The authors of the article emphasize that the reconstruction of revolutio-nary events in the most accessible synchronic documents, deposited in the arc-hives, and in the other sources does not reflect the some of the semantic aspects of these events that do not clearly show the special role in this events of women. This seems to be true not only of women of those stratums, which already during the decades before 1917 enriched the ranks of revolutionaries (nobility, clergy, intelligentsia), but also from traditionalist, peasant layers — and not only in cases where women were marginalized, without the support of the family or moving to the “urban lower classes”.
The lack of sufficiently representative documents that could reconstruct the real activity of women in revolutionary events prompted the authors to carefully analyze the few sources, primarily of personal origins (memories, later recorded stories, etc.), in which there is some information about the motives for women involvement in revolutionary activities, the reasons that forced them to break out of patriarchal chains — which however hard and difficult — still provided some protection.
This article studies behavior of women in the period of political and social cataclysms at the beginning of the ХХ c., based on autobiographical narratives written by women — active participants in events. The authors suggest a version that the political activity shown by female workers was based on a purely traditionalist background. Participation in artel and territorial types of communities could lead to a participation in political and other forms of collaboration. The authority of a husband and other men could encourage a woman (wife, daughter, sister, sometimes even a mother) to follow them “into politics” as a devoted performer. The inherent caution of women was combined with their sensitivity to abstract promises, for example, the promise of a better life. The scandalous public behavior of the women acted as a trigger of mass actions.
On a large number of concrete life histories the authors present pictures of the inclusion of women in various forms of self-protective, emancipatory, political activities.
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