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.