This stress on sobriety, thrift, piety, and assiduous husbandry was popular in Muscovy, particularly among the merchants and clergy, to whom the author probably belonged. Such people did not care much for the swashbuckling masculinity of the Rus warrior, and hence the warrior is absent from the pages of The Domostroi. Instead there is the homey, comforting vision of a harmonious household headed by its benevolent, diligent patriarch and matriarch. These ideals had widespread appeal, even among the warriors, and so The Domostroi quickly became an influential synopsis of Muscovy’s gender ideals.
The Domostroi does not talk directly about one of the major aspects of elite women’s lives in the Muscovite period: their seclusion from public view. The highest-ranking women wore veils when outside their residences, sat behind screens in church, and moved around Moscow in closed carriages or sledges. These customs arose from the notion that elite women should avoid being seen by males who were not members of their families. In large households, women slept in their own separate quarters and were supposed to be very careful about how and whom they entertained. Consequently, foreign men visiting a Muscovite boyar or merchant in his home rarely laid eyes on his wives or daughters. If they appeared at all, it would be to greet their guests in highly ritualized ceremonies, after which they returned to their rooms.
The seclusion of elite women grew out of the Muscovite belief in the importance of shielding high-born women from contact with people who might sully their honor. This concern was not unique to Muscovy. One of the most famous statements of Western European patriarchal values, the instructions of the Goodman of Paris to his young wife, written in the 1390s, declared, “You ought to be moderately loving… towards your good and near kinsfolk… and very distant with all other men and most of all with overweening and idle young men, who spend more than their means and be dancers.” Muscovites, who were even more anxious about women losing their good names than was the Goodman, extended the circle of threatening outsiders to include virtually everyone outside the walls of their well-guarded homes.13
Seclusion was also a marker of a family’s status. A wealthy upper-class woman did not have to work in the fields or move around the city to make her living. Instead she stayed home, consulting with her husband, supervising her slaves, saying her prayers, and finally, at day’s end, falling asleep over her embroidery. “Their chief employment is sewing,” declared a befuddled German diplomat named Adam Olearius, “or embroidering handkerchiefs of white taffeta or cloth, or making little purses or some such toys.”14 Olearius had never seen the mistresses at work running their households. He believed that the ladies of the ruling class sat quietly stitching all day—which is just what the author of The Domostroi and the elites of Moscow wanted him to believe.
A less restrictive and more widespread expression of the Muscovites’ concern about women’s honor was their practice of permitting women who felt that they had been dishonored to take their complaints to court. This practice, begun in Kievan times, was unusual in Europe. In many Italian city-states, for example, insults to a woman were treated as insults to her family, and her male relatives brought suit and received compensation. Muscovite law, by contrast, permitted women to sue in their own names, awarded the fines to them as their property, and assessed higher fines for insults to women than for insults to men. A wife who had been insulted received double the fine her husband would have received, and their daughter four times as much.
These differences reflect the fact that women whose reputations were damaged suffered social ostracism greater than that inflicted on insulted men. If they were of marriageable age, their prospects of finding a good match were diminished. To defend themselves against such dire consequences, women of all social classes went to court, bringing complaints that ranged from verbal slander and minor physical assault, such as knocking off a headdress, to major attacks, including rape. Women were complainants in perhaps one-third of honor cases brought before Muscovite courts. Judges took the charges very seriously, investigated assiduously, and often awarded considerable damages to the injured women.15
Ivan III and his successors portrayed themselves as divinely favored, powerful rulers. This transformation of the warrior prince into a sovereign tsar required a commensurate elevation of his wife, the tsaritsa, and her daughters, the tsarevny. Isolde Thyrêt has argued that this was a process of status-building in which the entire royal household participated. In court ceremonies and on icons and embroideries, the women of the royal family presented themselves as the blessed wives of their husbands and the mothers of their people. Tsaritsy prayed to God to bless their husbands, sons, and subjects. They made large, well-publicized donations to the church and the poor. By the reign of Ivan IV, church fathers, drawing on earlier ideals, were also suggesting that the tsaritsa, being female and therefore more naturally humble, submissive, and devout than her manly husband, could tame his cruder impulses and nudge him toward peacemaking.16
Portraying the tsaritsy as exemplars of Muscovite femininity and consorts of powerful tsars did not increase the powers granted them by custom. Instead, the royal wives participated in politics in much the same ways as had the princesses of Kievan and Appanage Rus. They advised their husbands, mediated family disputes, arranged marriages, and advanced their sons’ interests. Thyrêt has shown that tsaritsy were more likely to become politically involved during periods of instability at court.17 Sophia Paleologus, second wife of Ivan III, lobbied successfully for her son Vasili to be named successor. The mother of Ivan IV, Elena Glinskaia, served as regent for her three-year-old son after the death of her husband, Vasili III.
The royal mothers lived with their daughters and young sons, ladies-in-waiting, administrative staff, and a host of servants in the Moscow Kremlin’s women’s palace, a household similar in its organization to those of other elite women, but much larger.18 The responsibilities of running this establishment were considerable, and some tsaritsy, given the opportunity, willingly applied the skills acquired there to the outside world. When plague struck Moscow in 1654–55 and Tsar Alexis was too far away to supervise the government response, Tsaritsa Maria took over, conducting her own correspondence with city officials. Her tone was that of a self-confident woman accustomed to exercising authority.19
She did all this while hidden away from the view of the people over whom she ruled, for the elevation of the royal women did nothing to ease their seclusion. And no women were more walled in than the tsarevny, the daughters of the tsars, for they were prohibited from marrying on the grounds that no Russian was high-ranking enough for them and no suitably prestigious royal foreigner professed the true faith, that is, Russian Orthodoxy. So the grandiose ambitions of the tsarevny’s fathers led to lifelong spinsterhood for them. We will return to this subject later, when we come to the time when one of those daughters rebelled.
Muscovy retained the property-ownership customs established for women during Kievan and Appanage times. As in the past, women received most of their property as dowries and inheritances from their parents and they retained full rights over it after they married. Widows often held “life estates” that they managed and from which they received income. When they died, the land passed either to their sons or to other male members of their husbands’ families.