Paper short abstract:

This is the first study of gender and women’s experiences during the Kazakh famine. The social norms of the Kazakh society provided different options for males and females. I propose to gender the famine by discussing three themes: motherhood, son preference, and sexual violence and sexual barter.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is the first study of gender and women’s experiences during the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933. I propose to gender the famine by focusing on three major themes. Firstly, I provide a discussion of motherhood in this time of calamity. Motherhood, or traditional parental norms more broadly, collapsed in a similar way to other catastrophes across the world. Yet, it is also important to understand the specifics of Kazakhstan on this matter. The second part offers a discussion of who survived the famine. I argue that many parents preferred saving their sons at the expense of their daughters and consequently more boys survived the famine than girls. What is called son preference manifested itself strongly in this time of calamity; what was important was to save the lineage of a man which was defined exclusively in terms of male heirs. The last part discusses sexual violence and sexual barter. I show that rape and prostitution were less widespread in Kazakhstan, while sexual violence and barter frequently took a different form. Instead of directly raping them, abusers usually forced women to marry them as second wives. Unlike many examples in world history, sexual barter usually took place not between women and men, but between abuser men and male relatives of female victims. Fathers sold their daughters and husbands sold their wives for food. Son preference and sales of females are reflections of how strongly patriarchal the nomadic society was.