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

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Russian society, law and economy

the ruling of the Land College contradicted an article in the Ulozhenie, which

stipulated that when a woman died without issue, her serf women should be

returned to her natal family. If these serfs had been given in marriage, the

husbands must accompany their wives, regardless of their original ownership.

Voeikova therefore was entitled to claim her serf women and their families

as part of her original dowry, the Senate decreed, in addition to her statutory

share of one-seventh of her husband’s property.

Similar disputes over the inheritance of married serfs recurred throughout

the eighteenth century.

Until mid-century, noble widows clearly beneﬁted

from the courts’ assertion of their right to reclaim their serf women, along

with their families. This state of affairs proved much less satisfactory to men

who felt they or their heirs had been short-changed. In 1767 noble deputies

to the Legislative Commission brought their complaints to the attention of

Catherine II, arguing that under the present rules men suffered a loss in serf

ownership and that the proprietor of the serf husband, rather than the owner

of the wife, should claim the entire family when a division of property took

place.

Members of the Senate echoed the logic of the nobility in subsequent rulings

on inheritance. During the second half of the eighteenth century, as law-makers

revised their conception of women’s relation to property, they also withdrew

much of the protection they had previously offered propertied wives. Legal

authorities acknowledged that, despite the formal separation of property in

marriage before 1753, in practice married men made no distinction between

their own and their wives’ property. Thus, a decree in 1740 allowed for recruits

to be levied from the villages of an ofﬁcer’s wife as well as from his own, ‘since

husbands use their wives’ villages as they use their own, and for this reason

they are required, upon retirement, to declare openly their own as well as

their wives’ villages’.

Having invested women with full rights of ownership

in 1753, however, the Senate acknowledged the necessity of re-examining the

problem of serf ownership by married couples.

As it reviewed a case presented in 1799, the General Session of the Senate

discussed the principles that guided previous decisions on serf ownership in

1744 and 1762. The Senate had ruled in favour of the wife in 1744 because

18 PSZ, vol. 12,no.9.095 (19.12.1744).

19 RGADA, Fond 1209,op.79, ed. khr. 167, ll. 11–12; ed. khr. 365, lines 86–90; Fond 1209,op.

84, ch. 14, ed. khr. 1507, ll. 1–2.

20 Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (henceforth SIRIO), 148 vols.

(St Petersburg, 1869), vol. IV, pp. 419, 424;(1871), vol. VIII, pp. 539–40.

21 Quoted in A. S. Paramonov, O zakonodatel’stve Anny Ioannovny (St Petersburg, 1904),

pp. 161–2.

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‘in previous times the dowry estate was registered not only in the name of

the woman who was marrying, but in the name of her husband, and for this

reason the husband, considering himself the owner of his wife’s estate, could

give her women serfs in marriage to his serfs’. To prevent the loss of property

to the wife and her clan, the Senate had decreed that serf women and their

offspring were to be returned to the wife and her family. But after 1744, the

Senate continued, new customs governed the registration of dowries. Men

could no longer appropriate their wives’ estates now that ofﬁcials registered

the dowry in the name of the wife alone and women administered their prop-

erty without their husbands’ permission. Consequently, the Senate argued, it

was unjust to replace one serf woman with an entire family, and they offered

new guidelines to regulate the future division of assets. When husbands and

wives agreed to marry their serfs to one another, the following principle was to

apply: henceforth, the serf family belonged to the owner of the serf husband.

If a husband married his serf women to his wife’s peasants, the wife would be

considered the owner, and vice versa.

Yet in their discussion the Senate failed

to acknowledge that brides were far more likely to bring serf women to mar-

riage, thus placing female proprietors at a disadvantage. In short, once women

acquired the right to control their estates, they also took on the burden –

willingly or not – of protecting their fortunes from their husbands.

Transactions between husband and wife

Determining serf ownership was not the only quandary the courts confronted

in regulating property relations between husband and wife. In keeping with

the convenient assumption that women could now determine how they would

use their assets, law-makers gradually withdrew the protection they had once

extended to wives who were coerced to part with their fortunes. Having

spelled out the consequences for spouses who chose to marry their serfs to

one another, the courts then struggled with the question of whether spouses

might sell and mortgage property to each other. Their dilemma derived from

women’s obligation to obey their husbands – a duty that was originally a tenet

of ecclesiastical law and later articulated as well in civilcodes. Withgood reason

the courts initially expressed apprehension that husbands would exploit their

wives’ weakness and force the latter to part with their assets on unfavourable

terms. By the nineteenth century, however, ofﬁcial solicitude for vulnerable

22 PSZ, vol. 26,no.19.250 (19.01.1800).

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wives gave way to a ﬁrm conviction that married women were responsible for

the defence of their property rights.

Since the Muscovite era, the courts had been sensitive to the potential for

forced sales of land by abused wives. In order to minimise this danger, sellers

of both sexes were examined in court when they executed deeds of purchase,

mortgaged property or registered wills.

Yet it was not until the second half of

the eighteenth century, after noblewomen had gained control of their assets,

that the legality of transactions between spouses loomed large in debates

within the Senate. The ﬁrst debate in the Senate on transactions between

spouses took place in 1763. The summary of the case dwelled primarily on the

right of members of one clan to sell property to another; however, the Senate

ﬁnally ruled that conveyances between husband and wife were unacceptable

on the basis of a 1748 edict which forbade spouses to claim their entitlement

of one-seventh of the other’s estate during the other’s lifetime. The sale of

property by wives to husbands was more objectionable still, the senators

reasoned, since a woman could not dispute her husband’s decision and might

relinquish her property at his insistence.

In subsequent rulings legislators focused at times on the murky legal sta-

tus of property transactions between spouses, while on other occasions they

highlighted the necessity of protecting wives from greedy husbands.

As the

Senate debated the legal niceties of allowing spouses to engage in business,

however, sales and mortgages continued to take place between husbands and

wives. Finding it impossible to stop the practice, the Senate reversed its earlier

decisions on the grounds that the resolution of the 1763 dispute represented

a ruling on a particular case, not a general principle. The ﬁnal debate took

place in the Senate in 1825 between the minister of justice and members of

the Committee on the Codiﬁcation of Law. In their discussion, most of the

senators skirted the problem of men’s authority over their wives altogether

and focused on the status of the 1763 edict. The minister of justice argued that

the Land College had set forth its opinion in 1763 as a guide for ruling on future

transactions between spouses. Committee members countered the minister’s

reservations with their own interpretation: the issue was not, they maintained,

whether the sale of property between spouses was beneﬁcial or harmful to

the parties involved, but whether any principle in Russian law existed to pro-

hibit these transactions. Having reviewed the regulations in the Ulozhenie and

the 1785 Charter to the Nobility, the committee concluded that no rationale

23 PSZ, vol. 2,no.763 (19.06.1679); vol. 2,no.909 (05.04.1682).

24 PSZ, vol. 16,no.11.764 (26.02.1763).

25 PSZ, vol. 20,no.15.022 (25.06.1763); PSZ, vol. 27,no.21.926 (30.09.1805).

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could be found for preventing the transfer of property between spouses. After

lengthy debate, with virtually no reference to feminine vulnerability, three

of the four senators at the General Session agreed that transactions between

husbands and wives should be permitted.

Keeping in mind that previous decisions had rested, at least in part, on the

conviction that propertied wives should be protected from abusive husbands,

this was an ironic conclusion. As divorce petitions reveal, noblewomen contin-

ued to be the victims of beatings by husbands who wished to seize control of

their estates.

Yet the ruling was consistent with the general tone of Russian

property law in extending minimal protection to women. From the middle

of the eighteenth century the law made few distinctions between men and

women’s use of their assets. Placing an equal burden on both sexes to safe-

guard their interests was the logical corollary of equalising women’s status

in the law of property. Thus, in the early nineteenth century Russian ofﬁcials

confronted a paradox that bedevils law-makers to this day: gender neutrality

in the law by no means translated into a guarantee that women could fully

realise their legal rights.

Unlimited obedience: women and family law

During the decades when Russian lawmakers elevated noblewomen’s stand-

ing in the law of property, two noteworthy trends emerged in ecclesiastical

and family law. First, from the middle of the eighteenth century, grounds for

dissolving marriage in the Orthodox Church dwindled dramatically, making

divorce virtually impossible. Second, although wives had always been expected

to be subservient to their husbands, a woman’s responsibility to obey her hus-

band was for the ﬁrst time articulated in civil law, in Catherine II’s Statute

on Public Order (Ustav blagochiniia)of1782 and transformed into an obliga-

tion to demonstrate ‘unlimited obedience’ in the 1832 Digest of Laws (Svod

zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The contradiction between women’s economic lib-

erty and their personal dependence soon drew the attention of legal scholars

and became the subject of on-going controversy in the nineteenth century.

During the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, laymen and parish priests

‘made and unmade marriage’ with relative ease.

The tenuous nature of

26 PSZ, vol. 37,no.30.472 (31.08.1825).

27 RGIA, Fond 796 (Kantseliariia Sinoda), op. 39, ed. khr. 71,l.1 (1758); Fond 796,op.52, ed.

khr. 278a, ll. 1–2 (1771); Fond 796,op.58, ed. khr. 261, ll. 1–2 (1777); Fond 796,op.61, ed.

khr. 216,l.1 (1780); Fond 796,op.78, ed. khr. 440,l.2 (1797).

28 G. L. Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial

Russia, 1760–1860’, JMH 62, 4 (December 1990): 714.

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matrimonial vows before mid-century was also a feature of the pre-Petrine

era:

not only did the OrthodoxChurch in early-modern Russialack the means

to enforce its authority over marriage, but ecclesiastical authorities accepted a

broad range of grounds for divorce. Until 1730, parish priests granted divorce

certiﬁcates when spouses agreed to separate – and despite the prohibition on

voluntary divorce after 1730, the practice continued until the middle of the

eighteenth century.

In subsequent decades, however, the Church not only

stepped up its supervision of clergy and laity, but imposed far more rigid

regulations for the dissolution of marriage.

Even as the grounds for divorce contracted, unhappy spouses continued to

petition the Holy Synod for permission to end their union. Overwhelmingly,

both sexes appealed in vain, since the Orthodox Church was reluctant to accept

adultery as grounds for divorce and rejected severe physical mistreatment as

sufﬁcient reason for terminating marriage. Indeed, by and large the Church

sanctioned divorce only when separation had, de facto, taken place: namely, in

cases of desertion and Siberian exile.

Ironically, although ecclesiastical courts

refused to grant women divorce even when extreme physical abuse could not

be denied, the civil courts displayed far less tolerance for husbands who sold

their wives’ property or spent their dowry funds. Noblewomen thus discovered

that crimes against their property were more likely to elicit the sympathy of

the courts than violations against their persons.

While the bonds of matrimony tightened in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, women’s subservience to their husbands became the

subject of civil law. The rules for conduct in marriage, articulated in the 1782

Statute on Public Order, instructed husbands to live with their wives in love

and harmony, to protect them, forgive their shortcomings, sustain them in

their inﬁrmity and provide for their support. For their part, wives were to

abide with their husbands in love, respect and obedience.

The emphasis

on affective ties and feminine frailty in these strictures, as well as the demar-

cation of male and female responsibilities, betrayed the growing inﬂuence of

Western domestic ideals on Russian gender conventions.

The impact of the

29 E. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1989), pp. 114–26.

30 A. Lebedev, ‘O brachnykh razvodakhpo arkhivnymdokumentam Khar’kovskoi i Kurskoi

dukhovnykh konsistorii’, in Chteniia v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossi-

iskikh, 2/1 (Moscow, 1887), pp. 27–9.

31 Freeze, ‘Bringing Order to the Russian Family,’ pp. 709–46.

32 Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom,pp.86–97.

33 PSZ, vol. 21,no.15.379 (08.04.1782), st. 41, otd. VIII, IX.

34 For a discussion of the impact of separate-spheres ideology on Russian gender conven-

tions, see Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom, pp. 171–204.

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Church on civil law was also apparent in an 1819 State Council ruling,

which

prohibited spouses from living apart.

While this ruling did not put an end to

informal separations, it prevented women – who relied on their husbands to

obtain a passport, which was necessary for residence or employment – from

ﬂeeing an abusive or unhappy marriage without the latter’s collusion.

Legal specialists hotly debated whether women’s economic privileges ame-

liorated their submission to their husbands, or if the constraint of ‘unlimited

obedience’ effectively undermined their rights as proprietors. The statutes

that drew the ire of proponents of women’s property rights were contained

in the 1832 Digest of Laws, the ﬁrst Russian law code since the Ulozhenie of

1649. The task of legal codiﬁcation had eluded eighteenth-century monarchs,

despite their sporadic efforts to rationalise the law. It was only in 1830 that

Nicholas I successfully appointed a commission to collect all decrees issued

after the Ulozhenie, to reconcile their contradictions and produce a new legal

code. Among the articles in Volume X were a series of regulations governing

marriage which were clearly at variance with women’s economic autonomy.

Article 103 codiﬁed the obligation of spouses to live together and decreed

that wives must follow their husbands in cases of resettlement or when they

embarked on state service. Article 107 expanded upon the 1782 instructions to

wives, stating that ‘A wife shall obey her husband as the head of the family,

abide with him in love, respect and unlimited obedience (v neogranichennom

poslushanii) and render him every satisfaction and affection as the mistress of

the house.’ The following article added that a wife’s submission to her hus-

band’s will did not free her from her obligations to her parents. The Statute

on Public Order also provided the foundation for Article 106, which set forth

the duties of husbands: ‘A husband shall love his wife as his own body and

live with her in harmony; he shall respect and protect her, forgive her short-

comings, and ease her inﬁrmities. He shall provide his wife nourishment and

support to the best of his ability.’

Thus, the articles of the Digest of Laws not

only institutionalised feminine weakness and reinforced gender hierarchies,

but ‘dramatized the sharp division of sexual spheres, between the public and

the private, that was underway in Europe in these years’.

Thearticles of the Digest of Laws graphically illustrated the tension between

noblewomen’s proprietary power and their subservient role in the patriarchal

35 See chapter 20 of this volume for discussion of the State Council’s foundation and role.

36 Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law,p.71.

37 SZ, tomy VIII, ch. II–XI, ch. 1,arts.103, 106–108 (St Petersburg, 1900).

38 R. S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vol. I, p. 261.

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Russian society, law and economy

family. The publication of the new code also initiated lively debate over

women’s ability to realise their economic prerogatives. The historian Nikolai

Karamzin maintained that foreign inﬂuence had inspired the new emphasis

on women’s subjugation in Russian law, and accused the statesman Mikhail

Speranskii of imitating the Napoleonic Code when he introduced the provi-

sion on wives’ obedience in the Digest of Laws.

Writing in the second half

of the nineteenth century, the scholar N. V. Reingardt declared that since the

authority of husbands over wives was unlimited, women’s economic indepen-

dence was ‘only a ﬁction’.

Similarly, K. D. Kavelin believed that the article

mandating feminine obedience was not a mere recommendation but carried

the force of law.

By contrast, in his inﬂuential survey M. F. Vladimirskii-Budanov argued

that eighteenth-century Russian law was noteworthy precisely for the absence

of statutes concerning the relation of husband to wife, which belonged to the

realm of religious ideology. He remarked that the 1782 Statute on Public Order

was the ﬁrst ruling to prescribe feminine obedience in civil law; furthermore,

it was only in 1830 that the compilers of the Digest of Laws speciﬁed that

women’s obedience to their husbands must be unlimited. If this provision

were implemented, he concluded, it would impinge not only upon women’s

ﬁnancial autonomy but also on the prerogative of wives to ﬁle suit against their

husbands. At no time, however, had Russian law restricted women’s rights in

this regard. In fact, Vladimirskii-Budanov observed, the ‘recognition of equal

rights for men and women’ was ‘the distinguishing feature of Russian law’.

The glaring discrepancy between married women’s personal and property

rights in Russian law failed to recede as the imperial era drew to a close.

Members of a commission for a new codiﬁcation of Russian law in the 1880s

discussed the troubling contradictions in women’s legal status at length, and

the majority spoke in favour of limiting the authority of husbands over their

wives. According to one participant, marriage in Russia was still governed

by the oppressive principles laid out in the Domostroi in the sixteenth cen-

tury, which precluded married women’s active control over their property.

Another member of the commission maintained that although property law

39 V. I. Sinaiskii, Lichnoe i imushchestvennoe polozhenie zamuzhnei zhenshchiny v grazhdanskom

prave (Iurev, 1910), pp. 116–17, 124, 158, 162, 185–7; G. A. Tishkin, Zhenskii vopros v Rossii

50–60-e gody XIX v. (Leningrad, 1984), p. 29.

40 N. V. Reingardt, O lichnykh i imushchestvennykh pravakh zhenshchin po russkomu zakonu

(Kazan: Tip. gubernskogo pravlenia, 1885), pp. 7, 11–12.

41 K. D. Kavelin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (St Petersburg, 1900), vol. IV, p. 1063.

42 M. F. Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor istorii russkogo prava, 6th edn (St Petersburg, 1909),

pp. 445–6, 374.

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guaranteed women independent ownership of their fortunes, when disputes

between spouses arose, it was not uncommon for legal authorities to distort

the law and declare that husbands were the custodians of their wives’ dowry

during marriage.

Despite ample archival evidence that the courts upheld the

property rights of women across the social spectrum,

the prevailing view

among legal scholars and ofﬁcials was that married women stood little chance

of administering their assets unless their husbands permitted them to do so.

Gender in criminal law

Criminal law, as well as the law of property, made few concessions to female

weakness in the eighteenth century. Indeed, in cases of adultery or spousal

murder, the law displayed far less leniency for women than for men.

Over the

course of the nineteenth century, however, as Russian legal reformers became

increasingly familiar with Western European law, notions of sexual difference

intensiﬁed. The progressive legal order that evolved after 1861 emphasised

female dependence and associated women with the domestic sphere to an

extent never before witnessed in Russian law. As Laura Engelstein argues,

although women could be tried in court and were subject to the rule of law,

as late as 1903 they ‘remained the objects of . . . custodial solicitude . . . Like

children and the mentally incompetent, women continued to be marked by

special disabilities in relation to the law.’

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, legal authorities

made virtually no distinctions between women and men, meting out similar

punishments regardless of sex. Prompted by the confession of a fourteen-year-

old peasant girl to the axe-murder of two children, a decree of 1742 set the

age of criminal accountability at seventeen years for offenders of both sexes,

making them liable to exile, corporal punishment, and the death penalty.

Women were ﬂogged in public and subject to torture under interrogation,

sometimes so severely that they died in the process.

Nor were noblewomen

exempt from brutal treatmentwhen they dabbled in political intrigue: Empress

43 Zamechaniia o nedostatkakh deistvuiushchikh grazhdanskikh zakonov (St Petersburg, 1891),

no. 109.

44 Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom,pp.84–97; Worobec, Peasant Russia,p.64.

45 Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000, p. 13.

46 L. Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Si

ecle Russia

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 71–2.

47 PSZ, vol.11,no.8.601 (23.08.1742). Children under seventeen years of age could be whipped

in public and sent to a monastery for ﬁfteen years of hard labour.

48 E. Anisimov, Dyba i knut: Politicheskii sysk i russkoe obshchestvo v XVIII veke (Moscow:

Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), pp. 399, 405, 409, 411.

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Russian society, law and economy

Elizabeth ordered Countess Natalia Lopukhina to have her tongue cut out and

then exiled to Siberia when she indulged in subversive gossip.

Peter the Great

took the step of exempting pregnant women from torture until giving birth –

for the sake of the child, however, rather than the accused. The sole advantage

female convicts enjoyed after 1754 was freedom from being branded and having

their nostrils slit when transported to hard labour. Empress Elizabeth and the

Senate did not revise the law on grounds of female weakness, however, but

because they believed that women were less likely to ﬂee exile than men.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in keeping with the Euro-

pean ‘discovery of the sexes’,

legal authorities demonstrated new concern

with sexual difference in the context of criminal law. The growing signiﬁcance

of motherhood in ofﬁcial and public discourse prompted ofﬁcials to spare

pregnant women and nursing mothers from corporal punishment until their

children could be weaned. In the 1830s, the Senate decreed that children should

not be separated from exiled mothers. Special arrangements were to be made

for mothers during transport to exile or who were in prison.

For their part,

contemporaries greeted these innovations with approbation, singling out for

praise provisions that made allowances for the ‘sensitivity’ of the female sex.

Well into the nineteenth century, exemption from corporal punishment

hinged on social rank and standing in the family, rather than gender: thus,

noblewomen, along with their husbands, were freed from corporal punish-

ment in the 1785 Charter to the Nobility; wives of merchants of the ﬁrst

and second guilds received similar immunity in Catherine II’s Charter to the

Towns.

The wives and widows of priests and deacons were granted exemp-

tion in 1808, seven years after their husbands received this privilege, while

their children gained immunity only in 1835.

By the middle of the nineteenth

century, however, appeals were heard in the Senate that all women should be

spared corporal punishment by virtue of their weakness, both physical and

mental, relative to men. These arguments portrayed women as inﬁrm and pas-

sive, hence incapable of bearing severe ﬂoggings. Moreover, critics of corporal

49 The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, trans. Moura Budberg (London: Hamish Hamilton,

1955), p. 62; E. Anisimov, Elizaveta Petrovna (Moscow: Molodaia gvardia, 1999), p. 128.

50 Schrader, Languages of the Lash, pp. 125–7, 135.

51 T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 149–92.

52 Schrader, Languages of the Lash,pp.128–30.

53 I. V. Vasil’ev, ‘O preimushchestvakh zhenshchin v Rossii po delam ugolovnym’, Damskii

zhurnal (1827), no. 11: 242–3.

54 PSZ, vol. 22,no.16.187 (21.04.1785), otd. A, arts. 5, 6, 15; otd. Zh., art. 107; otd. Z, art. 113.

55 B. Mironov (with Ben Eklof ), A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700–1917, 2 vols.

(Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), vol. I, p. 92.

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Gender and the legal order in Imperial Russia

punishment argued that women were incapable of governing their emotions

and thus less accountable than men for the crimes they committed. Some

authorities objected to the display of women’s naked bodies being ﬂogged in

public: the sight of a woman naked and bleeding evoked sympathy in witnesses

to her ordeal and was potentially subversive of the social order. According to

other reformers, because women were inherently more virtuous than men,

they were less likely to commit crimes in general and they suffered more than

the men from the public display of their humiliation.

Ultimately, the signiﬁcance of sexual difference was accentuated to a new

extreme in criminal law. Women were portrayed as fragile, passionate, and

even prone to insanity, yet with a highly developed sense of virtue lacking in

their male counterparts.

Ofﬁcials also reafﬁrmed the bond between women

and the domestic sphere, arguing that the subjection of women to corpo-

ral punishment violated female modesty and subverted the familial order

and pointing out that the vast majority of crimes committed by women –

infanticide, homicide and prostitution – took place in the private realm.

Conversely, criminal law depicted men not only as capable of bearing physical

suffering, but also able to govern their emotions and assume accountability

for their actions.

An edict in 1863 ﬁnally pronounced all women, with the exception of female

exiles, exempt from corporal punishment. Female exiles waited until 1893 for

immunity from ﬂoggings, while male peasants remained subject to beatings

as late as 1904.

Legal reformers, along with the educated public, perceived

the end of corporal punishment for women as a symptom of progress, since

‘respect’ for the female sex was the hallmark of ‘every educated society’.

Women’s liberation from physical punishment was not, however, necessarily

a mark of special favour. As Engelstein observes, ‘The edict of 1863 did not

mean that peasant women had been admitted to a higher status than men of

their class...Women’s exemption functioned, in fact, as a mark of the peasant

male’s improved standing, constituting the family as his inviolable domain and

reinforcing the wife’s ‘private’ status.’

The intrusion of Western European

56 Schrader, Languages of the Lash,pp.157–61.

57 S. P. Frank, ‘Women and Crime in Imperial Russia, 1834–1913: Representing Realities’,

in M. L. Arnot and C. Usborne (eds.), Gender and Crime in Modern Europe (London:

University College London Press, 1999), p. 95. As Frank points out, however, although

women represented a small percentage of accused felons, they were accused of the same

range of crimes as men.

58 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness,p.74.

59 B. F. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863–1917 (DeKalb: North-

ern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 27.

60 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness,p.74.

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