NICHOLAEVAN FAMILY LAW

The cult of domesticity was the soft, persuasive voice of Nicholaevan gender discourse. When the law spoke, it sternly reaffirmed the enduring rules of patriarchy. The Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire, issued in 1832, declared, “[The] wife is obligated to obey her husband as the head of the family, to live with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience, and to render him all pleasure and affection as mistress of the household.” A husband’s duties were “to love his wife as his own body, to live with her in harmony, to respect and defend her, and to forgive her insufficiencies and ease her infirmities.”³³

This statement of general principles was attached to a short list of specific obligations drawn from older Russian laws. William Wagner has pointed out that the Collection’s medieval origins are reflected in the fact that it was mostly concerned, as The Domostroi had been, with prescribing duties and stressing the importance of submission to authority.³⁴ Husbands were required to support their wives. Wives were required to live with their husbands, unless those husbands were sentenced to exile in Siberia. The law of common residence was reinforced by another regulation that forbade women from holding passports in their own names. Passports were the identification cards of imperial Russia. Since women could not obtain them, they had to have their husbands’ or parents’ permission to live apart from their families or to travel. Married women also required the consent of their husbands before they could take a job. Both spouses were forbidden to injure one another physically or involve one another in criminal acts. The latter requirement was far more likely to be enforced than the former, for Russian custom and Russian people of all social ranks, as we have seen, had long tolerated the beating of wives and children, so long as it did not result in serious injury, and sometimes even when it did.

The 1832 law code preserved ancient patriarchal principles regarding the relations between parents and children as well. Parents were required to support their minor children; children repaid this care by giving their parents lifelong obedience. The laws declared that dutiful children should accept uncomplainingly whatever punishments their parents administered. Disobedience was defined as a crime, and particularly objectionable were failing to support aged parents financially and marrying without parental consent. A young woman or man who eloped could be disinherited and brought up on criminal charges.

Marriage law still fell under the jurisdiction of religious authorities in this period. Gregory Freeze has found that, as the Orthodox Church enlarged its administrative apparatus in the eighteenth century, it became better able to enforce its definitions of monogamy. By Nicholas’s reign, consequently, Russian divorce procedures were among the strictest in Europe. Orthodox prelates declared that the only justifiable grounds for dissolving a marriage were adultery, abandonment for many years, impotence, or exile to Siberia. Even when these conditions existed, obtaining an annulment was time‑consuming and expensive. For example, to gain an annulment on the grounds of sexual incapacity, a plaintiff had to provide evidence that his or her spouse’s impotence arose from physical causes and had existed prior to the marriage. Testimony from physicians was required, and if the wife was the plaintiff, she had to also have a doctor certify that she was still a virgin. If a woman did obtain an annulment, she had no right to custody of her children or financial support from her former husband.³⁵

Roman Catholic and Lutheran authorities in the Russian empire also prohibited divorce and rarely granted annulments. Indeed, Christians across Europe in the nineteenth century opposed divorce because they still believed, as they had for centuries, that marriage was a union created by God during the wedding ceremony. To dissolve it was to go against God’s will. The pain experienced in an unhappy marriage was no different from all the other suffering of life, Christians were taught. Suffering was a necessary means to the end of learning how to be patient and dutiful; it brought one closer to Christ, who had suffered agonies for humankind’s sake. So a bad marriage was to be endured humbly, with the hope that things would improve if people stuck it out long enough. Labzina’s mother and in‑laws told her precisely this in the eighteenth century. Christian and Jewish authorities also argued that marriage was the bedrock institution of society; peace in the larger community depended on peace within the family, family tranquility depended on orderly relations among family members, and order depended on patriarchal power, whether or not it was exercised benignly.³⁶

EDUCATION

The proposition that elite women could best meet their family obligations if they were formally educated was widely accepted in the early nineteenth century, and schooling for propertied girls continued to expand. Tutoring at home remained the predominant method, but by 1845 thirty‑six boarding schools for girls, called “institutes,” had been founded. In 1843 the church began opening schools for the daughters of priests, and private organizations and individuals also endowed schools. All these institutions emphasized the preparation of their students to be wives and mothers. As in the past, the curriculum varied according to the social class of the pupils: there was more stress on the arts in schools for noble girls, more stress on learning trades in those for the less privileged. The 1827 rules and regulations for a school for middle‑class girls declared, “The purpose… is to teach the students to be good wives, solicitous mothers, and exemplary mentors for their children, and to teach them the skills they need to be able to provide for themselves and their families by means of their own hard work.”³⁷

In memoirs, graduates of the boarding schools paint portraits of their teenage years that are similar to those created by other nineteenth‑century Europeans. They report feeling terrified when, at age eight or nine, they first entered the institutes that would be their homes until they graduated at age sixteen. This was more than the usual anxiety of a child on the first day of school, for many of these girls were beginning a long separation from their families. Contact with relatives was not encouraged even for pupils whose families lived nearby, because Russian pedagogues believed that the shaping of girls into moral young ladies proceeded best without distraction. Years passed before those from provincial families returned home.

The schools were spartan. Sophia Khvoshchinskaia, a graduate of the Smolny, remembered her first impressions: “The longest of corridors, enormous classrooms, endless dormitories, staircase upon staircase. A spacious and bleak place after the crowded coziness of home.”³⁸ Many alumnae complained about bad food, stifling rules, lazy instructors, and autocratic matrons who supervised the dormitories. But they did form deep attachments to other girls and to the more admirable teachers. By the time they graduated as teenagers, many girls had come to consider the institutes their homes, and they found it wrenching to leave their friends. “Spare me from describing our final farewells,” wrote Nadezhda Sokhanskaia in 1847–48. “It all seems even sadder to me now. Where have you gone? What has become of us? How much that was fine and beautiful has disappeared, perhaps forever, never to return!”³⁹

Across Europe, the curriculum of women’s education in the early 1800s was often criticized for being insufficiently rigorous. Religion, embroidery, and social graces were taught to girls, while boys studied classical languages and mathematics. This educational inequality was galling to those who did not consider women innately inferior to men intellectually. In Russia as elsewhere, however, the education available to elite women did foster the participation of those women in the nation’s growing secular culture. From the reign of Catherine on, noblewomen were reading poetry, novels, and magazines as well as devotional texts. By the 1820s they were also attending lectures, plays, and poetry readings.

PHILANTHROPY

One of the great ironies of women’s history in nineteenth‑century Europe is the fact that the cult of domesticity, which prescribed women’s concentration on their homes and families, was used to justify ever greater involvement by elite women in the world beyond those homes. Philanthropy, a highly organized type of charity, was one of the first, most popular, and most enduring of their many ventures. We have seen that elite women had long been expected to help the poor. The rapid social changes of the time, particularly the growth of slums in the cities of northwestern Europe, convinced some that traditional benevolence (giving alms to beggars, taking in homeless people, making donations to the church) was no longer sufficient. So charitable societies were established across Europe. Female philanthropists often focused their energies on urban poor women and justified their engagement by arguing that the virtuous upper‑class woman had a religious duty to rescue her less fortunate and more corruptible sisters by giving them financial assistance and educating them to be self‑supporting, pious, and virtuous.

The prejudices and condescension of nineteenth‑century philanthropists should not blind us to the great social evils they were trying to alleviate. Crime, epidemic diseases, alcoholism, and prostitution bedeviled nineteenth‑century cities, and poor women struggled as well with awful living and working conditions. In the first half of the century, the need was less severe in Russia than in Western Europe, because Russia had yet to experience the Industrial Revolution, which swelled urban populations and urban problems. But the situation of poor women in Russia’s cities was compelling, nonetheless.

The foremost advocate for philanthropy aimed at women was Empress Maria, Nicholas’s mother. This redoubtable woman was running so many charities when she died in 1828 that a government agency, the Department of the Institutions of Empress Maria, had to be created to oversee them all. The empress also inspired her daughters‑in‑law to become philanthropists. Elizaveta, the wife of Alexander I, established the Women’s Patriotic Society in 1812 to work among those injured or displaced by the Napoleonic Wars. It continued on as a sponsor of girls’ schools after the wars ended. Alexandra, Nicholas’s wife, allocated funds to several charities and paid close attention to the operation of the Smolny Institute. Still more energetic was her sister‑in‑law, the Grand Duchess Elena, a German princess who was the wife of Michael, Nicholas’s younger brother. Elena funded charities and schools, and became an advocate of the emancipation of the serfs.

The example of Maria and her daughters‑in‑law was widely followed. Adele Lindenmeyr has written that setting up a charity became “virtually part of the job description of the wives of high‑ranking state officials.”⁴⁰ By the 1830s, “Ladies’ Charitable Societies” in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Riga, Tver, and other provincial cities were distributing food, clothing, and money to the needy. Prison societies were sending members into the jails to pass out warm clothes and nutritious food, teach basic literacy and numeracy, and read the Bible aloud. Other groups sponsored schools and workhouses in which poor women learned marketable skills, particularly needlework. Their philanthropy was part of an increasingly wide‑ranging involvement of elite women in public life.