Degrees of Freedom: Women Under Serfdom in Russia

The Slavic Connexion

What was life like for Russian women under serfdom? In this episode, Cullan talks with the expert on this subject, Dr. Tracy Dennison, a historian and professor at Caltech. Based on her talk by the same name, Tracy explores how societal structures shaped and limited women's choices, opportunities, and constraints under different ruling families. Thanks for listening, and Happy 2025!

About the Guest

Tracy Dennison studies institutions and their effects on long-term growth and development. She is especially interested in the roots of economic divergence between east and west Europe, and uses serfdom as a lens through which to examine institutional change over time. Dennison is interested in how specific societies worked in the past – how societal rules and norms affected human behavior and how and why this varied over space and time.
Dennison's research to date has focused on these questions at the micro level, using local sources to investigate the ways that pre-modern entities like states, landlords, communities, and households influenced the economic, social, and demographic behavior of people in their everyday lives. In particular, she has studied estate policies and practices in imperial Russia, and the way that quasi-formal legal systems established by some wealthy landlords made it possible for their serfs to conduct property and credit transactions despite their ambiguous legal status. This was the subject of her 2011 book, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge University Press), in which she argued that these micro-level practices had significant implications for the longer-term economic development of Russia.

In her current project, Dennison is investigating these questions from a top-down perspective rather than the bottom-up approach taken previously. Comparing the abolition of serfdom in Prussia and in Russia, this research explores larger questions of political economy and state capacity and their implications for institutions and institutional change. How did the institutional structure of serfdom in central Europe differ from that in Russia and how did these differences matter to the process and outcomes of reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

Dennison has also published on institutions and demographic behavior, comparative systems of serfdom, and on the importance of history and historical context in social science research. She is a regular contributor to Broadstreet Blog, an interdisciplinary forum which aims to bring research in historical political economy to a wider audience.

PRODUCER'S NOTE: This episode was recorded in November 11, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois. If you have questions, comments, or would like to be a guest on the show, please email [e-mail] and we will be in touch!

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Host/Associate Producer: Cullan Bendig

Associate Producer: Basil Fedun

Associate Producer: Sergio Glajar

Background music by Denys Brodovskyi, Alex Productions. Closing Theme by Charlie Harper Executive Producer & Creator: Michelle Daniel www.msdaniel.com