Issue 1 (54)
| “MOTHERS” AND “DAUGHTERS” IN THE PUBLIC SPACE OF THE NOBILITY ELECTIONS IN THE 1820–1850s: BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE | |||
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| Year | 2017 | Number | 1(54) |
| Pages | 12-20 | Type | scientific article |
| UDC | 94(470)”18”:82.3 | BBK | 63(2)521+83.3(2=411.2)52 |
| Authors | Kupriyanov Alexander I. |
Topic | FATHERS AND SONS: GENERATIONAL STORY |
| Summary | The article is a discussion of the inclusion of women in the public space of the nobility elections. Gender aspects of women's participation in the elections are analyzed within the context of the nobility's public sphere formation preceding the emergence of the bourgeois public environment. Owing to their open nature the elections played an important role in the female members of the nobility involvement in public life. The goals and motivations for the participation of women from different generations in the provincial nobility assemblies have been studied on materials from the Russian fiction of the late 1820s — early 1860s. The texts describing the provincial nobility elections (G. F. Kvitka, D. I. Braikevich, V. V. Selivanov, F. A. Zinoviev) revealed the evolution of the electoral behavior of women of different age groups. Noblewomen of the middle and older generations (“mothers”) came to a provincial capital with two goals in mind: supporting the election campaigns of their husbands and finding a suitable match for the “daughters”. The “mothers”, who generally stayed away from the public space of the elections, nonetheless made their contribution to the fight between different nobility groups. The daughters remained at the sidelines of the elections. For instance, in G. F. Kvitka's and D. I. Braikevich's plays they were shown as a mere commodity, a means for strengthening the electoral capital of the “fathers”. V. V. Selivanov was the first to describe women as part of the electorate. The fiction of the beginning of the 1860s had already shown signs of new patterns in the electoral behavior of the middle-age and young noblewomen: their physical presence at the elections as part of the audience, active participation of the “mothers” in the electoral campaigns of different “parties”. | ||
| Keywords | Russia, the nobility, the public sphere, public space, civil society, gender, election literature | ||
| References |
Habermas J. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, 1989. |
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