Livestock Products Trade in the Business Strategies of Merchant Women of the Сentral Сhernozem Region in the Late XIX – Early XX Century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of one of the spheres of women's history of the Central Chernozem region – the entrepreneurship of merchant women. In modern Russian science, the history of merchants is an actual and dynamically developing scientific direction. A major specialist in the field of women's entrepreneurship is G. Ulyanova. She explores the experience of women's entrepreneurship in the metropolitan region. At the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX century merchantwomen traded livestock products. Most often they traded meat products (pork, beef, veal, bacon, chicken, game), as well as sausages, pork. At the same time, there was a tradition in the region in which sausage production and subsequent sale of sausage products were concentrated mainly in the hands of local male merchants – Germans and Jews. Merchant women were also engaged in egg trade and dairy trade (milk, cottage cheese, sour cream). Merchant women sold their goods in rural areas, in county towns and provincial centers. Railway communication was developed in the region. And by the beginning of the XX century, warehouses and refrigerators were developing, where perishable goods could be stored. This allowed merchant women to supply food to the capital cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow with the help of intermediaries. And also to export food abroad.