The article examines the phenomenon of women‘s autobiographical memory in the context of problems of women‘s social and family memory. Based on the methodological approaches of women‘s history, the social anthropology of women‘s everyday life, interdisciplinary studies of memory, and the anthropology of memory, the subject of special study was the gender characteristics of memory as one of the scientific problems that reveal the specifics of women remembering their own life experiences. Analyzing the unpublished diary entries of a female resident of Tver from the mid-1970s, the author examines the question of the relationship between memorization practices and the social experience of women. The article also discusses the functional connection between issues of the anthropology of memory and the study of gender aspects of social experience. The diary entries of Alexandra Mikhailovna Nikolskaya (1887 — after 1976), recording women‘s autobiographical memory, made it possible to restore unknown details of the historical biography of the founder of excursion work in the USSR, the organizer of the Institute of Methods of Extracurricular Work, Art Yakovlevich Zaks (1878—1938). Based on a study of unpublished autobiographical documents of Alexandra Mikhailovna Nikolskaya, the relationship between professional, personal and everyday aspects in public and private life is analyzed, and the connection between the subjective and historical past is clarified. Particular attention is paid to the problems of the source potential of women‘s autobiographical memory recorded in ego-documents, notably in diaries. It is concluded that the quantitative reliability of women‘s social memory, associated with the exact dating of events, a thorough restoration of the chronological sequence, may be inferior to qualitative information about the subjective reaction to past events, the emotional perception of the experience, the role of the autobiographical narrative in the construction of one‘s own identity.Read in PDF
Acknowledgments:this work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant № 24-18-00212 Women‘s family memory in Russia in the 18th—21st centuries: forms of transmission, dynamics of transformation, social mission; the author also expresses gratitude to the direct descendants of A. Ya. Zaks — grandchildren V. A. Zaks, I. A. Zaks, greatgranddaughter M. V. Akenina, née Zaks, for kindly providing materials from the personal archive, as well as to the representative of the Moscow branch V. S. Zaks.