Gender

Most of the identifiable persons within the sample are men, but in fact women occupy a considerable proportion of the membership population. Amongst the 100 persons featured on the 103 sample cards (taking into account the recurring cards and the co-memberships), 55 are identified as men (according to the "д" or "динъ" in the title standing for “господинъ”, the ending of the last name if Russian, or first name when available), and 32 are identified as women (according to "жа" in the title standing for “госпожа”, the ending of the last name if Russian, or first name when available). The rest of the 13 persons did not have their gender specified.

Within this small sample, we are not yet aware of any gender-nonbinary members of the Library, though the possibility of their existence cannot be excluded. Within the Shakespeare & Co. Library’s membership population, for example, artist Claude Cahun lived her early years as a woman before adopting a gender-neutral identity; Beach initially recorded her with the prefix “Mademoiselle” in a membership card from 1919, but we learned of her shifting gender identity in ensuing years through secondary sources, including her own writing. In response to the presence of such cases, the Shakespeare & Co. Project had an elaborate, ongoing process of data revision, in hope of attributing and encoding the gender of library members in an accurate and inclusive way through code. We hope to pursue a similar trajectory for the Turgenev Project as well, but for now, we will use binary gender categories, to present a generic landscape of the gender distribution of the members. After we gather more data, we hope to trace the change of that distribution over time, to investigate differences between male and female members’ reading choices or habits (e.g. whether readers of a particular gender are more likely to read books of specific genres/themes/authors), and to examine the community-building of émigré readers by gender, while recognizing the potentially essentialist limitations of such method.

Let us start again with specific case examples. Among the female readers, one can identify “Барановская” (GARF no. 354) - actress Vera Vsevolodovna Baranovskaya (Вера Всеволодовна Барановская), who emigrated to Paris in 1932 and died there three years later. During her active year, 1934, she borrowed 14 books, much more than the average reader. Unfortunately none of their titles can be identified except for Tolstoy’s Детство, отрочество, юность; more than half of the numbers on her list are larger than the maximum in the pre-1928 belletristic catalogues, suggesting that she extensively borrowed books published or acquired in fairly recent years. Another female reader, albeit a less secure identification, is “Белобородова” (GARF no. 353), perhaps referring to A. Beloborodova who wrote “Condition de la vie des émigrés à Paris,” published in Russie et chrétienté in 1937, a journal launched in 1934 to inform western Christians about the situation of the persecuted churches in Russia and promote knowledge of the history and theology of the Russian Orthodox. None of the four books she borrowed during 1934, the year of her active membership, could be identified, so it remains unknown whether her reading interests bear any association to her religious leanings or social engagement.

The rest of the female members could not be historically identified by (often) their last names alone. This relative difficulty – compared to identifying male members – results from the long-standing general issue of women’s lack of representation in history, and perhaps also from the fact that a greater proportion of the Library’s female readers are commoners per se, as opposed to known public figures. It suggests that the pursuit of knowledge and connection with an émigré community applies not only to elite White male officials (as such is the demographics of most identified male readers), but also to the everyday émigré.

And in fact, female members borrowed more books than their male counterparts. The figures below visualize the number of books borrowed by each member within our sample, and break down the sample into male and female respectively (members whose gender cannot be identified are omitted in this stage). Within the full sample, the average number of books borrowed per year is 6.31, and the median is 5. Within the male sample, the average is 5.09, and the median is 3. Within the female sample, the average is 8.18, and the median is 7. It is tempting to focus on the identifiable members of the sample – the big names and their biographies – and assume that because less women could be identified, they were marginalized readers. These numbers, however, remind us to not lose track of the bigger picture, and that matching up a name with a biography is not the only way to understand the membership population. Therefore, let us take a closer look at some of the unidentified yet prolific female readers through their borrowing list. In this process, we do not aim to produce a gendered reading of their borrowing history but rather use the relatively extensive data from their lists to gain insight into the reading habits of the Library’s members in general.

^{Works Cited:}

Tirza True Latimer, “Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,” Queer Cultural Center. Claude Cahun, Suzanne Malherbe, and Susan De Muth. Disavowals (Aveux non Avenus) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

Nick Budak, “Representing Gender in the Shakespeare and Company Project,” Shakespeare and Company Project, version 0.29.0. Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University.

“Вера Барановская,” Советский Экран.

James E. Hassell, "Russian Refugees in France and the United States between the World Wars," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 81, no. 7 (1991): 59.