Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

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Russian society, law and economy

section of Gapon’s Assembly of Russian Factory Workers that Vera Karelina

organised in St Petersburg. Karelina’s most effective organising tool was a

story that she read aloud, describing the humiliating body searches by male

personnel that women workers were forced to undergo.

1905 and after

During the revolution of 1905, women across the social spectrum mobilised

in enormous numbers to demand an expansion of political rights and greater

social justice. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, pharmacists, pro-

fessionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to

attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autocracy

anda representative form of government. Labouring womenoften participated

in the burgeoning strike movement in ways connected to their family roles. In

factories where women predominated, the textile industry in particular, strike

demands clearly reﬂected their presence. Factory after factory demanded day

care, maternity leave, nursing breaks and protection of women workers. Even

as they demonstrated new assertiveness, such demands reinforced a gender

division of labour by touching on women’s role as mother and not on their

actual working conditions. Peasant women also participated actively in rural

unrest primarily in their family roles.

However, the intense politicisation

and pervasive use of a language of rights stimulated other women, primarily

the educated, to speak on their own behalf and to claim their place in the

expanding public sphere.

Feminist organisations emerged to promote women’s interests. The most

signiﬁcant and the ﬁrst to try to speak on behalf of all of Russia’s women was

the All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality (Women’s Union). The union’s

platform, adopted in May 1905, called for the equality of the sexes before the

law; equal rights to the land for peasant women; laws providing for the wel-

fare, protection and insurance of women workers; the abolition of regulated

prostitution; co-education at all levels of schooling; and women’s suffrage.

Although its membership was primarily middle class, the Women’s Union

worked to forge alliances across the social divide and encourage lower-class

women to speak for themselves, inviting ‘women of the toiling classes’ to

46 Glickman, Russian Factory Women,pp.184–6.

47 Glickman, Russian Factory Women,pp.190–4; Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Women, Men,

and the Languages of Peasant Resistance, 1870–1907’, in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D.

Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 34–53.

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Women, the family and public life

formulate their own demands and pledging to support them.

Feminists

also tried to reach out to peasant women, joining the Peasant Union, and

convincing it to adopt the plank of women’s suffrage.

Feminist efforts to

expand their social base bore some fruit. Women domestic servants in Moscow

and St Petersburg joined feminist-organised unions; they attended feminist-

sponsored clubs. Women workers added their signatures to petitions favour-

ing women’s suffrage. A number of peasant women’s groups were formed

and some petitions signed by peasant men took up the demand for women’s

suffrage.

Nevertheless, 1905 brought feminists very little in the way of measurable

gains. To be sure, the granting of civil liberties, however limited, allowed more

scope for organising. The revolution also marked a watershed in the history

of women’s education. The curriculum of women’s higher courses expanded

and between 1906 and 1910, new women’s courses opened in many provin-

cial cities. In addition, a number of private co-educational universities were

established, offering new curricula and electives. The enrolment of women

students increased exponentially: in 1900–1, there were 2,588 women students

enrolled in higher education in Russia; by 1915–16, the number was 44,017.

Nevertheless, the status of women’s education remained insecure and career

options limited, leaving an enormous gap betweeneducation and employment

opportunities.

Moreover, the October Manifesto enfranchised only men. The liberal Kadet

party divided over the issue of women’s suffrage, while parties to the left,

although staunch advocates of women’s rights, were with the exception of

the Trudovik party suspicious of and reluctant to support ‘bourgeois femi-

nism’. Further, the evidence suggests that working-class and peasant women

felt more afﬁnity with the men of their class than they did with middle-class

feminists. Even when feminists succeeded in organising women workers, they

had trouble retaining their loyalty. As one feminist lamented, it was rela-

tively easy to establish circles among labouring women, but as soon as their

political consciousness was raised, they wanted to work with the men of

their class. As a result, the Women’s Union ‘acted as a kind of preparation

for party work’.

The social divisions that weakened opposition to autoc-

racy divided the women’s movement as well. After 1907, membership in the

48 GIAgM, Fond 516,op.1, ed. khr. 5, ll. 45–50.

49 L. H. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1984), pp. 38–47.

50 Morrissey, Heralds,p.161.

51 GIAgM, Fond 516,op.1, ed. khr. 5,p.73. Report of the Third Congress, 22 May 1906.

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women’s movement sharply declined, as it did in radical political parties in

general.

In the aftermath of 1905, other issues, especially ‘the sexual question’,

absorbed the public’s attention. Commercial culture ﬂourished. Advertise-

ments encouraged women to develop more beautiful busts; they offered cures

for sexual troubles; they touted contraceptives. On the back pages of news-

papers, ‘models’ boasting ‘attractive bodies’ offered to pose for a fee.

The

‘new woman’ symbolised the new era. Freed from the constraints of conven-

tional morality, she dominated the imagination of the reading public. The

immensely popular boulevard novel, Anastasia Verbitskaia’s The Keys to Hap-

piness (Kliuchi schast’ia, published 1908–13) was one of the bestselling works of

the time. The novel addressed women of all classes who felt stiﬂed by societal

and professional restraints, and emphasised their right to sexual adventure and

professional achievement.

Non-readers might encounter the ‘new woman’

on the silver screen.

Yet more restrictive ways of regarding women continued, and drew new

life from the fears that revolution evoked. This can be seen in the debate over

abortion, which Russian law penalised as a form of murder. Supposedly, its

incidence had escalated dramatically following the revolution of 1905. Pro-

gressive physicians sought, unsuccessfully, to decriminalise the procedure and

at professional meetings, women physicians spoke vociferously on behalf of

reproductive freedom. Among the most vocal was the feminist physician Maria

Pokrovskaia, who denounced Russia’s punitive abortion laws as unwarranted

restrictions on female autonomy. Invoking the concept of voluntary mother-

hood, she claimed that only women were in a position to know their own

needs. To proponents of decriminalisation such as she, abortion symbolised

women’s autonomy. To others, however, abortion symbolised women’s sex-

ual licence and underscored the dangerous aspects of women’s emancipation.

Even those who approved of women’s freedom from legal and career restraints

condemned women’s sexual liberation.

However controversial she might be, by the outbreak of the First World War,

the ‘new woman’ had apparently come to stay. She was very much a product

of the changes that had swept Russia in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The expansion of women’s education, the growth of the market economy and

52 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-si

ecle

Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 360.

53 Anastasya Verbitskaya, Keys to Happiness, ed. and trans. Beth Holmgren and Helena

Goscilo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. xiii.

54 Engelstein, Keys,pp.341–4.

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the increased emphasis on the self and its gratiﬁcation contributed more to

undermining the patriarchal family than had the radical critiques of the 1860s.

Signiﬁcantly, wifehood and motherhood played a minimal role in the woman-

related discourse of the early twentieth century, although those themes gained

more prominence following 1905. Yet the ‘new woman’ remained a minority

phenomenon, swimming against a conservative tide. Patriarchal relations con-

tinued to serve as both metaphor and model for Russia’s political order, upheld

by the law and by the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast

majority of Russia’s population. Wifehood and motherhood, not the pleasures

and freedoms of new womanhood, remained the aspiration of countless num-

bers of Russia’s women. Although the nature of social divides had changed,

they remained almost as unbridgeable on the eve of the First World War as

they had been 200 years before.

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Gender and the legal order

in Imperial Russia

michelle lamarche marrese

This chapter will explore a single but signiﬁcant dimension of women’s expe-

rience in Imperial Russia: the transformation of their legal status from the

Petrine reforms to the eve of the 1917 Revolution. It has become a truism

among scholars that law codes both mirror and produce gender difference

and hierarchies.

In this regard, Russian legal culture proved no exception:

normative law drew marked distinctions between women and men, as well

as distinguishing between individuals on the basis of social standing. When

applied to women, the juridical system in Imperial Russia was also notewor-

thy for tensions and inconsistencies that intensiﬁed with the elaboration of

women’s status in written law. This essay will investigate the origins of com-

peting deﬁnitions of gender in the realms of property, family and criminal

law. In the pre-reform era, the clariﬁcation of women’s civil status elevated

noblewomen’s standing in the patriarchal family by extending their rights over

property, yet simultaneously institutionalised their subordination to their hus-

bands. The legal regime that emerged after the Great Reforms of the 1860s

placed a novel emphasis on female vulnerability and the assignment of women

to the domestic sphere, at the very moment that unprecedented numbers of

peasant women were making their way into the urban marketplace.

As I

will argue in the following pages, if the legal order in eighteenth-century

Russia minimised sexual difference in many respects, nineteenth-century

I would like to thank Barbara Alpern Engel, John Bushnell and Dominic Lieven for their

thoughtful comments, which have greatly improved this essay.

1 Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 3; A. M. Schrader, Languages of the

Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Uni-

versity Press, 2002), p. 6;W.G.Wagner,Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 3.

2 B. A. Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 64–99; R. L. Glickman, Russian Factory

Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984),

pp. 59–104.

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Gender and the legal order in Imperial Russia

innovations in the law highlighted gender distinctions to an unprecedented

degree.

Noblewomen, inheritance, and the

control of property

The pre-Petrine law of property was characterised by unequal inheritance for

sons and daughters and limitations on women’s use and control of landed

estates. For all that Muscovite law codes allowed women a surprising degree

of independence in matters judicial,

elite Russian women shared many legal

disabilities with their European counterparts. The reforms of Peter the Great,

however, initiated an era of profound cultural and legal change for Russian

noblewomen. Most notably, the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual

expansion of women’s rights to property. Innovations in female inheritance

were less dramatic than advances in women’s control of their fortunes, yet

the elevation of women’s inheritance rights and married women’s acquisition

of the right to manage and alienate their estates were emblematic of a larger

process of legal change: the trend toward individualised rather than familial

property rights among the nobility in the eighteenth century, and the efforts

of the elite to clarify their standing in the law of property in relation to other

family members and the state. Signiﬁcantly, noblewomen took active part in

the extension of their property rights and went on to make ample use of their

legal prerogatives.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, inspired by debates over the

‘woman question’, Russian historians and jurists wrote extensively on the topic

of women’s property rights. Russian scholars issued extravagant pronounce-

ments about the legal status of their female compatriots, declaring them the

most fortunate women in Europe with regard to control of property but the

most disadvantaged in the domain of inheritance.

Both generalisations were

overstated, yet it cannot be denied that from the eighteenth century the evo-

lution of Russian women’s legal status diverged signiﬁcantly from that of their

3 N. S. Kollmann, ‘Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia’, in Barbara E. Clements,

Barbara Alpern Engel and Christine D. Worobec (eds.), Russia’s Women: Accommodation,

Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 60–73.

4 On women’s role in the expansion of their property rights, see M. L. Marrese, A Woman’s

Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861 (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2002), pp. 28–39, 56–9.

5 Anna Evreinova, ‘Ob uravnenii prav zhenshchin pri nasledovanii’, Drug zhenshchin

(November 1883), no. 11: 62; I. V. Gessen, ‘Vliianie zakonodatel’stva na polozhenie zhen-

shchin’, Pravo (1908), no. 51: col. 2837; A. Liubavskii, ‘Ob uravnenii nasledstvennykh prav

muzhchin i zhenshchin’, ZMI 20, book 2 (May 1864): 412.

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Russian society, law and economy

European equivalents. In Western Europe, differential control of property

sharply distinguished the sexes, associating men with real estate and women

with personality, while – as often as not – subjecting married women’s property

to control of their husbands.

In regard to female inheritance, Russian law displayed only marginal superi-

ority over European legal codes. The post-Petrine law of inheritance continued

to favour male heirs, while failing to elucidate the claims of married daugh-

ters and the legal status of the dowry vis-

a-vis inheritance. After decades of

debate, imperial legislators guaranteed daughters, regardless of marital status,

a statutory share of one-fourteenth, or 7 per cent, of their parents’ immove-

able property, as well as one-eighth of their personal assets, after which their

brothers received equal shares of the estate. When no male offspring survived,

daughters divided their parents’ holdings equally. By the nineteenth century,

intestate inheritance law was in dire need of revision, as European states

began to equalise the inheritance rights of sons and daughters. Nonetheless,

the revised rules of succession at the end of the eighteenth century represented

a genuine achievement for noblewomen, who had won greater security in the

law of inheritance and the right to litigate for a statutory share of family assets.

It was in the realm of control of property, however, that Russian noble-

women made their most striking advance vis-

a-vis their European counter-

parts. From 1753 Russian noblewomen enjoyed the right to alienate and man-

age their property during marriage.

Noblewomen’s control of their assets,

whether acquired as dowry, purchased or inherited, inspired foreign observers

to remark on this curious exception to Russian women’s legal servitude. ‘You

must know that every Woman has the right over her Fortune totally indepen-

dent of her Husband and he is as independent of his wife’, Catherine Wilmot

marvelled in a letter from Russia to her sister Harriet in 1806. ‘Marriage there-

fore is no union of interests whatsoever, and the Wife if she has a large Estate

and happens to marry a poor man is still consider’d rich...Thisgivesacuri-

ous sort of hue to the conversations of the Russian Matrons which to a meek

English Woman appears prodigious independence in the midst of a Despotic

Government!’

In his account of Russia in the 1840s, August von Haxthausen

6 A vast literature exists on the topic of women and property. For a detailed overview of

this literature, see Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom.

7 M. L. Marrese, ‘From Maintenance to Entitlement: Deﬁning the Dowry in Eighteenth-

Century Russia’, in W. Rosslyn (ed.), Women and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 209–26.

8 PSZ, vol. 13,no.10.111 (14.06.1753). M. L. Marrese, ‘The Enigma of Married Women’s

Control of Property in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, RR 58, 3 (July 1999): 380–95.

9 Martha Wilmot, The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot, 1803–1808, ed. and

intro. Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 234.

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also observed, ‘In Russia the female sex occupies a different position from its

counterpart in the rest of Europe.’ He went on to relate that ‘A large part of the

real estate is...inthehands of women’, adding that ‘it is easy to understand

what a great inﬂuence women enjoy in society as a result’.

Noblewomen’s control of their estates was, moreover, an active concept,

rather than a mere legal convention in many families. Greater equality in

the law of property translated into women’s acquisition of estates and into

striking similarities between women and men in regard to use of their assets:

noblewomen became enthusiastic participants in the market for land and serfs,

as well as urban real estate. Women as a group engaged in the same range

of property transactions as men, and the size of women’s estates was com-

mensurate with that of their male counterparts. Indeed, the scale of women’s

holdings grew dramatically from the middle of the eighteenth century: by the

nineteenth century, noblewomen controlled as much as one-third of the land

and serfs in private hands. The presence of married women as both sellers and

investors in property after 1750 increased steadily, while the participation of

widows and unmarried women dwindled.

Married women engaged in busi-

ness in their own names, were present at property transactions and assumed

responsibility for managing the family estate. Noblewomen’s legal and eco-

nomic autonomy, coupled with the frequent absences of their husbands on

state service, ensured that signiﬁcant numbers of women in Imperial Russia

were as likely to concern themselves with investment decisions and large-scale

management as with the supervision of house serfs and other domestic tasks.

Gender conventions and the law of property

in the eighteenth century

Russian law-makers stopped short of establishing complete parity between the

sexes in regard to property, particularly in their failure to equalise inheritance

rights. Yet the contention of this work is that, for noblewomen, from the mid-

dle of the eighteenth century, gender difference in Russia was muted in the

law of property.

Once law-makers granted women the right to control their

10 A. von Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, ed. S. Frederick Starr and trans.

E. Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 21–3.

11 On women’s economic activities, see Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom, p. 109.

12 Over time, the right to control property was extended to women of the merchant and

urban estates. Among the peasantry, customary law also protected women’s dowries.

Yet property rights among the peasantry remained collective until the twentieth century,

as did the rights of merchants in many respects. B. A. Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60; C. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family

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Russian society, law and economy

fortunes, they gradually withdrew legal provisions designed to protect wives

from husbands who tried to defraud them of their assets. Far from being

afforded special treatment, property-owning women assumed all the respon-

sibilities of male proprietors. They were expected to defend their holdings

against the encroachments of husbands, kin and neighbouring proprietors.

Nor were noblewomen absolved of responsibility for their own, or their chil-

dren’s, ﬁnancial affairs by virtue of their sex. Writing early in the nineteenth

century, the memoirist F. F. Vigel criticised Princess Gargarina for neglecting

her estate: ‘Like all the nobility in our country, not only women, but also men,

she did not think about her business affairs, which were in a sorry state.’

many of his contemporaries, Vigel all but prescribed an active role for women

in estate administration.

With the extension of noblewomen’s property rights, however, a fundamen-

tal contradiction characterised married women’s legal status in Russia. At the

heart of this contradiction lay the tension between married women’s station

in family law and their standing in the law of property. Custom, family law and

religious ideology unanimously prescribed women’s personal subjugation to

their husbands. At the same time, from 1753 the law of property deﬁned mar-

ried women as autonomous agents and guaranteed them full control over any

property in their possession. It should come as no surprise that these principles

could clash, and often at the expense of female autonomy. Or, as one observer

of Russian social customs remarked, ‘Tho a married Woman has compleat

power over her Fortune she has not over her person.’

The tension between property and family law was an eighteenth-century

innovation. Although Russian law acknowledged separate property and mar-

ried women’s ownership of the dowry long before 1753, the administration of

marital property was traditionally a joint venture

and married women sold

or mortgaged their estates only with their husbands’ consent, if not at their

behest.

Yet as rights of property came to be invested in (noble) individuals,

rather than families, and women gained control of their estates, maintaining

the boundary between the property of husband and wife created a host of

dilemmas for Russian legal authorities. In particular, determining serf owner-

ship when peasants who belonged to spouses married and produced children

and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1991); Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law,p.371.

13 F. F. Vigel, Zapiski (Moscow: 1928), p. 26.

14 Bradford, The Russian Journals, p. 232.

15 Akty iuridicheskie, ili sobranie form starinnogo deloproizvodstva (St Petersburg: 1838), no. 71,

X; no. 357.

16 Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom,pp.52–4.

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Gender and the legal order in Imperial Russia

repeatedly drew the attention of the courts. The debates over serf ownership

exemplify the problems inherent in maintaining separate estates in marriage

on a day-to-day basis. A series of legal conventions, including the registration

of dowry villages in the name of the bride, made husbands and wives acutely

aware of the separation of their assets and undermined marriage, in the words

of Catherine Wilmot, as a ‘union of interests’. To be sure, many noblewomen

trusted their husbands to administer their holdings for their mutual bene-

ﬁt, as well as in the interests of their children. Yet this arrangement by no

means worked to the advantage of women or their heirs if the presumption of

common interests broke down. Women’s failure to keep close watch on their

holdings could lead to considerable loss for themselves or, if they predeceased

their husbands and the latter remarried, for their children.

In order to reap

the beneﬁts of separate property, noblewomen were compelled to patrol the

legal boundaries between their own estates and those of their husbands.

Serf women, particularly house serfs, comprised an important part of a

Russian bride’s dowry, along with other goods she would need to set up

her household. As a result, marriages frequently took place between serfs

belonging to married couples. Such arrangements disturbed no one while the

serf owners’ marriage endured; when one spouse died, however, a serious

complication arose. The Ulozhenie, or Law Code, of 1649 forbade serf owners

to separate wives from their husbands. Since married serfs could not be parted,

the surviving serf owner confronted an awkward dilemma: which spouse was

the owner of the serf couple and their offspring?

The widow Akulina Voeikova insisted that she was the rightful owner when

she brought a suit before the Land College in 1737. Following her husband’s

death in 1735, Voeikova entered into a lengthy inheritance dispute with her

son-in-law, Prince Nikanor Meshcherskii. Voeikova did not contest her daugh-

ter’s right to inherit her father’s estate, but she insisted on her full widow’s

entitlement of one-seventh of her husband’s immoveable property, as well as

the return of her dowry. According to Voeikova, Meshcherskii had left her

with less than one-tenth of her husband’s assets, and included in her daugh-

ter’s share all of Voeikova’s serf women, whom her husband had married to

peasants in his own villages.

Voeikova pursued her case to the Senate in 1744, after the Land College ruled

that her dowry serfs would be returned to her, but their husbands and children

would be considered part of her entitlement, thus diminishing the portion she

would inherit from her husband’s estate. In contrast, the Senate found that

17 See, for example, RGIA, Fond 1330,op.4, ed. khr. 262, ll. 2–3, 35.

331