PETER’S REFORMS FOR WOMEN

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.

More women may have approved of his 1702 reform of marriage customs. As we have seen, parents in Muscovy arranged marriages with the interests of the family in mind. By the seventeenth century, the ancient Rus rule that they had to obtain the agreement of the future bride and groom was rarely followed, and it was not uncommon for couples to meet for the first time at their weddings. Peter did not approve, probably in no small measure because he had taken an immediate dislike to Evdokia Lopukhina, the wife his mother had chosen for him. Instead, he thought that prospective spouses should be permitted some voice. Undoubtedly this was a feeling widely shared by other people damaged by unhappy marriages. So the decree of 1702 granted parents the right to choose partners for their children, but gave the children a right of refusal. Couples had to be permitted to meet during a six‑week betrothal. If either party decided against the match, parents were prohibited from forcing it to occur. Furthermore, the decree permitted a groom to refuse to marry a woman with a physical disability. There was no similar “escape clause” for brides. Peter reinforced the decree in the 1720s with additional regulations outlawing forced marriages.

The marriage decree reflected and promoted attitudes already present among elite Russians. Notions about marriage had begun to change in the second half of the seventeenth century, a change detectable in a small but growing secular literature that featured stories in which true love triumphed over all obstacles. The nobility was beginning to believe that marriage should be more than synchronized teamwork, more than a prospering alliance built on duty, piety, and hard work. It should sustain the partners emotionally. Peter’s marriage law gave legal recognition to the newer concept that marriage would work better if the spouses found one another desirable. The tsar himself acted on this concept by divorcing his wife and living with, then marrying, a lower‑class woman named Martha Skavronska. On converting to Orthodoxy, Martha took the name Catherine.

Peter’s sisters, although they honored many Muscovite customs, including the requirement to remain single throughout their lives, supported their brother’s efforts to engage women in Russia’s new social life. Maria took the unprecedented step of traveling abroad to attend the wedding of her niece in 1717, ignoring her brother’s complaints about having to pay the expenses of the huge entourage that accompanied her. Natalia moved to Peter’s new capital and set about promoting Peter’s reforms as well as occasionally supervising his children. She also sponsored a theater, for which she wrote at least one play, organized a choir, and perhaps composed songs. When she died in 1716, Natalia left behind sixty‑one paintings, one hundred books, mostly about religion, and several wardrobes full of dresses cut to foreign patterns.² Her sister‑in‑law, Tsaritsa Praskovia, widow of Ivan V, also subsidized a theater. Much of the tsarevny’s patronage was devoted to arts with a religious theme, and so it would not be accurate to describe them as departing radically from Russian traditions, which had long encouraged rich women to promote religion. But now such women increasingly could, and did, use their fortunes to encourage arts new to Russia, such as theater.

Peter did not challenge the fundamental values that defined women’s natures and duties. Nor did he advocate limiting the power of senior men. The Honorable Mirror of Youth, an etiquette manual published in 1717, advised its female readers, “You must acknowledge your own weaknesses, frailties, and imperfections, and be humble before God and consider your fellow beings more than yourself.”³ Gender change is often accompanied by such reaffirmations of core values. In contemporary France and England, the same emphasis on female frailty prevailed, and the few women in the West who aspired to be artists or writers were often reminded that their role was to appreciate the works of men, not to create their own.

Peter’s involvement of noblewomen in social life did promote an understanding among the highest ranks of the nobility that women should be something more than the dutiful housewives of The Domostroi. Their wishes were to be consulted by parents arranging their marriages; their husbands were to permit them to chat with, even flirt with, other men. They were to embody, literally, a femininity that was on public display, and this was a major change from the seclusion of the past. Furthermore, Peter’s reforms and the examples of his sisters and his court became the foundation on which subsequent generations of elite women built for themselves a significant position in Russia’s secularizing elite culture. Central to that process were two of Peter’s female successors, the empresses Elizabeth I and Catherine II.