Mapmaking in the home and printing house: women and cartography in late imperial Russia

The history of cartography in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire has been dominated by accounts of the military, academic establishments and elite male intellectuals. This article seeks to provide a corrective to this tendency by highlighting the involvement of women in cartography in the home and print workshops. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources, the article traces the role of women in the process of making the Ethnological-Geographical Atlas of Present and Prehistoric Latvia (1892), from Martha Bielenstein’s drawing of the manuscript maps in the Bielenstein family home in the Baltic provinces to the female print workers at A. Il’in’s Cartographic Establishment in St. Petersburg. The article builds on recent research on women and cartography to argue that mapmaking was a far more widespread socioeconomic activity in imperial Russia than previously thought and permeated family and working lives. The research findings contribute to our knowledge of the impact of traditional gender roles on cartographic labour and geographies of map production in late imperial Russia.