Wdowie wioski czernihowszczyzny. Sytuacja wiejskich kobiet w Ukrainie
Widows’ Villages in the Czernihiv Region. The Situation of Women in Ukrainian Villages

Summary/Abstract: Problems with access to professional healthcare services have a negative impact on the health of women in Ukraine’s rural areas. The pilot program of prevention of civilisational diseases focused on educating rural women in providing first pre-medical aid and promoting a healthy lifestyle. The monitoring conducted with the use of sociological quantitative methods in 3 villages of the Czernihiv region was supplemented with in-depth autobiographical-narrative interviews based on the methodology of oral history. The interviews and their analysis, which followed Fritz Schütze’s method, were aimed at obtaining a picture of the conditions underlying the everyday lives of rural women, the dominant hierarchy of social relations and their conceptual structure. The collected data was used to build a system of social support in the villages. A collective biographical profile of the interviewees emerges from the analysis of the interviews, making explicit within the course of their lives the following themes: hunger, childhood and youth, labour, family life, transformation of the political system in the 1990s. On this basis, biographical action schemes are proposed, as well as institutional action patterns, trajectories understood as experiencing the external coercion, and more positive biographical transitions. The results indicate a decay of the traditional rural community, initiated by the oppressive system of soviet kolkhozs and completed through its transformation in the 1990s.

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