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Women, the family and public life

barbar a alpern engel

It is difficult to generalise about the women of Russia, so much did their identity and experience vary according to their legally defined social status, religion and ethnicity, among other variables. To be sure, gender shaped key aspects of women’s lives. Until well into the nineteenth century, if not later, most shared virtually an identical lot in life: learning women’s duties at their mother’s knee, a marriage arranged by others, then childbearing, childrearing and the labour of maintaining the home and provisioning the family. Changes that began in the reign of Peter the Great nevertheless affected the ways that women understood and fulfilled those family responsibilities; while developments in the final decades of the nineteenth century challenged the family order that governed most women’s lives, and expanded and diversified alternative ways of living. Even so, beneath the developments traced in this chapter, fundamental continuities remained.

The Petrine revolution and its consequences

The period properly begins with the reign of Peter the Great, who brought a thoroughgoing revolution to aristocratic women’s lives and initiated economic, social and legal changes that touched the lives of many of the rest. As part of his Westernising project, and in order to mobilise his subjects to suit his needs, Peter the Great endeavoured to transform Russia’s traditional family regime. From the elites, he required new women, suitable consorts for the new men of the service elite and likewise modelled along Western lines. ‘Upper-class Muscovite women were driven from the seclusion of the terem, or women’s quarters, divested of their old-fashioned robes, squeezed into Western corsets and low-cut gowns and transformed into suitable companions for their “decent beardless” spouses.’1 Only elite women were required to

1L. Hughes, ‘Peter the Great’s Two Weddings: Changing Images of Women in a Transitional Age’, in R. Marsh (ed.), Women in Russia and the Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 31.

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appear at social gatherings and display the requisite social skills; however, even women lower down on the social hierarchy became subject to the requirement that Russian women don European dress. The law of 1701 mandating German clothes, hats and footwear applied to the wives and children of men of all ranks of the service nobility, as well as of leading merchants, military personnel and inhabitants of Moscow and others towns; only clergy and peasants were exempted. Henceforward, such women who failed to wear dresses, German overskirts, petticoats and shoes risked a fine.2

Westernisation of elites began in the new capital, St Petersburg, and proceeded only gradually elsewhere. In the decades following Peter’s death, increasing numbers of noble families sought to provide their daughters with at least a rudimentary education, and some aspired to more, hiring foreign governesses and tutors to instruct their daughters at home. In addition to a good dowry, a virtuous and submissive character, and competence in household management, educated men increasingly sought brides who could read and write and converse in foreign tongues. The well-educated Anna and Alexandra Panina, renowned for their knowledge and intelligence at mid-century, had no difficulty making excellent marriages.3 During the reign of Elizabeth a few private boarding schools opened; such schools proliferated in the reign of Catherine the Great. By the close of the eighteenth century, there were over a dozen in Moscow and St Petersburg and more in provincial cities, invariably run by foreigners. Catherine made noblewomen’s education the responsibility of the state. Her goal: to further the Westernisation of Russia’s manners and morals by training mothers to become the moral educators of their young. In 1764, Catherine established Russia’s first school for noble girls. Called the Society for the Training of Well-Born Girls (better known as Smolnyi Institute), the school admitted primarily daughters of servitors from the elite as well as middling-level ranks of military and civil service. The school graduated 70 students in its first year and about 900 women altogether during Catherine’s reign. About twenty other institutes, organised along lines similar to Smolnyi, were opened in Russia’s major cities and towns in the years after its founding.4 Whether acquired at school or at home, the impact of education on elite women’s literacy rates was substantial by the end of the century: Michelle Marrese has calculated that in the middle of the eighteenth century, only a

2The decree is translated in J. Cracraft (ed.), Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia

(Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co., 1994), pp. 110–11.

3B. Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 113.

4J. L. Black, ‘Educating Women in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Myths and Realities’, Canadian Slavonic Papers 20, 1 (1978): 23–43.

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small fraction (4 to 26 per cent) of noblewomen dwelling in the provinces were literate; a quarter of a century later, the proportion was closer to half. Thereafter, women’s literacy rates rose dramatically, to roughly 92 per cent at the start of the nineteenth century.5

By then, cultivation characterised women of the cream of Russia’s elite. Judging by the women’s dress, their hairdos, the dances that they performed and the language that they spoke – almost invariably French – they were virtually indistinguishable from their Western European counterparts. The artist Elisabeth Vigee´ Lebrun, who visited Russia in the 1790s, returned to Paris impressed by what she saw: ‘There were innumerable balls, concerts and theatrical performances and I thoroughly enjoyed these gatherings, where I found all the urbanity, all the grace of French company.’ She believed, in particular, that it would be impossible ‘to exceed Russian ladies in the urbanities of good society’.6 Some of these cultivated women also developed independent intellectual interests and enthusiastically pursued them; the erudition of a few rivalled that of their European counterparts. Catherine the Great herself was an enormously prolific writer, founding Russia’s first satirical journal and authoring works in a wide variety of genres. Princess Catherine Dashkova (1743–1810), nee´ Vorontsova, wrote numerous plays and articles and in 1783 became one of the first Russians to edit a journal, The Companion of Lovers of the Russian Word. That same year, Dashkova became one of the first women in Europe to hold public office, appointed by Catherine the Great as Director of the Academy of Sciences. Increasing numbers of women found their way into print, translating from foreign languages or writing prose and, more commonly, poetry of their own.7

Peter also attempted to transform private life, reforming marriage practices and bringing the state more intimately than ever before into the lives of his subjects. The aim was to raise the birth-rate by enhancing conjugal felicity, but also to weaken the ability of elite parents or elders to use marital alliances for political purposes. A decree of 1702 altered the Muscovite custom wherein marriages were contracted by the parents, or if they were dead, by close relatives of the bride and groom, who usually saw each other for the first time only after the wedding ceremony. The decree required a six-week betrothal period before the wedding, enabling the couple to meet and get to know one

5 M. L. Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia,

1 7 00–1 861 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 213–15.

6Quoted in Judith Vowles, ‘The “Feminization” of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, in Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (eds.), Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport: Praeger, 1994), p. 42.

7Quoted in Vowles, ‘The “Feminization” of Russian Literature’, pp. 45–7.

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another. Should they decide against marriage, either party gained the right to terminate the engagement, the betrothed as well as their parents. A decree of 1722 (rescinded in 1775) explicitly forbade forced marriages, including those arranged for ‘slaves’ by their masters, and required both bride and groom to take an oath indicating that they consented freely to their union. The two decrees may also have reflected Peter’s own, more individualised, attitude towards conjugal life, which differed substantially from the official morality of his time, shaped by Russian Orthodoxy. The Church regarded the goal of marriage as reproduction and social stability, and condemned sexual enjoyment as sinful. Peter’s second marriage to a woman he loved passionately and deeply introduced a new conjugal ideal that affirmed individual affection and the pleasures of life on earth. It was celebrated in public and disseminated in portraits of Peter, Catherine and their children.8

The fundamentally patriarchal character of Russian society nevertheless remained unaltered. Grounds for divorce did not include wife-beating; in Peter’s day, husbands could rid themselves of unwanted wives by depositing them in a nunnery, as Peter did with his first wife Evdoksia. For the crime of adultery, wives were sentenced to forced labour, whereas men who killed their wives were merely flogged with the knout. Making it more difficult for women to avoid family life by entering a convent, in 1722 Peter raised the age at which women could take the veil to sixty.9 Developments after Peter’s death further buttressed the patriarchal family. The laws governing marriage permitted husbands and fathers to exercise virtually unlimited power over other family members, and required a wife to submit to her husband as head of the household and to live with him in love, respect and ‘unlimited obedience’.10 The strictures on marital dissolution tightened. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church steadily increased its authority over marriage and divorce, emphasising more than ever before the sacramental and indissoluble nature of marriage. The Church made divorce virtually inaccessible to the Russian Orthodox faithful, the majority of the population. Grounds for annulling a marriage also narrowed and were even more narrowly applied.11 It became much more difficult for a woman to escape

8N. S. Kollman, ‘“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: Changing Models of Masculinity in Muscovite and Petrine Russia’, in Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey (eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 15–32.

9L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 199–200.

10SZ (St Petersburg, 1857) x, pt. 1, article 106.

11G. L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760–1860’, JMH 62 (1990): 709–46.

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an abusive or unsatisfactory marriage by obtaining a divorce; the law strictly forbade marital separation.

Yet in the final decades of the eighteenth century, literature imported from the West introduced new ways of thinking about marriage and the family. Conduct books and education manuals celebrated motherhood’s sanctity, and instructed mothers to be the moral and spiritual guides of their children.12 Sentimental literature elevated woman’s role, presenting her as sensitive and emotional, a friend to the man whom she married.13 Even Russian Orthodox views of marriage were affected by these trends: the Church placed new emphasis on the affective ties of spouses and their reciprocal responsibilities towards one another, while downplaying – although not eradicating – the patriarchal and misogynist elements of its previous stance.14 In the reign of Nicholas I, a modified patriarchal ideal became the model of imperial rule. The private life of the tsar was staged so as to portray him as a loving and devoted husband and caring father, while the empress provided a model of maternal love and tenderness – a family idyll that was disseminated in paintings and engravings to a broad audience as well as to the elite. The new imagery dramatised a ‘sharp division of sexual spheres’ that mirrored developments in other European courts.15

Although arranged marriages continued to be the norm well into the nineteenth century, there is evidence that by the reign of Nicholas I, a portion of the nobility had embraced the new affective ideal of marriage and come to value intimate and loving family relations. ‘Can a marriage be stable and happy, when it is not based on feelings of mutual respect and the most tender love?’ rhetorically inquired the governor of Nizhegorod province in 1828.16 However, it is questionable whether Nicholas’s ideology of separate spheres had a broad popular basis in Russia, as it had in Great Britain and France.17 While the

12 Diana Greene, ‘Mid-Nineteenth Century Domestic Ideology in Russia’, in Rosalind Marsh (ed.), Women and Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 84–7; C. Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28.

13O. E. Glagoleva, ‘Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies, 1700–1850’, The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1405, p. 44.

14W. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 76.

15R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. I, p. 261.

16GARF, Tret’e otdelenie sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 1826– 1880, Fond 109, 2aia ekspeditsiia, 1828, op. 58, ed. khr. 199, ll. 1–19; Mary Wells Cavendar, ‘Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Tver, 1820–1860,’ unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan (1997), p. 29.

17M. Perrot, ‘The Family Triumphant’, in Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

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