Nikita A. Bilenko

PhD in History, Associate Professor, Chair of History and Archeology, Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

(Tula, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2021-2-29

Abstract. The article is devoted to the problem of the development of women's commercial entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire of the second half of the XIX century. The source base of the study was made up of mass fiscal and administrative documentation ("Journals of general verification of trade and industrial institutions"), created as a result of inspections of the activities of entrepreneurs of the provincial city of Tula (one of the provincial, but industrially developed centers of the Empire). The standard form of the Journals allowed automating the processing of large amounts of information from historical sources by creating a source-oriented machine-readable database (based on the Microsoft Access 2007) and answering the questions: representatives of which social strata were involved in trade and market relations in the second half of the XIX century? What are the specifics of the forms and scales of trade activity of women entrepreneurs? Were the representatives of the weaker sex really independent managers of their trading establishments, or did they become their owners only "on paper"? How stable was the employment of women in the field of commercial entrepreneurship during the period of large-scale changes in the economic and social life of Russia? As a result of the study, it was found that representatives of almost all social strata were involved in the trading business: merchants, middleclass women, peasants, soldiers, most of whom were widows. During the analysis of sources, a direct relationship was recorded between the social status of women and the forms of trade organization: noblewomen, merchants and middle-class women more often owned warehouses, shops and shops, while peasant women, wives of guild artisans and soldiers-lockers, tents and small shops; as well as the relationship between the social status and the way of managing commercial establishments. This was largely due to the economic opportunities of the families of the fairer sex. The analysis of the terms of functioning of "women's" trading establishments allowed us to identify the short-term business activity of women entrepreneurs, which reveals the forced nature of this activity, the long-term preservation of traditional views in society on the position of women in the economic life of the family
Keywords: economic history, Tula, women, entrepreneurship, city, trade.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Bilenko, NA 2021, ‘Women's commercial entrepreneurship in the provincial city of Tula of the second half of the 19th century’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 2 (6), pp. 29–44, https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2021-2-29. (in Russ.)

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