Abstract

The history of women in Central Asia is gaining increasing scholarly attention, particularly within the framework of postcolonial studies. However, scholarship that examines voices from the imperial peripheries through a “history from below” perspective, highlighting the experiences of ordinary subjects, is still not sufficiently extensive. The status of women is a recurring theme in studies of Central Asian History, particularly in research on the Soviet period.

However, the active voices of women remain significantly understudied, particularly in the period I intend to research, the late Imperial period.

By examining administrative documents, petitions initiated by women, press materials, and personal accounts, this study will provide insights into the forms of agencies women employed to negotiate marriage arrangements, property rights, mobility, and social authority within both customary (adat) and imperial laws.

Rather than portraying Kazakh women solely as passive subjects of patriarchal or colonial structures, the paper seeks to reconstruct the strategies through which they articulated grievances, tried to defend their interests, and participated in shaping family and social life. By situating these voices within the broader context of Russian imperial governance, Islamic reformist discourse, and emerging print culture, the research will demonstrate how gender relations in the steppe were changing.

This paper is based on published materials, including sources such as administrative reports, petitions (aryz), periodicals, literary texts, and aims to answer the following key questions:

How were the social identities of the Kazakh women shaped by kinship, customary law (adat), Islamic norms, and imperial governance, and how were they slowly changing?

What forms of agency did Kazakh women exercise in family, legal, and social contexts, and how did they articulate their interests through petitions, court cases, and oral traditions?

How were Kazakh women positioned within imperial and reformist discourses of “civilization,” modernization, and progress, and to what extent did these external narratives correspond to women’s lived realities?

By addressing these questions, the research aims to reconstruct the images of Kazakh women as they appear in existing sources. It will also explore the forces driving change in women’s status: the rise of Jadidism (albeit slower than in neighboring Turkestan) and its impact on girls’ education, imperial policies tied to the “civilization mission” of the Russian Empire and the influence of new settlers, such as Volga-Ural Tatars, who contributed to raise of Islamic education and the influence of the Tatar women as abystais (female teachers), shaping women’s circles in the steppe.