ABSTRACT
Irina Kniazeva was the only woman we interviewed who had lived most of her life in a peasant village and who spoke about it at length. Kniazeva’s account of the patriarchal peasant family was much darker than Dubova’s. As her mother’s first child, it became Kniazeva’s responsibility to care for her younger siblings. For that reason, she never had the chance to go to school. Later, when Kniazeva’s husband abandoned her, leaving her with two small children, her father began to beat and insult her, too, and eventually drove her from his house. To support herself and her children, Kniazeva found work at a grain elevator. When a husband disappeared and failed to pay child support, his abandoned wife was entitled to go to court, initiate a search for him, and attempt to force him to pay. It is unclear why Kniazeva seemed reluctant to respond directly to Posadskaya’s question.
