ABSTRACT
Unlike most European metropolises in the late nineteenth century, Russian cities, and Moscow in particular, suffered from the significant lack of women. This chapter explores the interaction between gender and city space in Moscow in the last decades before World War One and the relation of the gender composition to the urban experience.
The chapter approaches the problem on three levels. The first studies the gendered aspects of Russian urbanization and connections between the city and the village. It argues that the specificity of the rural communal organization imposed different limitation for male and female mobility. The second concentrates on Moscow’s urban space and the factors that determined its gender topography, as the distribution of men and women across the city space was remarkably uneven. Finally, the third looks at working-class domestic space and the ways in which it shaped, or was shaped by, the gendered structure of the Moscow population.
