THE ASCENDANCY OF THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY

Nicholas did not have to coerce his subjects into accepting the cult of domesticity; it already had many devotees among the elite when he took the throne. Mary Cavender has found late eighteenth‑century letters in which Russian nobles praised mothers who instructed their families in ethical behavior. We have already seen the increased emphasis in these decades on more loving, less patriarchal relations between husbands and wives. In the early nineteenth century, government officials turned to the ideas of the cult for ways to control criminals exiled for life to Siberia. The men should marry, officials believed, because loving wives tamed men’s unruliness and inspired them to behave better. The exile would also “find a helpmeet in his wife, who will uphold and increase the comfort of domestic life through her own activity,” an 1827 report declared.²⁹

The dissemination of cult ideas continued throughout Nicholas’s reign, as the bookstores filled with housekeeping guides, cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and edifying literature and poetry, some published in Russia, some imported from abroad. A typical description of the perfect wife appeared in an 1846 collection of essays for young people, written by Maria Korsini, a graduate of the Smolny Institute: “Her dominion is kindness and gentleness. She looks after the domestic tranquility of her husband…. She raises her babies and is the first to pronounce for them the name of God and to make them pray. She also ensures that the servant performs her duties and that quietude and peace reign in her house. A woman is given inexhaustible patience, which helps her to endure the screams of children, lack of sleep, and many minor domestic unpleasantries.”³⁰

This version of the cult is adapted to the life of the average noblewoman, for it emphasizes household management, as the royal version did not. Royal women supervised their staffs, but this was not an activity for which they were widely praised. More important was their symbolic position as consort of the emperor and mother of his children and, by extension, of the nation. It was quite otherwise with noblewomen, whose primary responsibilities included running households, and so Korsini harkens back to The Domostroi in the importance she attaches to “ensuring that the servant performs her duties.” Novels, short stories, and diaries from the period suggest that there was still a good deal of the steely mistress of The Domostroi in real married noblewomen. Managing domestic chores and possibly their own estates required them to be authoritative.

There were other differences between the Nicholaevan cult of domesticity and the more bourgeois versions ascendant in Western Europe and North America. Chief among them was a different emphasis on the importance of separating woman’s sphere, the inside and private, from man’s, the outside and public. The notion that women belonged in the home, away from the temptations and dangers of the wider world, was an ancient one among Europeans, as well as among Arabs, Turks, Chinese, and other peoples. We have seen it in The Domostroi, and in the Muscovite seclusion of elite women. Nineteenth‑century Russian advocates of the cult of domesticity, however, never carried that idea to the extremes of those contemporary British or Germans who wrote obsessively about the importance of women staying home. Now it was the Western Europeans who were harping on women’s seclusion.

This difference arose from differences in economic and social development in Western and Eastern Europe. In the West, especially the northwest, the growth of commerce and manufacturing led to a physical separation of urban residences from workplaces. By the end of the eighteenth century, more and more men were working away from home, which had not been the case in earlier times, when workers and bosses lived and labored in the same buildings. This development was idealized as the cult of domesticity was formulated. Home came to be seen as a refuge from the moral and physical squalor of public spaces. Soon this idealization was put in service to the social agenda of the middle class. Desirous of distinguishing themselves from the nobles who still outranked them in status and the artisans and peasants from whom many of them sprang, these people, particularly the English ones, defined middle‑class “respectability” as requiring that women spend most of their time in their residences, as nobles did not and poor people could not. The Russian nobility in the early nineteenth century had no such social anxieties. Nor did the physical separation of workplaces and residences exist in Russia, either in the preindustrial cities or in the countryside. Hence the version of the cult that they created laid far less stress on the physical locations of men’s and women’s “separate spheres” than did middle‑class variants elsewhere, which resulted in less attention being devoted to policing elite women’s behavior when in public.³¹

The Russian cult of domesticity also differed from the Western European bourgeois one in its definitions of masculinity. Thus far we have not discussed the cult’s prescriptions for men, and, indeed, they are often overlooked by historians. This is unfortunate, for the cult of domesticity had quite a bit to say about men, as all gender codes do, and what it said was very influential. Western European proponents of the cult sang the praises of the hard‑working husband who provided for and loved his family, disciplined his children, and supervised their education, especially that of the boys. To the larger world, he set an example of rectitude and rationality. These values moved quite easily to Nicholaevan Russia, where they merged with Peter’s energetic masculinity. Nicholas’s government preached that the men of the ruling class should be educated, self‑disciplined, dutiful, modest, pious, and hard‑working. But public life might toughen them too much, deadening their capacity for fellow‑feeling and perhaps even corrupting their morals. (This was a key idea of the cult.) Hence they needed good wives waiting at home to soothe and advise them. This synthesis of imported and inherited masculine ideals reflected, as Peter’s gender ideas had, the character of the monarch as well as his agenda for his servitors.³²

Nicholas’s notions about masculinity and those proclaimed by opinion‑makers in Western Europe differed most significantly in that his were more autocratic, theirs more democratic. The masculine ethos popular among the middle and, increasingly, the working classes argued that a man should be judged not according to his social rank, his family’s connections, or how well he subordinated himself to the authorities, but on his own merits and by his own accomplishments. He could be considered successful if he was a good family man who did well in business or the professions. This leveling individualism, which suited Western Europeans, especially the British and their North American cousins, could never win the favor of authoritarian rulers such as Nicholas. He stayed true to older patriarchal ideals of obedience, service, and class and believed in the importance of duty, especially the duty to serve the tsar.

Nicholas could not keep the cult’s more democratic version of masculinity out of Russia, though. It crept in among those elite men who dreamed of political change and rejected what they saw as the servility demanded of them by the autocrat. They valued rationality, education, integrity, social responsibility, diligence, and independence of thought. Like Peter the Great, they also put stock in energy and initiative. During Nicholas’s times such men were few. There would be many more of them during the reign of his son Alexander.