Peasant Women Research Articles

Midwifing Modernity: Popularizing Modern Health Care for Women in Late Imperial Russia

AbstractThis article examines the discourse on Russian women’s health care in the late Imperial period within the context of modernization. One of the hallmarks of modernity, health care is also one of the most intimate areas of contact between the agents of modernity and the public at large. The discussion was starkly divided between those concerned with peasant women and those concerned with educated women, but both were firmly situated in the overarching project of healthification (ozdorovlenie). While the authors concerned with peasant women’s health sought to overcome traditional beliefs and practices and replace them with the findings of modern science, the literature directed at the educated public illustrates the anxiety that accompanied the modernity project. The authors writing to and about educated society were far more conflicted about the array of problems they observed developing as traditional beliefs and practices were challenged by changes in society. The article explores the development and role of women’s health care, the tensions between professional and popular health care practitioners, and their relationships with the population from cultural, political and gendered perspectives, and analyzes modernization as a site of contention over women’s agency as well as a social and cultural process.

The Social Reproductive Roots of Agrarian Contention: Gendered Labor amid Peasant Struggles in Tunisia

AbstractThis paper revisits the Tunisian 2010–2011 uprising and its ensuing decade of agrarian contention as a crisis of social reproduction stemming from the combined effects of depletion and dispossession. It traces the lineages of the grievances that continue to animate the Tunisian countryside to the multiple and often enmeshed labours—both productive and reproductive—of peasant and rural women. In underscoring the interconnectedness between these labours and the ebb and flow of various contestations against depletion and dispossession, it recognises social reproduction as a site of deep exploitation as well as an arena of day‐to‐day struggle. Guided by social reproduction theorisations and leveraging a multi‐sited ethnography conducted during July and August 2023, this paper relies on participant observation/observant participation and unstructured interviews conducted with predominately landed and landless peasant women, the testimonies of whom serve as a conduit for an important dialogue between feminist materialist analyses of social reproduction and peasant movements.

Contribuições do conceito de corpoterritório e dos feminismos comunitários para pensarmos na construção de Territórios Saudáveis e Sustentáveis

ABSTRACT This text constitutes a literature review, which presents the path towards building the concept of body-territory, its connections with community feminism, ecofeminism and decolonial feminism, to discuss the construction of Healthy and Sustainable Territories (TSS). This concept originates from community mobilizations of women of Abya Yala peoples. It has been gradually incorporated by Brazilian Indigenous, Black and peasant women. The body-territory consists of biological, mental, social and cosmogonic dimensions. From their bodies and territories, they question the impacts of large undertakings; problematize violence against women and the Earth; problematize sex-gender, class and race inequalities; and denounce situations that constrain health and their bodies and territories. Through care practices, these women recover their own health and of their community groups and territories, expanding theirs and the collective health. This favors resilience and reparation of the web of life. This female protagonism has been invisible in studies on TSS. Therefore, it is considered essential that these feminist contributions are intersectional in actions to promote TSS.

Mexican Catholic Women and Their Gendered Racial Politics

This article examines pedagogical materials and Catholic youth magazines to uncover how, between 1926 and 1939, the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (JCFM) pursued peasant moralization campaigns driven by young women’s shared distrust of Indigenous and mixed-race campesinas. It unearths the authoritarian dimensions of the group’s educational initiatives and exposes these efforts as fundamentally racial, gendered, and class-conscious political and religious projects. Moreover, this article traces how the JCFM, as an influential upper-class laywomen’s group, tried—and failed—to establish a nationwide educational curriculum grounded in Church doctrine to counter the influence of Protestant missions and Mexico’s nascent Secretariat of Public Education. It attributes these shortcomings to laywomen’s adherence to social hierarchy and their reluctance to offer meaningful solutions to peasant women’s economic hardships.

Aproximación al Buen Vivir: Una experiencia de emprendimiento por mujeres de la zona rural

The concept of Good Living plays a crucial role in relation to the community and becomes an opportunity to improve the quality of life. This article systematizes the entrepreneurship experience with peasant women from the rural area of Villamaría, Caldas, Colombia, as a contribution to human flourishing. This research followed the guidelines of the Alforja Network, which proposes a systematization framed within dialectical, systemic, and holistic approaches to popular education. The results are presented in three phases: characterization of the families, the environment, and the entrepreneurship production; interdisciplinary accompaniment and sustainability through the structuring of networks and alliances. The experience reflects the ability of women for the Good Living of themselves and their families, collective organization, and innovation. Additionally, it highlights the importance of the role of the State in strengthening local development through the production chain, preserving its rural identity in the context of equitable processes.

Reassessing Soviet industrialization as primitive Soviet accumulation: Social reproduction, collectivization and peasant women's revolts under Stalin

AbstractThis paper adopts a novel Social Reproduction feminist approach to re‐evaluate the Soviet experience of industrialization within the context of global research on primitive accumulation. I analyse the first Five‐Year Plan as a unique process of ‘primitive Soviet accumulation,’ focusing on the Zhenotdel collectivization campaign and the often‐overlooked role of Zhenotdel peasant women delegates [krestyanki delegatki]. The study explores their involvement in peasant women's revolts against collectivization, emphasizing the significance of these events for the Zhenotdel's emancipatory programme in the village. Considering class as a social relation to the conditions of life's reproduction, I demonstrate: (1) how primitive Soviet accumulation reshaped the gendered metabolic relationship between land and labour during the first Five‐Year Plan and (2) yet, the allocation of surplus into the expanded Soviet state apparatus laid the foundation for the distinctive Soviet mother–worker gender contract and social citizenship model.

Trabajo agrario femenino en Cataluña, 1830-1930

Work by women was crucial to guaranteeing the viability of small peasant farms in Catalonia throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In this article, we describe the jobs done by peasant women on their own family farms, the tasks for which they were hired as day-labourers, and the organization of work crews for the period covering 1850-1930. We then analyse the volume of female agricultural labour contracted in relation to male labour, as well as the seasonality of the work carried out by female day-labourers. The study establishes new wage series and calculations for the wage gap between male and female earnings in various Catalan counties. Finally, we identify factors that help explain the wage differences detected among counties.

Peasant women and social security: advances and counter-reforms in Brazil

O presente artigo investiga as conquistas e perdas de direitos na relação entre as mulheres camponesas e a previdência social no Brasil, destacando sua importância a partir de marcos históricos delineados pela chegada tardia desses benefícios no campo, pelos avanços com a Constituição Federal de 1988, pelos limites com a expansão do neoliberalismo, das contrarreformas nos anos recentes e pelos impactos dos limites de acesso sobre a população do campo em tempos de crise do capital. O artigo tem por base a revisão bibliográfica e documental e pesquisa de campo realizada através de entrevistas semiestruturadas com mulheres durante o mestrado da autora. A conclusão é que a previdência é fundamental, tem grande impacto na vida da população, especialmente das mulheres camponesas, mas, na atualidade vem sofrendo limitação no acesso em decorrência das contrarreformas em curso.

The Women of Viharsarok: Peasant Women's Labour Activism in 1890s Hungary

AbstractThis article explores peasant women’s labour activism in 1890s Hungary, in the southeastern part of the Habsburg Empire, where repeated harvesters’ strikes and peasant uprisings took place during the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, making it the first centre of agrarian workers’ socialist organizing in Hungary. Informed by a more inclusive approach to women’s activist histories and subaltern studies, this article develops a new perspective on the periodization and geography of the international and Hungarian history of women’s social movements, to contribute to the historiographies of peasant women’s labour activism in the Eastern European countryside.

Time in the novel “The Snake’s Pass” by Bram Stoker as a plot-forming element

The article examines time as a plot-forming element in Bram Stoker’s novel “The Snake’s Pass”. The traditional idea of artistic time as a sequence of events flowing from the past into the present and future is interpreted from the point of view of the concept of linear and monumental time. Ireland’s legendary and historical past are intertwined and expressed in the present through the images of the bog, the treasure, the Englishman and the Irish peasant woman. The monumental past is associated with the uneasy relationship between Great Britain and Ireland at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and the attempt of the author of the novel to metaphorically resolve the contradictions through the marriage of an Englishman and an Irish woman. Linear time is expressed in the image of an Englishman, the development of his relationships with the inhabitants of an Irish village, the engineering study of a bog, and the transformation of a poor Irish village into a prosperous region. The female image is created according to the canon of the “new woman” in the late Victorian novel, combining femininity and heroism, manifested in a difficult situation.

Embroidering care and reciprocity: contributions to food sovereignty by feminist peasant women from the mountains of Veracruz, Mexico

Different authors from academia and social movements point to agroecology as a path to food sovereignty and as a way out of multiple social-ecological crises. Peasant feminism (feminismo campesino) informs the daily practice of women, and has contributed to broaden the meanings of food sovereignty as a political framework. Vinculación y Desarrollo Agroecológico en Café (VIDA) is a Mexican coffee growers’ organization that is centrally guided by principles of agroecology, food sovereignty, and peasant feminism. A transdisciplinary study held with VIDA members shows how food sovereignty is based on more dimensions than the official ones. In this paper, we use the Mexican art of embroidery as an integrating metaphor to analyze how female coffee growers’ practices around integral health, food gathering, and bartering contribute to food sovereignty. Our intention is also to analyze how these activities expand from the family unit to the territory, as well as from human to more than human beings. Based on their agroecological knowledge and practice, VIDA’s feminist peasant women invite us to consider agroecology and food sovereignty as key dimensions of Earth stewardship.

Care is the new radical: food and climate approaches from a peasant feminist perspective

ABSTRACT This article examines the work of ‘Fundación Entre Mujeres’ (FEM), a feminist peasant collective organized in cooperatives and working on food sovereignty, agro-ecology, and the economic, ideological and organizational empowerment of peasant women in the dry corridor of Nicaragua. I argue that by centring an ethics of care and the sustainability of human and more-than-human life in their thinking and responses to the food and climate crises, FEM has opened a space of radical contestations to a dominant capitalist and patriarchal rationale and worldview that is at the core of these crises and mainstream approaches towards agricultural transformation.

Women Peasants in India: Farmers or ‘Farmers’ Wives’?

Even though there is an increasing trend towards the ‘feminisation of agriculture’, especially among the small and resource-poor farm households due to the increasing long-term migration of men, women’s work on the family farm is invisibilised to a very large extent in most parts of the country. One of the reasons for the absence of gender issues in the literature on agriculture is that women are not even regarded as farmers due to the absence of property rights for them. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in villages of Punjab, Rajasthan and Telangana. It brings to light lesser-known facts about women’s ownership of land and their changing status in rural India. Based on data collected through primary research from 100 households in each of the three states, this paper concentrates on the less researched aspects of women in agriculture in India. The study focuses on women’s role as farmers, their control over land, their participation in agricultural activities on family farms, and decision-making, including decisions relating to the family. The analysis of data shows that there are regional differences in these aspects, which are mainly due to the differences in cultural factors relating to women’s status in society.

Peasant woman and Soviet power in the Yenisei Province during the New economic policy

The authors analyze the work of the Soviet government with peasant women in the Yenisei province during the New economic policy. The collection, systematization, summarization of data and construction of the narrative were carried out on the basis of the problem-chronological method. The historical-genetic method is used to analyze the activities of women's departments from 1920 to 1929, the emphasis is placed on the first, most difficult stage of their creation and the beginning of work (until the mid-1920s), when the Soviet government brought the country out of acute political and economic crisis after the Civil War, intervention and war communism. The historical-systemic method made it possible to consider the work of womens' departments to involve women in social production and political life in the context of the changes taking place in the country and the socio-economic conditions of the Yenisei province. Based on the comparative historical method, the tasks and their practical implementation in the field of womens' issues are compared. It is shown that in the conditions of economic devastation after the First World War and the Civil War, famine, and mass epidemics, the harsh tax policy of the Soviet government among the East Siberian peasantry caused an increase in anti-Bolshevik sentiment. Experience of women's departments working with peasant women in the 1920s showed that without solving urgent economic and social problems of society (mass illiteracy, lack of modern industrial sectors, technical backwardness in agriculture, manual labor, low standard of living, etc.), the transformation of womens' position and their involvement in socio-political life were impossible. It became obvious that this kind of large-scale task could only be solved gradually with an increase in the educational level of the population, the qualifications and professional level of women, and the solution of many everyday issues. All these tasks were related to the need to modernize the state's economy.

Excluding the Rural Girl Student: Rural-Urban Divide, Knowledge Transmission, and Female Homosociality in Xiao Hong’s “Hands”

Abstract: In the early 20th century, the figures of both the peasant woman and the “New Woman” caught the attention of Chinese writers. While the “New Woman” has been the subject of considerable scholarship, the representation of peasant women has not received much scholarly attention. This essay examines the peasant woman as represented in modern Chinese literature to complement the existing understanding of Chinese modernity. It focuses on the rural girl student, as she signifies the clash of two worlds: the rural family as her point of provenance and the modern school as her entry into the urban. Relying on Xiao Hong’s short story “Hands” in the context of historical accounts, I argue that hygiene becomes a type of biopower that punishes the rural girl student for her class origin and racializes her as a barbarian, the process capturing a rural-urban divide. The modern school that expels the protagonist, Wang Yaming, is not an institution that promotes upward mobility but a tool to perpetuate class privileges. Although the narrator shows occasional sympathy with Wang Yaming, under the influence of class difference female solidarity is not achieved.

Человек читающий и человек сочиняющий: «Бедная Лиза» (1792) Н.М. Карамзина и «Записки из подполья» (1864) Ф.М. Достоевского

The article analyses the image of homo legens in Poor Liza by Nikolay Karamzin and Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novelist considers Karamzin’s short story as a part of the process of the knowledge of the human being in the 19th century. In contrast to positivist philosophical knowledge, which, according to Dostoevsky, simplifies the phenomenon of the person, the writer, with the help of Karamzin’s artistic discoveries in the short story Poor Liza, creates the image of the Underground Man as a person who both reads and writes. Typologically, the encounter of the dreamer with a girl in Notes from Underground repeats the situation in Poor Liza. Erast dreams of an idyll and “invents” his future life with Liza according to the laws of the genre, while the peasant woman, unlike the reading hero, understands that dreams cannot be realized. In Dostoevsky’s novella the situation is more complicated. Following literary models, the Underground Man creates two stories in an idyllic and anti-idyllic key, in order to manipulate the soul of another person and to affirm himself. At first, Liza does not believe the words of the visitor or the possibility of leaving the brothel. The Underground Man prefaces his stories with two biblical quotations: “the image and likeness of God” and “lay down your life for the sake of friends.” He introduces the sacred as a means of manipulation of the heroine’s feelings. Having identified these quotations, Liza sincerely believes in the possibility of leaving the brothel and offers her love to the dreamer, which the author sees as an opportunity for him to come out of “the underground.” The hero cannot accept this chance. By creating the image of homo legens in Notes from Underground Dostoevsky shows that a chaotic and blind adherence to literary genres, situations, and gestures together with the manipulation of both literary and sacred texts places man in a position of insoluble conflict with “living life.”

Fashion issues in the columns of the magazine «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» (1924–1941)

Introduction. The invasion of Ukraine by an aggressor country has emphasized the importance of Ukrainian identity and prompted a reassessment of Soviet Ukrainian fashion journalism, highlighting its distinctiveness and value globally. Relevance of the study. This article examines Soviet women’s press, focusing on fashion, through Ukrainocentric and anti-Bolshevik perspectives. It aims to showcase Ukrainian fashion journalism during the early years of totalitarianism using «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» [«Peasant woman of Ukraine» / «Collective farmer of Ukraine»] as an example and identify unique features in fashion media. Methodology. The study analyzes «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» from 1924 to 1941 using historicism, systematicity, socio-cultural analysis, and historical-anthropological approaches. Results. It has been investigated that materials on fashion in «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» from 1924 to 1941 (52 issues out of 407) were categorized into genres including photo reports, articles, reviews, and practical guides. Topics covered: (1) standards of female beauty in the Ukrainian SSR; (2) handicraft production of clothing/fabrics; (3) clothing models and their manufacturing technology; (4) advice on dressing and caring for clothing; (5) cutting and sewing guides; (6) industrial clothing / fabric production; (7) propaganda of totalitarian fashion; (8) advertising of sewing equipment; (9) schemes for manual embellishment of clothing; (10) schools / courses of cutting and sewing. Conclusions. The peculiarities of fashion coverage in «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» during the period of indigenization, collectivization, and at the beginning of World War II have been clarified. It has been revealed that despite «Selianka Ukrainy» / «Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy» primarily being a party tribune and the most ideologically engaged magazine among other press publications for women in Soviet Ukraine, the fashion issue aimed at the readership of rural areas was covered in small concentrations and filtered through the Bolshevik censorship in the columns of the magazine.

WOMEN IN THE AGE OF MEXICAN REVOLUTION FRANCISCO ROJAS GONZÁLEZ’S LA NEGRA ANGUSTIAS

This paper examines the role of women in the Mexican Revolution starting from the novel La Negra Angustias written by the Mexican writer Francisco Rojas González. The research is based on the assumption that the protagonist of the novel, Angustias Farrera, symbolically represents a powerless and downtrodden part of the Mexican population that, after centuries of suffering oppression, rises up in arms demanding a respect of basic human rights. We point out that in the period of the Mexican Revolution (1910– 1920), Angustias gets the opportunity to transform from a marginalised and passive mulatto peasant woman into an active social factor that tends to change the social system. As the military officer that forms part of the Liberation Army of the South, guerrilla force led by Emiliano Zapata, one of the most famous Mexican revolutionaries, Angustias stands up for the vulnerable part of the Mexican population, primarily women, demanding the right to freedom, independence and education. Her initial enthusiasm, however, gradually weakens under the influence of the teacher with whom she falls in love. The teacher Manuel in this Novel of the Mexican Revolution plays the role of an opportunistic intellectual who joins the Mexican Revolution in order to gain material benefit. By getting married with a greedy opportunist, Angustias abandons the revolution, and betrays her friends and ideals. From an active military officer, Angustias once again becomes a passive woman whose role in the context of the patriarchal Mexican culture is reduced to a self-sacrificing wife and mother. Therefore, following the fate of this revolutionary woman from childhood to adulthood, we try to follow the course of the Mexican Revolution in terms of armed rebellion, from the initial excitement, through the heated struggles to a status quo return.

I colori della lingua di una semicolta siciliana

The aim of the paper is to examine the linguistic varieties present in the autobiographical diary of an illiterateSicilian peasant woman, Carolina Drago, who has chosen to entrust her memoirs to the written page. The diary,composed since 2007, when Carolina Drago was more than 70 years old, contains recipes of gastronomicpreparations, prayers, songs as well as the narration of the most significant episodes of her existence seenthrough the eyes and heart of a mother who writes the diary in order to deliver her memories to her childrenand grandchildren. The facts described within only partially intertwine the "great history" (e.g. the Spanishepidemic of the twenties, the Second World War) and dwell rather on the family environment, offering a crosssectionof peasant and popular life that crosses the twentieth century. From a linguistic point of view, CarolinaDrago uses the variety of the repertoire at her disposal: basically, the dialect and popular regional Italian, mixingthe linguistic colours of her poor palette with the enthusiasm of those who want to tell and tell themselves. Alinguistic analysis will also be presented, aimed at demonstrating how the writings of illiterate people allow usto see that Italian defined as "hidden" by Testa (2014), almost in a karstic way, has continued to evolvealongside the normative codification anticipating innovative trends.

Violation of food taboos by peasant women of Kyiv region and political use of accusations of anthropophagy: the case of Hanna Bilorus

The article analyzes the emergence of psychopathological changes in peasant women resulting from long-term deprivation, using the examples of the archival and criminal case of Hanna Bilorus, oral historical testimonies, and official sources. These changes affected the deformation of women’s behavior and led to the spread of its extreme manifestations — violations of food taboos, an increase in cases of anthropophagy and necrophagy since the beginning of 1933. However, they were perceived by the peasants in different ways: from a sympathetic attitude to condemnation and lynchings. We discovered the long-term impact of the consequences of cannibalism on rural communities and the psyche of eyewitnesses to the tragedy. Additionally, it investigates the representation of cannibalism cases by the authorities, which often carry political undertones. Anthropophages were represented in official sources as marginal non-working elements (“ledar”), representatives of hostile social groups (“kurkuli”, “odnoosibnyky”), and spies. Using the archive-criminal case of Hanna Bilorus, the article demonstrates the correlation between accusations of espionage for Poland and the suspicion of cannibalism with the broader political context of 1932–1933. This context emphasized the “Polish threat” and the alleged dismantling of the DPU «counter-revolutionary network» associated with the Polish General Staff.