Social Welfare Provision at the Imperial Edge: Single Mothers and Abandoned Children in the Late Russian Empire

Abstract

This article looks to the societal and imperial margins to examine attitudes towards social welfare provision in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Drawing on archival material from the Empire's Estliand province (now northern Estonia), the article focuses on the self-representation of single mothers and official discussions of abandoned children. Society was in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration served to undermine traditional social structures, mentalities and identities. These changes were accompanied by the disruption of the traditional patriarchal gender order, as well shifting ideas about who ought to be responsible for taking care of vulnerable groups. In rural Estliand, Estonian-speaking unmarried women sought engagement with Russian imperial judicial structures to secure child maintenance. In the early 1900s, anxieties about the social impacts of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and the development of new currents in philanthropy, meant that care for foundlings and abandoned children became a burning issue in the minds of Estliand's provincial officials. Examining single mothers and child abandonment in Estliand illuminates tensions between empire-wide and local mechanisms for dealing with social issues, as well as shifting attitudes to gender, the family and charity in light of urbanisation and modernisation.In December 1910, a ticket inspector discovered an unaccompanied new-born baby in one of the third-class cars on the Pskov-Riga railway, a railroad line that cut through the region of the Russian Empire that comprises present-day Estonia. 1 The local police searched for the baby's mother and found Liza Laiden, who hailed from the Estonian countryside. Laiden admitted that she had given birth that day in a nearby town, but since the child was 'illegitimate' (nezakonnyi, literally translated as 'illegal') and the father refused to provide financial support, she made the snap decision to leave the child on the train in the hope that somebody else would take him to a foundling home. Laiden's child would have been classed as illegitimate under Russian imperial law because he had been conceived through the crime of fornication, defined in the criminal code as consensual sexual intercourse between heterosexual unmarried partners. 2 This article focuses on the two groups in the above case, single mothers and abandoned infants, to examine shifting perceptions about whose responsibility it was to take care of vulnerable groups in the final decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. Taking the case study of Estliand province (Estliandskaia guberniia,