacturing and banking families built luxurious homes in Philadelphia. Quaker grandees invested heavily in land, apparently emulating the Whig oligarchs of contemporary England.7 Many wealthy Quakers had left the Society for the Church of England , and by the 1770's the Quakers embraced only one-seventh of the total population of Philadelphia.8 One disillusioned Friend even observed that "Sottishness and immorality" seemed to be on the increase.9 Many Quakers paid taxes for military purposes during the Revolution . Indeed, John Adams spoke of whole companies of armed uniformed Quakers in Philadelphia.10 When Patrick Henry mentioned to Benezet that many Quakers were advocating violence against the British, Benezet could only remark that they had no other claim to the Friends' principles than the fact that they were their children or grandchildren.11 3.Rufus Jones described the Quakers in this period as more concerned with preserving a system within their own circle than in relating to die external world. See The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York, 1962), introduction. Calling this a period of "Quietistic introspection," Frederick Tolles saw the eighteenth-century Quaker rebelling from his seventeendicentury image. Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York, 1960), 91-102. 4.Benezet to John Pemberton, March 29, 1784, copy, Impey MSS, Part 1/33, Friends House Library, London. 5.Benezet to Jonah Thompson, August 28, 1759, copy, Swarthmore MSS 6/116, Friends House Library, London. 6.Benezet to John Fothergill, April 28, 1773, Gibson MSS 1/27, Friends House Library, London. 7...

Geographic Areas of Cities

TaHE great modern city is man's largest and most complex artifact. It contains scores or even hundreds of square miles of rather closely built up land, and is a veritable hive of human activity. It is the supreme focus of the commercial, manufactural, transportational, professional, social, and political life of a large contiguous territory. The central section tends to be a maze of congested, noisy, canyon-like streets between compact rows of towering buildings which are occupied by shops, stores, banks, hotels, offices, and factories. On its margins are terminal districts with many parallel railroad tracts, long strings of cars, steaming locomotives, moving trains, busy passenger and freight stations, spreading warehouses, and large factory buildings. Extensive areas largely occupied by manufacturing plants lie along the water-courses and railroad lines which extend toward the margins of the city; and between them are large stretches of land occupied by associations of old tumble-down houses, flat and apartment houses, small modest homes, luxurious homes, and by streets, parks, playgrounds, and aviation fields. Still farther out are spaces, yet unappropriated by the growing city, of which some are platted and ready for development, some are held for speculative purposes, some are used as market gardens and dairy farms, and here and there about the intersections of important transportation routes are the far-flung suburban or satellite cities with their relatively small business, manufacturing, and residential districts.