Left to the Mercy of Fate: Soldiers’ Wives at the Beginning of the WWI in Kyiv

World War I changed gender roles, family structures, the image and the practice of women’s participation in the war effort. After the demobilization, men returned to their work places and pushed women out of the limited labor market. Even so, the experience accumulated by women during the war contributed to their further emancipation throughout the 20th century. Due to the developments in the fields of urban and women’s history, many of the problems that relate to the women’s experience during the WWI (mainly in Western Europe) have already been addressed. This article, however, revolves around the aspect that still remains outside of the focus of scholars. The author looks at the lives of conscripted soldiers’ wives in the city of Kyiv, who were left to the mercy of fate, after their husbands were mobilized. In early stages of the war, these women rarely had a possibility to find a job. Most of them did not have working experience or possessed any professional skills. If a woman had little kids, she could not take even day labor jobs to earn living. In those cases, the survival of a family depended on the welfare assistance from the state institutions, church and charitable organizations. The article analyses historiographic tendencies in the field, gives a characteristic of female population of Kyiv and of social policies towards soldiers’ wives in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the war. The main focus is a study of appeals sent by solders’ wives to the Kyivan Fraternity of St. Volodymyr at the St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral between August and December 1914. The author suggests that these appeals should be analyzed within a framework of the study of women’s agency at time of war. She argues that these appeals were used by women as an instrument that created new strategies of survival. Based on the analysis of the primary texts, the author looks at the living conditions of women, types of work they performed, sources and size of the welfare assistance. The article demonstrates that appeals for assistance make a valuable source for the study of women at the beginning of WWI.