Amid the instabilities fostered by these changes, gender norms held firm for most of the women of Muscovy. The elite values of the time were summed up by the author of The Domostroi, who promoted the notion that an ideal family was one in which everyone knew her or his place and all worked together to meet their material and spiritual needs. Muscovites extended these ideals to society as a whole, seeing the tsar and tsaritsa as master and mistress of the realm, presiding over a gigantic household in which the powerful took care of the needy, men guided and protected women, women served and cared for their families, and all obeyed those above them. This vision legitimated the ground rules by which women lived their lives. As in the Rus centuries, the rules empowered older women, particularly elite ones, even as they sustained boundaries beyond which women trespassed at their peril. By the end of the Muscovite period, a few women were pushing against those boundaries. The age of The Domostroi was drawing to a close.
3
EMPRESSE, AND SERFS
1695–1855
Peter I, known to history as Peter the Great, believed that he had to change elite women in order to transform Muscovy into a modern, powerful Russian Empire. He began by ordering them to put away their heavy kaftans and veils and order dresses of German design. Though his strong-willed sisters Maria and Ekaterina refused to get new wardrobes, many other women in the circles around the throne happily acceded to the tsar’s demands. The tsar also commanded his female subjects to attend court festivities with men, and thereby began abolishing the seclusion of elite women. These decorative reforms set in motion much more substantial changes in privileged women’s lives over the next century and a half. The gender ideas of Western and Central Europe, which were in ferment during these years, flowed into Russia, where they changed Russian ideas and were changed in their turn. Education for girls and women expanded. Revisions in property laws permitted elite women to buy ever more land. By 1850, Russian noblewomen were attending boarding schools, reading scholarly journals, publishing poetry and short stories, running charities, and managing estates.
This transformation was limited. In 1850, women still owed obedience to their older relatives and to their husbands; they had to have their spouses’ permission to travel on their own; they could not divorce. They could not attend the universities or enter the professions that were beginning to develop. Still more significant was the fact that women’s opportunities improved only among the elite, who made up less than 10 percent of the population. The great majority of women were serfs, whose bondage became ever more onerous.
The pressure for reform was growing. By the 1840s social critics were attacking the constraints on elite women and criticizing serfdom. In the early 1850s a few connected the two issues, denouncing the bondage of women and serfs as dual consequences of Russian patriarchy and calling for the abolition of both. When Alexander II took the throne in 1855 and encouraged a wide-ranging discussion of reform, therefore, the intelligentsia was ready to put “the woman question” on the agenda. The age of Peter the Great and his eighteenth-and nineteenth-century successors may be seen as a time of important changes in the situation of elite women and as the seed-time of a still more transformative era in the history of all women in Russia—the later nineteenth century.
Peter I, 1682–1725
Natalia Naryshkina’s iconoclastic son began to rule in his own right in the mid-1690s. Over the next thirty years, he and his ministers expanded the country’s borders and inserted themselves into the foreign affairs of Central and Western Europe. At home they converted the military to a standing army, founded the Russian navy, and reorganized the government. They promoted economic growth. They reduced the power of the church by putting civilian administrators in charge of its revenues and limiting its influence at court. They abolished slavery and began collecting the “soul tax,” a levy on male peasants that increased government revenues. Finally, and most importantly for women’s history, Peter and his advisers sought to transform Russian noblemen into progressive, well-educated executors of the royal will and noblewomen into cultured, decorative helpmeets.
This effort to engineer gender change was not unique to Russia. In Europe and elsewhere, there was a long history of governments shoring up their power by promoting revisions in gender values. Augustus, the first Roman emperor (reigned 27 BCE–14 ce), trumpeted the virtues of the dutiful Roman matron as part of his campaign to present his regime as restoring traditional values. In the early modern period, the governments of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Louis XIV’s France attempted to shape the character of their subjects, particularly their ruling classes, by emphasizing revised ideals of masculinity and femininity. The Chinese and Japanese did as Augustus had, and claimed to be restoring values corrupted by their predecessors. Peter took a different tack, condemning Muscovite traditions for making his servitors conservative and lethargic and their womenfolk prisoners in their own houses. As foils to these dismal stereotypes, he promoted idealized gender conceptions heavily influenced by Central and Western European ideals. By so doing, Peter made foreigners and their notions about men and women the official standards by which to measure Russia’s elite.
Peter’s first priority was the men of his ruling class. Piety did not matter much to him, nor did the old markers of status, such as family pedigree and wealth. Instead he endorsed a hard-working, open-minded, and above all, energetic masculinity, which he modeled literally and figuratively. Peter dressed in plain suits of Western European design much of the time, kept his hair short and his face clean-shaven, and ordered his nobles to do the same. He befriended and sometimes promoted to high office men from all walks of life. He took up boat-building, collected scientific specimens, beat the drum in parades, and pulled teeth. He moved the capital from Moscow, which he saw as a bastion of the old order, to a new city that he founded on the Baltic Coast and named St. Petersburg. Much of this, while expressive of his character, was calculated to impress. Peter was seeking to inspire the nobles to be like him so that they would work with him in improving Russia. He would set the agenda, for he did not question the autocratic power he had inherited. Nor did he see any contradiction between forcing his followers to shave their beards and urging them to exercise initiative.1
Peter believed that elite women should participate in his make-over of the ruling class. So he ordered his female courtiers to wear clothes of foreign design, to participate in public ceremonies, and to dance, drink, and play cards at court parties. This delighted some women, horrified others. French dresses, cut low to reveal cleavage, were embarrassing to women used to clothes that covered them from head to toe. One could also develop a serious case of the shivers wearing them in St. Petersburg’s newly built and drafty palaces. Still more unsettling were the boisterous parties at which the wives and daughters of the court were required to dress up in costumes and frolic with the men. Some of Peter’s more adventurous ladies enjoyed themselves. Most noblewomen were probably, at least at first, appalled.