BARBARA 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
1 L. 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.
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.[149]
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.[150] 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 goaclass="underline" 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 found- ing.[151] 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 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.[152]
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 wouldbe impossible 'to exceed Russian ladies in the urbanities of good society'.[153] Some ofthese 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.[154]
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 ofelite 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 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.[155]
149
The decree is translated in J. Cracraft (ed.),
150
B. Meehan-Waters,
151
J. L. Black, 'Educating Women in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Myths and Realities',
152
M. L. Marrese,
153
Quoted in Judith Vowles, 'The "Feminization" of Russian Literature: Women, Language, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Russia', in Toby W Clyman and Diana Greene (eds.),
155
N. 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.),