Tsarist Russia's Policies in the Field of Women and Family in Central Asia

Certain and accepted patterns prevailed in the political and cultural life system of Muslims in the pre-modern era, which generally underwent changes with the arrival of the new era in the 19th century and the active action of the colonists. Central Asia was part of the extensive Islamic lands that experienced such a process. Parts of this vast geography were annexed to Russia with the dissolution of a part of the political structure and the formation of the General Governorate of Turkestan and two other political units of the Emirate of Bukhara and Khanate of Khiva were also preserved in the form of protectorate powers. In more than half a century of Russian presence, they implemented the policy of Russification in order to make changes in various political, social, cultural and even political geography fields and finally adapt the region to the empire.Research Question: The ambiguity that forms in the mind during the study of the historical documents of this period is that, unlike many social and cultural contexts in Central Asia, family status and women's lives experienced little change and very little experience of modern change under Tsarist Russia.The above ambiguity becomes more important when we know that in the general process of the entry of the Muslim word into the modern world order and the entry of colonial countries into them, in general, there have been changes in the social and political actions of women and the passivity of women in Central Asia or the lack of change in their lives is not compatible with the current trend in other Islamic lands, including Iran and Egypt. Based on this duality (incidence of changes in most fields and lack of change in women's lives) , the question of this article is designed in such a way that why the life of women in Central Asia and family-state relations do not change much during the presence of Tsarist Russia in the region?Research Hypothesis: We believe that the lack of change in women's lives in Central Asia is because the Tsarist Empire, as an Eastern power, has recently been influenced by the flow of Western modernity, as well as the continuation of cultural traditionalism in its society, so in the field of women, it has behaved differently compared to Europe.

What seemed necessary in the rest of the article to find the answer to this problem was to provide a definition of the concept of change, that is, what do we mean when we talk about the occurrence of change or its non-occurrence? Using the theory of Guy Rocher 's social change, we found this indicator that to examine a particular community, when a behavior has clearly changed over time, we can talk about change and this difference has continued and effects on the construction or tasks of the social organization and changing its flow. According to this definition of change, the current article (with a qualitative method and a descriptive-analytical approach and data collection from historical documents) while describing the two currents of conservative and Russian radicalism and their attitude towards women, deals with the evolution in this field.

Our research findings show that unlike many political and social fields, the definition of the world of women in Russia shows many similarities and commonalities with the social life of Muslim women in Central Asia, and it can be clearly seen in many surviving works from this period of Russian history. Despite all the ups and downs in this approach and despite reaching the peak of power and adopting modernist policies by some tsars (such as Peter the Great and Catherine), in general, this traditional view was preserved to a large extent, so that such an approach is fully reflected in literary works that are the manifestation of social life. In the 19th century, right at the time of advancement and the peak of domination over Central Asia, although this traditional view was slightly broken by the Western trend and changes occurred in Russia in the field of women's lives, the duality of traditionalists and modernists and their ideological competition has still kept its shadow on this issue. Therefore, we are witnessing the lack of alignment in policy making in women's life and the ineffectual pressures of Russian Westerners in Central Asia.The result of this was that during half a century of the presence of Tsarist Russia in Central Asia, the Tsarist authorities could not implement a coherent and unified policy to change the living environment of women and the family state.

By returning to the theory of "Guy Roche" we conclude that the definition he had as a social scientist of social change and the indicators he expressed for a change, cannot be found in the context of Russia's colonial practice of women in Central Asia. The answer we got at the end of the research can be summarized as follows: " The predominance of the traditional discourse in Russia about women and the divergence of the two currents of Westernism and the Slavophilic attitude towards women have caused inconsistency in the policy of Russians in this field.  Therefore, unlike other fields, there have been no lasting and extensive changes in this field.