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5. REFUGEES AND GENDER The old beliefs, the time-honored foundations, the customary forms are breaking down. They have lost their meaning and force. Thanks to the triumph of political reaction, new foundations and renovated forms have not yet emerged, and people have lost their way. —Dmitrii Zhbankov, “Sexual Bacchanalia and Sexual Compulsions” (1908) What is there to cry about, when there is so much of interest before you? —E. Shveder, Bezhentsy And how do refugees live locally? They starve, run around naked, and live in appalling conditions and in such destitution that they drive their wives and daughters on to the street to join the ranks of prostitutes. —E. M. Rozenblium, speech at the Extraordinary Pirogov Congress, April 1916 The constitution of refugeedom entailed several implications for notions of gender in late imperial Russia. Although the fact attracted scarcely any comment, relatively few refugees were able-bodied men, many of whom had already been conscripted into the Russian army.1 By implication, patriarchal forms of authority were called into question from the very moment of displacement. It fell to the adult women among their number to attend to the immediate needs of the refugee population, many of whom were directly dependent upon them.2 At the same time, the war presented opportunities for other women. Educated women, who had slowly begun to enter Russia’s public sphere, were allowed to claim a particular duty to care for refugees—men, women, and children—who entered the Russian interior. This gendered expertise further enhanced their civic pro¤le, which had already been boosted by the entry of women into the sphere of military nursing.3 Since feminine duty was deemed to lie in the care and treatment of wounded soldiers, it was but a short step to the assertion of feminine obligation toward other victims of war. The articulation of concern for family integrity also implied the partial feminization of public discourse.4 Russian women asserted the right to get involved, precisely because issues of household collapse and reconstitution were at stake. So, too, were the care and rehabilitation of orphans, for whom special provision had to be made. This suggests the elaboration of a range of claims to speci¤c female responsibilities, some of which had no precedent in imperial Russia. Other issues were also at stake, in addition to the articulation of feminine responsibility for the health, security, and moral well-being of refugees. The preponderance of women among the refugee population had profound repercussions for the public pro¤le of women—and men, as we shall see shortly. Traditionally, women tended to migrate to towns to a much lesser extent than did men, although this picture was beginning to change around the turn of the century. The war loosened the remaining constraints on women’s spatial mobility, driving them from their homes and compelling them not only to assume new kinds of domestic responsibilities , but also to enter public spaces that had previously been closed to them. But the contrast between peacetime migration and wartime displacement needs to be drawn more carefully. As Barbara Engel has demonstrated, peasant women who left the ¤elds for the city before 1914 were released to a degree from the constraints of the patriarchal peasant household.5 The growth of new employment opportunities in the expanding urban-industrial war economy gave a new impetus to the prewar pattern of migration. However, the implications were quite different for refugee women, who were often obliged to travel with their dependents. From this point of view, refugeedom did not reinforce the sense of liberation associated with geographical mobility; rather, it served to remind women of their “domestic” duties, now transferred to the contingents of vulnerable refugees. Yet—to complicate matters further—the war disrupted the traditional institutions of rural life, depriving men of direct access to the established peasant community, in which their supremacy was more or less guaranteed. The war encouraged refugees to devise new arrangements for their self-preservation. Women had an opportunity to take the leading role in de¤ning new social and economic duties. Whether on the road or in the refugee camp, there were no ready-made institutions in which patriarchal government was secure. The question then arises: Did refugeedom make the task of establishing women’s claim to basic rights more dif¤cult or less? In another respect, too, we need to think quite cautiously about women and spatial mobility. Whether or not an individual peasant woman had traveled beyond...

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