Приданое в дореволюционной городской России: экономические и моральные аспекты

This thesis suggests that dowry tradition is a “total social fact”, which was woven into the cloth of society and had certain value orientations in the pre-revolutionary urban Russia. Sources of the past show that dowry tradition inevitably changed and was supplanted by new practices in the conditions of development city. The insurance and fraud, crime and revolutionary activity involved the tradition and turned it into a “market” practice: due to dowry each person could quickly enrich, or become a victim of fraud and fraudulent schemes, and sometimes he received threats to life. In the 19th century, the “marriage deal” had to do with the latest economic phenomena and traditional moral values that provoked controversial and acute public debate. Dowry commoditization led society to the need to measure the "price" of not only women but also those who paid the dowry. In this way, the author of thesis sketches some facets of these new relations and categorical distinctions, and in doing so to conceptualizes different “faces of dowry” in a quickly changing urban Russia.