Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian society, law and economy
knowledge about agriculture and medicine),
58
liberal clergy now redoubled
and diversified such efforts. The seminary also played an important role; it
not only produced a disproportionate number of radicals
59
but also had a
significant impact on younger clergy.
The result was a ‘social Orthodoxy’ which emphasised the Church’s respon-
sibility to address key social ills. Sermons not only became a regular feature of
parish services, but came to address a broad range of worldly problems, from
spouse abuse to alcoholism. The religious press, similarly, gave growing atten-
tion to temporal issues. In practical terms too, post-reform clergy sought to
tackle social problems like poverty and prostitution, encouraged parishes and
monasteries to open almshouses and medical clinics, and generally endeav-
oured to bring the Church into the world.
Orthodoxy in the Russian prerevolution
The revolution of 1905–7 had a profound impact on Russian Orthodoxy. Most
dramatically, it unleashed the pent-up discontent long percolating among the
parish clergy, who, individually and collectively, embraced a range of liberal
and even radical movements. To the horror of state officials, priests all across
the empire proved receptive to the calls of the ‘Liberation Movement’ and used
the occasion to press their own demands – for better material support, for the
right of self-organisation, for a reduction in ‘episcopal rule’ and a greater role
in diocesan administration. But others took up the needs of the disprivileged.
Thus the clergy of one deanship in Viatka diocese, for example, urged the State
Duma (parliament) to resolve ‘the agrarian question according to the wishes
of the people’.
60
And in numerous cases the local priest, whether from fear
or conviction, became embroiled in the revolution itself, delivered incendiary
sermons, performed requiems for fallen revolutionaries, and in sundry other
ways supported his rebellious parishioners.
61
58 For a typical statement, praising the parish clergy for ‘endeavoring to give [the peasants]
agricultural instruction’ and encouraging ‘the simple people, in case of dangerous dis-
eases, to seek the assistance of doctors’ (and eschew the traditional fatalism), see the 1851
annual report by the bishop of Riazan in RGIA, Fond 796,op.132,g.1851,d.2363,l.200.
59 See the overview in B. V. Titlinov, Molodezh’ i revoliutsiia (Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924). For
typical reports on seminary disorders, which proliferate from the 1880s, see the cases
from 1904 in RGIA, Fond 796,op.185,g.1904, dd. 225, 247–9, 382, 543, 553, 557.
60 Telegram of 21 June 1906 in RGIA, Fond 796,op.187,g.1906,d.6809,l.16.
61 See G. L. Freeze, ‘Church and Politics in Late Imperial Russia’, in Anna Geifman (ed.),
Russia under the Last Tsar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 269–97; John H. M. Geekie,
‘The Church and Politics in Russia, 1905–17’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University
of East Anglia (1976); Argyrios Pisiotis, ‘Orthodoxy versus Autocracy: The Orthodox
302
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics
It was not only a matter of radical priests: conservative prelates found
themselves locked in a struggle with a regime fighting for survival. The decisive
trigger to Church–State conflict was the emperor’s Manifesto on the Freedom
of Conscience (17 April 1905), an attempt to mollify disaffected religious and
ethnic minorities by decriminalising apostasy and legalising conversion from
Orthodoxy. The result, as the prelates feared, was a tidal wave of declarations
to leave the Church.
62
The manifesto did not reconcile minorities, of course,
but it did enrage churchmen – who saw it as a crass betrayal of the Church’s
vital interests.
Like the rest of Russian society, the clergy responded to the revolutionary
crisis by pressing for reform. Their principal goal was to convene a church
council – the first in more than two centuries – to address the Church’s many
problems and needs. And such seemed a realisable dream, as the regime acqui-
esced and authorised preparations for a church council. After first collecting
the opinions of diocesan authorities, the Synod created a special pre-conciliar
commission to analyse the opinions and draft proposals which bore the liberal
stamp of these revolutionary ears. All that, however, came to naught: as the
revolution receded, the emperor decided to defer the church council until
more ‘propitious’ times.
The ‘Duma Monarchy’ of the inter-revolutionary years – that marked by the
Third (1907–12) and Fourth (1912–17) Dumas – did nothing to solve problems
or reduce tensions. At the very minimum, church authorities were aghast at
the prospect of the multi-confessional Duma intervening in church affairs, as
indeed soon became the case (with respect to salaries for the clergy, parish
schools and a host of other issues).
63
Apart from seeking to influence from
within (by promoting the election of clerical deputies),
64
the Church adamantly
rejected the Duma’s competence in most ecclesiastical affairs. Thus, in 1908,
the chief procurator conveyed the Synod’s rejection of attempts by the Duma
(as a ‘non-confessional legislative institution‘) to meddle in church business
and to sponsor new laws on religious tolerance.
65
Similar sentiments were
later voiced at a conference of prelates from central Russian dioceses, who
Church and Clerical Political Dissent in Late Imperial Russia, 1905–14’, unpublished PhD
dissertation, Georgetown University (2000).
62 For data on 1905–9, see RGIA, Fond 797,op.79, otd. 2, st. 3,d.494, ll. 36–8.
63 For the fullest account, though based only on printed sources, see Vladimir Rozhkov,
Tserkovnye voprosy v Gosudarstvennoi Dume (Rome: Pontificium inst. orient. Studiorum,
1975).
64 See, for example, the Synod decree of 14 July 1912 urging active clerical involvement in
elections to the Fourth Duma, in RGIA, Fond 796,op.194,g.1912,d.1207,l.10–10 ob.
65 See the chief procurator’s memorandum to the Council of Ministers (dated 10.9.1908)
in RGIA, Fond 797,op.78, otd. 2, st. 3,d.122/b, l. 53.
303
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian society, law and economy
demanded the ‘complete removal of church legislation from the purview
of a non-confessional State Duma’.
66
Archbishop Stefan of Kursk expressed
prevailing sentiment in the episcopate when he wrote that ‘it is an empty
and idle dream to count on the bureaucrats renouncing their coercion of the
Church. It is a vain, futile hope to count on the Duma giving us the opportunity
to free ourselves from the enslavement and to build the Church on “conciliar
principles” as the canons require.’
67
All this unfolded against the backdrop of growing anxiety about the moral-
religious state of the Church. Among the folk themselves, piety seemed to
be recovering, with high rates of religious observance, but it was clear that
the ‘simple folk’ were no longer so simple: patterns of religious observance
were complex, driven not so much by dissent and apostasy as by broader pat-
terns of social and cultural change (migrant labour, the rebellion of youth
and the like).
68
Publicly, the Church suffered enormously from the infa-
mous ‘Rasputinshchina’, as Grigorii Rasputin, the self-appointed lay ‘elder’
(starets), gained extraordinary influence and compromised crown and altar in
the process. Although public perception greatly exaggerated Rasputin’s role,
he nonetheless elicited fierce enmity among the ranking churchmen, espe-
cially after Rasputin’s influence became public in 1912. As a police report from
1912 attested: ‘According to public opinion, the ecclesiastical domain experi-
enced a kind of revolutionary movement in 1912.’
69
Even extreme conservatives
like Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) waxed indignant about the cancerous
influences on the Church.
70
The First World War inspired the Church, like most of Russia, to respond
with patriotic support for what would quickly prove an unmitigated military
catastrophe. The Church itself mobilised substantial resources to assist in the
war, converted facilities to serve as military hospitals, raised funds for the
war victims and campaigned to sustain the fighting morale of the troops and
the home front. In that respect, it differed little from churches of the other
combatants. But the context was different: far sooner than elsewhere, the Rus-
sian Empire was swept by an intense tide of anti-war sentiment. Hence the
Church’s identification with the ‘imperialist war’ did much to create a young
generation of anti-religious veterans, the future Red Army men who would
66 RGIA, Fond 796,op.189,d.2229/b, l. 271.
67 RGIA, Fond 1101,op.1,d.1111,l.3.
68 See G. L. Freeze, ‘A Pious Folk? Religious Observance in Vladimir Diocese 1900–14’,
JfGO, 52 (2004): 323–40.
69 RGIA, Fond 1101,op.1,d.1111,l.1.
70 ‘V tserkovnykh krugakh’, KA 31 (1928): 204–13.
304
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics
be particularly hostile to the Church. But the Church itself had grievances,
71
suf-
fered mightily from the inflation and dislocation of war and had grown increas-
ingly alienated from a crown irreparably besmirched by Rasputinism. Indeed,
amidst the military crisis of 1915, with the country reeling from defeat, the
Church suffered yet another scandal associated with Rasputin, as his prot
´
eg
´
e,
the bishop of Tobolsk, conducted a hasty canonisation against the express
orders of the Synod. The public resonance could hardly have been greater,
and the damage to the Synod more ruinous. Little wonder that, when the
autocracy appealed to the Church for support on 27 February 1917, in its criti-
cal hour, even the conservative Synod summarily refused.
72
Russian Orthodoxy did not vanish after the Petrine reforms, but it cer-
tainly changed. Most striking was the resilience of popular faith; while the
prerevolution brought and accelerated undeniable anti-religious tendencies,
the vast majority remained faithful and, indeed, demanded a greater role for
the Church and for themselves in the Church. But Orthodoxy was no longer
part of the infamous ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ trilogy of official
politics; it had excised the middle term and, increasingly, identified with the
people, not with a secular state that had plundered its assets and failed to
protect its vital interests.
71 See, for example, the collective statement of clerical deputies to the State Duma in
August 1915 (at the very height of a political crisis), detailing all the Church’s woes and
how so little had been resolved, in ‘Pechat’ i dukhovenstvo’, Missionerskoe obozrenie 11
(November 1915): 286–90.
72 A. V. Kartashev, ‘Revoliutsiia i sobor 1917–1918 gg.’, Bogoslovskaia mysl’ 4 (1942): 75–101.
305
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
15
Women, the family and public life
barbara alpern engel
It is difficult to generalise about the womenof 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 eco-
nomic, 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 compan-
ions 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 Transi-
tional Age’, in R. Marsh (ed.), Women in Russia and the Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 31.
306
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Women, the family and public life
appear at social gatherings and display the requisite social skills; however, even
women lower down on the social hierarchy became subject to the require-
ment 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 peas-
ants were exempted. Henceforward, such women who failed to wear dresses,
German overskirts, petticoats and shoes risked a fine.
2
Westernisation of elites began in the new capital, St Petersburg, and pro-
ceeded 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 gov-
ernesses 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 Alexan-
dra Panina, renowned for their knowledge and intelligence at mid-century,
had no difficulty making excellent marriages.
3
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 goal: 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 Soci-
ety 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.
4
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
2 The decree is translated in J. Cracraft (ed.), Major Problems in the History of Imperial Russia
(Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co., 1994), pp. 110–11.
3 B. Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 113.
4 J. L. Black, ‘Educating Women in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Myths and Realities’, Cana-
dian Slavonic Papers 20, 1 (1978): 23–43.
307
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian society, law and economy
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.
5
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 Vig
´
ee 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 exceedRussianladies in the urbanities
of good society’.
6
Some of these 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), n
´
ee 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.
7
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 of elite 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 rel-
atives 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
5 M. L. Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia,
1700–1861 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 213–15.
6 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.), Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport: Praeger, 1994), p. 42.
7 Quoted in Vowles, ‘The “Feminization” of Russian Literature’, pp. 45–7.
308
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Women, the family and public life
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 enjoy-
ment 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.
8
The fundamentally patriarchal character of Russian society nevertheless
remained unaltered. Grounds for divorce did not include wife-beating; in
Peter’s day, husbands could rid themselves of unwanted wives by deposit-
ing them in a nunnery, as Peter did with his first wife Evdoksia. For the crime
of adultery, wives were sentenced to forced labour, whereas men who killed
their wives were merely flogged with the knout. Making it more difficult for
women to avoid family life by entering a convent, in 1722 Peter raised the
age at which women could take the veil to sixty.
9
Developments after Peter’s
death further buttressed the patriarchal family. The laws governing marriage
permitted husbands and fathers to exercise virtually unlimited power over
other family members, and required a wife to submit to her husband as head
of the household and to live with him in love, respect and ‘unlimited obedi-
ence’.
10
The strictures on marital dissolution tightened. Over the course of
the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church steadily increased its
authority over marriage and divorce, emphasising more than ever before the
sacramental and indissoluble nature of marriage. The Church made divorce
virtually inaccessible to the Russian Orthodox faithful, the majority of the
population. Grounds for annulling a marriage also narrowed and were even
more narrowly applied.
11
It became much more difficult for a woman to escape
8 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.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 15–32.
9 L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
pp. 199–200.
10 SZ (St Petersburg, 1857)x,pt.1, article 106.
11 G. L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial
Russia, 1760–1860’, JMH 62 (1990): 709–46.
309
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Russian society, law and economy
an abusive or unsatisfactory marriage by obtaining a divorce; the law strictly
forbade marital separation.
Yet in the final decades of the eighteenth century, literature imported from
the West introduced new ways of thinking about marriage and the family.
Conduct books and education manuals celebrated motherhood’s sanctity, and
instructed mothers to be the moral and spiritual guides of their children.
12
Sentimental literature elevated woman’s role, presenting her as sensitive and
emotional, a friend to the man whom she married.
13
Even Russian Ortho-
dox views of marriage were affected by these trends: the Church placed new
emphasis on the affective ties of spouses and their reciprocal responsibilities
towards one another, while downplaying – although not eradicating – the
patriarchal and misogynist elements of its previous stance.
14
In the reign of
Nicholas I, a modified patriarchal ideal became the model of imperial rule.
The private life of the tsar was staged so as to portray him as a loving and
devoted husband and caring father, while the empress provided a model of
maternal love and tenderness – a family idyll that was disseminated in paintings
and engravings to a broad audience as well as to the elite. The new imagery
dramatised a ‘sharp division of sexual spheres’ that mirrored developments in
other European courts.
15
Although arranged marriages continued to be the norm well into the nine-
teenth century, there is evidence that by the reign of Nicholas I, a portion of
the nobility had embraced the new affective ideal of marriage and come to
value intimate and loving family relations. ‘Can a marriage be stable and happy,
when it is not based on feelings of mutual respect and the most tender love?’
rhetorically inquired the governor of Nizhegorod province in 1828.
16
How-
ever, it is questionable whether Nicholas’s ideology of separate spheres had a
broad popular basis in Russia, as it had in Great Britain and France.
17
While the
12 Diana Greene, ‘Mid-Nineteenth Century Domestic Ideology in Russia’, in Rosalind
Marsh (ed.), Women and Russian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp. 84–7;C.Kelly,Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine
to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28.
13 O. E. Glagoleva, ‘Dream and Reality of Russian Provincial Young Ladies, 1700–1850’, The
Carl Beck Papers,no.1405,p.44.
14 W. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), p. 76.
15 R. Wortman, Scenarios of Power:Myth and Ceremonyin RussianMonarchy, 2 vols.(Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. I, p. 261.
16 GARF, Tret’e otdelenie sobstvennoi ego imperatorskogo velichestva kantseliarii, 1826–
1880, Fond 109, 2aia ekspeditsiia, 1828,op.58, ed. khr. 199, ll. 1–19; Mary Wells Cavendar,
‘Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Tver, 1820–1860,’
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan (1997), p. 29.
17 M. Perrot, ‘The Family Triumphant’, in Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life:
From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
310
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Women, the family and public life
‘domestic’ was defined as women’s proper sphere, as it was elsewhere, for Rus-
sian noblewomen the domestic extended well beyond the confines of home
and housekeeping. Women’s subordinate status in law coexisted, sometimes
uneasily, with their legal right to own and manage immovable property, which
Russian wives, as well as single women and widows, enjoyed. Even married
women could buy and sell and enter contracts, a status that was unique in
Europe. Noblewomen’s activities as property managers often took precedence
over childrearing and brought such women into contact with local and central
authorities and with the legal process.
18
Given the lawlessness of provincial
life and noblewomen’s control of human chattel, estate management could
require determination, even ruthlessness, rather than the gentleness usually
associated with domesticity.
Outside the circle of privilege
The changes introduced by Peter and his eighteenth-century successors
affected women of Russia’s tax-paying population, townspeople as well as
peasants, primarily in negative ways. The most significant change derived
from the practice of conscription that Peter introduced. Conscription created
a new social category, the soldier’s wife (soldatka). If a peasant, conscription
put the soldatka in the most marginal position by freeing her and her children
from serfdom, thereby depriving her of her husband’s share of the communal
land and other benefits. Because they represented an extra mouth to feed and a
potential threat to the other women of the household and community, soldatki
might be driven from the village. Such women became highly vulnerable. The
cities to which many migrated offered them little in the way of respectable
employment and large numbers of men prepared to pay for sexual compan-
ionship. Some women took up petty trade, many more hired out as domestic
servants. However, enough turned to prostitution as a temporary or perma-
nent expedient that soldiers’ wives acquired an unsavory reputation. They
also figured prominently among the mothers of illegitimate children. In the
course of the eighteenth century, illegitimacy and infanticide became much
more visible than they had been previously, and perhaps more commonplace
as well. These social problems moved the state to action. Initially, concern to
increase the population prompted Peter the Great to establish hospitals where
mothers could deposit their illegitimate children in secret (in 1712, and again
Press, 1990), vol. IV, pp. 134–5; Catherine Hall, ‘The Sweet Delights of Home’, in Perrot,
AHistory,p.49.
18 Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom.
311