5 research outputs found
Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender, authority, and dissent
At the peak of the anti-religious campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev,
communist propaganda depicted women believers as either naĂŻve
dupes, tricked by the clergy, or as depraved fanatics; the Protestant
“sektantka” (female sectarian) was a particularly prominent folk-devil.
In fact, as this article shows, women’s position within Protestant
communities was far more complex than either of these mythical
figures would have one believe. The authors explore four important,
but contested, female roles: women as leaders of worship, particularly
in remote congregations where female believers vastly outnumbered
their male counterparts; women as unofficial prophetesses,
primarily within Pentecostal groups; women as mothers, replenishing
congregations through high birth rates and commitment to their
children’s religious upbringing; and women as political actors in the
defence of religious rights. Using a wide range of sources, which
include reports written by state officials, articles in the church journal,
letters from church members to their ecclesiastical leaders in
Moscow, samizdat texts, and oral history accounts, the authors
probe women’s relationship with authority, in terms of both the
authority of the (male) ministry within the church, and the authority
of the Soviet state
Religious influences on human capital variations in imperial Russia
Historical legacies, particularly imperial tutelage and religion, have featured prominently in recent scholarship on political regime variations in post-communist settings, challenging earlier temporally proximate explanations. The overlap between tutelage, geography, and religion has complicated the uncovering of the spatially uneven effects of the various legacies. The author addresses this challenge by conducting sub-national analysis of religious influences within one imperial domain, Russia. In particular, the paper traces how European settlement in imperial Russia has had a bearing on human development in the imperial periphery. The causal mechanism that the paper proposes to account for this influence is the Western communities’ impact on literacy, which is in turn linked in the analysis to the Western Christian, particularly Protestant, roots, of settler populations. The author makes this case by constructing an original dataset based on sub-national data from the hitherto underutilised first imperial census of 1897