Donbas Studies DS

Woman in traditional Ukrainian culture.

  1. Summary
  2. This monograph represents a complex historical and ethnographic study of the everyday lives of Ukrainian peasant women in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The gender approach to traditional Ukrainian culture is applied for the first time in Ukrainian scholarship. The book offers a thorough critical overview of the development of the feminist paradigm in social and cultural anthropology; the origins and main trends of research on women within the framework of Ukrainian studies are discussed as well. This study reveals basic legal, socio-economic, and demographic contexts of a peasant woman’s life. The author explores the roots and key constituents of the traditional stereotype of femininity as an essential part of the Ukrainian peasantry’s worldview. The study focuses on principal functions, rights, and responsibilities of women at various stages of the life span (little girl, young girl, woman, old woman). The peculiarities of gender socialization receive special attention. The specific features of the women’s social roles– normative (young girl, wife, mother, housewife), and marked (widow, single mother, witch) – in the context of the peasant family and rural community are examined in depth. The study reveals the complex and controversial aspects of everyday women’s lives which heretofore have been silenced or overlooked. Based upon the analysis of various sources (ethnographic materials, folklore, historical documents, legislation, statistics, demographic data etc.) this book contributes to a more accurate and thorough understanding of the Ukrainian popular notion of womanhood, as well as the diversity in a woman’s status in a peasant family and the rural community.
    CONTENTSPREFACE

    PART ONE: WOMEN’S STUDIES IN ETHNOLOGY

    1. Women’s studies in Ukraine: past and present

    2. Feminist paradigm in social and cultural anthropologies

    3. Gender approach: theoretical principles and key categories

    PART TWO: BECOMING A WOMAN

    4. Social, legal, cultural and historical contexts of a woman’s daily life

    5. Little girl: foundations of gender programming

    6. Girl: testing the maturity

    PART THREE: AN ORDINARY WOMAN

    7. Wife: the problem of conjugal (in)equality

    8. Housewife: woman’s work and creativity

    9. Mother: ideals and practices of motherhood

    10. Old woman: declining years

    PART FOUR: A DIFFERENT WOMAN

    11. Single mother: confronting the destiny

    12. Widow: advantages and disadvantages of widowhood

    13. Witch: life on the margins

    AFTERWORD

    ABBREVIATIONS

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

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