TY - BOOK ID - 101255928 TI - Russian peasant women who refused to marry : spasovite old believers in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries PY - 2017 SN - 0253030137 0253029651 0253029961 9780253030139 9780253029652 9780253029966 PB - Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Marriage KW - Women peasants KW - Religious aspects KW - History KW - Peasant women KW - Peasants KW - Rural women KW - Married life KW - Matrimony KW - Nuptiality KW - Wedlock KW - Love KW - Sacraments KW - Betrothal KW - Courtship KW - Families KW - Home KW - Honeymoons UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:101255928 AB - John Bushnell's analysis of previously unstudied church records and provincial archives reveals surprising marriage patterns in Russian peasant villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. For some villages the rate of unmarried women reached as high as 70 percent. The religious group most closely identified with female peasant marriage aversion was the Old Believer Spasovite covenant, and Bushnell argues that some of these women might have had more agency in the decision to marry than more common peasant tradition ordinarily allowed. Bushnell explores the cataclysmic social and economic impacts these decisions had on the villages, sometimes dragging entire households into poverty and ultimate dissolution. In this act of defiance, this group of socially, politically, and economically subordinated peasants went beyond traditional acts of resistance and reaction. ER -