Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg

Finding a Mate in Late Tsarist Russia

“…54 But people who declared themselves as 'toilers' (truzhenniki) -whose social identity depended on the laborious exercise of (primarily manual) skills -always had a place in these columns, even if they were comfortably outnumbered by intelligenty. The corpus of advertisements is notable for a social inclusivity rarely associated with late imperial society: authors ranged from seamstresses to wealthy or titled noblemen, while the middle ground between these extremes became ever more richly populated with civil servants, railway engineers, pharmacists, accountants, businessmen, army officers, and many others.…”

Hygiene, dirt and the shaping of a new man among the early Zionist halutzim

“…The halutzim of the earlier immigration wave, many of whom were affiliated with one of the socialist movements that flourished in Russia before the war (Frankel, 1981; Shilo, 1988: 111), came to Palestine with the intention of becoming members of the agricultural proletariat in the Jewish colonies – agricultural settlements of private farms, which were formed by Jews since the late 1870s. Many of them formed labor collectives, following the Russian model (Smith, 2002), and moved from place to place in search of work. Passionate, restless and proud, they were not well received by the Jewish colonists (Shilo, 1988: 112).…”

“…A central aspect of the Zionist new man ideal was robust and healthy physicality (Gluzman, 2007; Presner, 2007). Physical strength was a central component of the masculine model around the turn of the 20th century, both in Western and Central Europe, and in Russia, where it gained heightened salience in the construction of a masculine authority among rural migrants to towns (Forth, 2008; Mosse, 1996; Smith, 2002). On the one hand, it was a common notion among the halutzim that those who survived in the settlements were not necessarily the better, more able-bodied workers, but rather the more committed ones, who were imbued with a sense of mission and determination (Shilo, 1988: 111).…”