Историческая этнология (Dec 2023)
Private life of a Tatar woman of the pre-reform era (on the example of the Menzelinsk Uyezd)
Abstract
The article restores the social and economic status of Tatar women based on documents of Orenburg Mokhammedan Religious Assembly (OMRS), state audit documents, acts of civil status, and journalistic materials of the 19th-early 20th centuries. The Menzelinsk Uyezd had class specifics and was a part of the military (canton) administration. The chronology of the article starts from the late 18th century and continues until the mid–1860s, due to the fact that at the time the state authorities approved certain laws on marriage and family life of Muslims of the Russian Empire: they changed the age of marriage and legalised inter-class marriages, the OMRS began to regulate marital disputes and inheritance cases. The author places the main focus on the marriage and family aspect of private life and includes many archival examples related to the Tatar women of the Menzelinsk Uyezd. Tatar women turned to OMRS when they needed a divorce or permission to remarry, etc. Women were independent subjects of Muslim and civil law, but they always acted with the support of their relatives. Images of Tatar women in the first half of the 19th century presented in publicistic works are a bit static. Russian authors described only the look of a Tatar woman, the cost of her clothes, accessories, etc. The Tatar view was focused on the composition of the woman’s family (to whom she was married, how many children she had). The article presents the biographies of three Tatar women from the Menzelinsy Uyezd: Kurypla Imanaeva, Gulbadar Akhtyamova, and Khasiba Arduanova. Each case illustrates the main trends in everyday life in the first half of the 19th century (military service problems, the cholera epidemic, etc.). The everyday objects played an important role in interpersonal relations and conflicts. At the same time, in the second half of the 19th century, the Tatar society had an ideal of not only a hard-working and religious woman, but also an educated woman.
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