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Whether or not scholars adopted a self-consciously feminist perspective, its content places much of this initial scholarship in "contribution" history, to borrow Gerda Lerner's phrase. Such histories describe "women's contribution to, their status in and their oppression by male-defined society." 5 Partly because of the intrinsic importance of those topics, but also because they left a relatively accessible paper trail, they focus either on women of the intelligentsia or on the bolshevik attempt to liberate women after 1917. 6 While such works revealed hitherto unknown or neglected aspects of Russian women's experiences, they primarily discussed only the educated, the articulate and the radical; they told us almost nothing about the lives and experiences of "ordinary" Russian women-lives which activist women rejected and which revolutionaries aimed to transform. They also left unchallenged the ways that historians have traditionally conceptualized and periodized Russia's past. More recendy, the focus has broadened, the questions have grown more multi-faceted and the methodologies more diverse. Evolution and diversity were evident at a conference on "The History of Women of the Russian Empire," held in Akron, Ohio in August 1988. Scholars from England, the Soviet Union, Germany, Australia and the United States contributed papers on a broad range of topics that offered new perspectives on women's experience and on the role of gender in structuring historical change. In 1991, selected articles from the conference were published. 7 Together with the scholarship that has appeared in the last decade or so, the collection provides a basis for reassessing Russia's past.

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“It isn't the land that attaches a man to the village, it's the family [rodnye].ProkopovichIn the last decades of Imperial Russia, peasant migrants from all over Russia swelled the ranks of urban dwellers. Impelled by the increasing impoverishment of their villages and the hope of a steady wage, they poured into the cities, some to remain for months or years, others to stay for life. The number of male migrants always exceeded the number of female, although the proportion of women was growing steadily. Even so, the majority of men either remained single or left wives and children in the village.Thus far, the attention of most social historians has focused on the migrant: his relation to the means of production; the extent to which his experiences in city and factory contributed to the transformation of his consciousness from peasant to proletarian. This approach has yielded rich scholarly results. But, with the exception of the work of Rose Glickman, that scholarship has addressed the peasant migrant almost exclusively as male and regarded his relation to his village primarily as an obstacle on the path to proletarianization.

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