On the traditional norms of the marriage age of Tatar women at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries (sources, methods of analysis and interpretation)

Abstract

For a long time, there have been views in historiography about Tatar women getting married at a young age. This was also facilitated by contradictory statements on this matter by various authors of pre-revolutionary times. In many ways, this view arose due to the lack of a full-fledged analysis of mass statistical sources, such as parish registers and census materials from the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. This publication not only analyzes the literature on this issue, but also offers the results of examining the data of the 1926 census, which provide reliable information on the marriage age of Tatar women at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. Indirect information on this issue is also available in the materials of the First General Population Census of the Russian Empire in 1897. Taken together, these materials allow us to conclude that the majority of Tatar women at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries got married at a fairly mature age, and this was the case for all ethnoterritorial groups of the Tatar people.

For citation: Iskhakov D.M. On the traditional norms of the marriage age of Tatar women at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries (sources, methods of analysis and interpretation). From History and Culture of Peoples of the Middle Volga Region. 2025, vol.15, no.1, pp.46–54. https://doi.org/10.22378/2410-0765.2025-15-1.46-54 (In Russian)