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Peter I, known to history as Peter the Great, believed that he had to change elite women in order to transform Muscovy into a modern, powerful Russian Empire. He began by ordering them to put away their heavy kaftans and veils and order dresses of German design. Though his strong-willed sisters Maria and Ekaterina refused to get new wardrobes, many other women in the circles around the throne happily acceded to the tsar’s demands. The tsar also commanded his female subjects to attend court festivities with men, and thereby began abolishing the seclusion of elite women. These decorative reforms set in motion much more substantial changes in privileged women’s lives over the next century and a half. The gender ideas of Western and Central Europe, which were in ferment during these years, flowed into Russia, where they changed Russian ideas and were changed in their turn. Education for girls and women expanded. Revisions in property laws permitted elite women to buy ever more land. By 1850, Russian noblewomen were attending boarding schools, reading scholarly journals, publishing poetry and short stories, running charities, and managing estates.
This transformation was limited. In 1850, women still owed obedience to their older relatives and to their husbands; they had to have their spouses’ permission to travel on their own; they could not divorce. They could not attend the universities or enter the professions that were beginning to develop. Still more significant was the fact that women’s opportunities improved only among the elite, who made up less than 10 percent of the population. The great majority of women were serfs, whose bondage became ever more onerous.
The pressure for reform was growing. By the 1840s social critics were attacking the constraints on elite women and criticizing serfdom. In the early 1850s a few connected the two issues, denouncing the bondage of women and serfs as dual consequences of Russian patriarchy and calling for the abolition of both. When Alexander II took the throne in 1855 and encouraged a wide-ranging discussion of reform, therefore, the intelligentsia was ready to put “the woman question” on the agenda. The age of Peter the Great and his eighteenth-and nineteenth-century successors may be seen as a time of important changes in the situation of elite women and as the seed-time of a still more transformative era in the history of all women in Russia—the later nineteenth century.
Natalia Naryshkina’s iconoclastic son began to rule in his own right in the mid-1690s. Over the next thirty years, he and his ministers expanded the country’s borders and inserted themselves into the foreign affairs of Central and Western Europe. At home they converted the military to a standing army, founded the Russian navy, and reorganized the government. They promoted economic growth. They reduced the power of the church by putting civilian administrators in charge of its revenues and limiting its influence at court. They abolished slavery and began collecting the “soul tax,” a levy on male peasants that increased government revenues. Finally, and most importantly for women’s history, Peter and his advisers sought to transform Russian noblemen into progressive, well-educated executors of the royal will and noblewomen into cultured, decorative helpmeets.
This effort to engineer gender change was not unique to Russia. In Europe and elsewhere, there was a long history of governments shoring up their power by promoting revisions in gender values. Augustus, the first Roman emperor (reigned 27 BCE–14 ce), trumpeted the virtues of the dutiful Roman matron as part of his campaign to present his regime as restoring traditional values. In the early modern period, the governments of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and Louis XIV’s France attempted to shape the character of their subjects, particularly their ruling classes, by emphasizing revised ideals of masculinity and femininity. The Chinese and Japanese did as Augustus had, and claimed to be restoring values corrupted by their predecessors. Peter took a different tack, condemning Muscovite traditions for making his servitors conservative and lethargic and their womenfolk prisoners in their own houses. As foils to these dismal stereotypes, he promoted idealized gender conceptions heavily influenced by Central and Western European ideals. By so doing, Peter made foreigners and their notions about men and women the official standards by which to measure Russia’s elite.
ENERGETIC MASCULINITY
Peter’s first priority was the men of his ruling class. Piety did not matter much to him, nor did the old markers of status, such as family pedigree and wealth. Instead he endorsed a hard-working, open-minded, and above all, energetic masculinity, which he modeled literally and figuratively. Peter dressed in plain suits of Western European design much of the time, kept his hair short and his face clean-shaven, and ordered his nobles to do the same. He befriended and sometimes promoted to high office men from all walks of life. He took up boat-building, collected scientific specimens, beat the drum in parades, and pulled teeth. He moved the capital from Moscow, which he saw as a bastion of the old order, to a new city that he founded on the Baltic Coast and named St. Petersburg. Much of this, while expressive of his character, was calculated to impress. Peter was seeking to inspire the nobles to be like him so that they would work with him in improving Russia. He would set the agenda, for he did not question the autocratic power he had inherited. Nor did he see any contradiction between forcing his followers to shave their beards and urging them to exercise initiative.1
PETER’S REFORMS FOR WOMEN
Peter believed that elite women should participate in his make-over of the ruling class. So he ordered his female courtiers to wear clothes of foreign design, to participate in public ceremonies, and to dance, drink, and play cards at court parties. This delighted some women, horrified others. French dresses, cut low to reveal cleavage, were embarrassing to women used to clothes that covered them from head to toe. One could also develop a serious case of the shivers wearing them in St. Petersburg’s newly built and drafty palaces. Still more unsettling were the boisterous parties at which the wives and daughters of the court were required to dress up in costumes and frolic with the men. Some of Peter’s more adventurous ladies enjoyed themselves. Most noblewomen were probably, at least at first, appalled.
More women may have approved of his 1702 reform of marriage customs. As we have seen, parents in Muscovy arranged marriages with the interests of the family in mind. By the seventeenth century, the ancient Rus rule that they had to obtain the agreement of the future bride and groom was rarely followed, and it was not uncommon for couples to meet for the first time at their weddings. Peter did not approve, probably in no small measure because he had taken an immediate dislike to Evdokia Lopukhina, the wife his mother had chosen for him. Instead, he thought that prospective spouses should be permitted some voice. Undoubtedly this was a feeling widely shared by other people damaged by unhappy marriages. So the decree of 1702 granted parents the right to choose partners for their children, but gave the children a right of refusal. Couples had to be permitted to meet during a six-week betrothal. If either party decided against the match, parents were prohibited from forcing it to occur. Furthermore, the decree permitted a groom to refuse to marry a woman with a physical disability. There was no similar “escape clause” for brides. Peter reinforced the decree in the 1720s with additional regulations outlawing forced marriages.
The marriage decree reflected and promoted attitudes already present among elite Russians. Notions about marriage had begun to change in the second half of the seventeenth century, a change detectable in a small but growing secular literature that featured stories in which true love triumphed over all obstacles. The nobility was beginning to believe that marriage should be more than synchronized teamwork, more than a prospering alliance built on duty, piety, and hard work. It should sustain the partners emotionally. Peter’s marriage law gave legal recognition to the newer concept that marriage would work better if the spouses found one another desirable. The tsar himself acted on this concept by divorcing his wife and living with, then marrying, a lower-class woman named Martha Skavronska. On converting to Orthodoxy, Martha took the name Catherine.
Peter’s sisters, although they honored many Muscovite customs, including the requirement to remain single throughout their lives, supported their brother’s efforts to engage women in Russia’s new social life. Maria took the unprecedented step of traveling abroad to attend the wedding of her niece in 1717, ignoring her brother’s complaints about having to pay the expenses of the huge entourage that accompanied her. Natalia moved to Peter’s new capital and set about promoting Peter’s reforms as well as occasionally supervising his children. She also sponsored a theater, for which she wrote at least one play, organized a choir, and perhaps composed songs. When she died in 1716, Natalia left behind sixty-one paintings, one hundred books, mostly about religion, and several wardrobes full of dresses cut to foreign patterns.2 Her sister-in-law, Tsaritsa Praskovia, widow of Ivan V, also subsidized a theater. Much of the tsarevny’s patronage was devoted to arts with a religious theme, and so it would not be accurate to describe them as departing radically from Russian traditions, which had long encouraged rich women to promote religion. But now such women increasingly could, and did, use their fortunes to encourage arts new to Russia, such as theater.
Peter did not challenge the fundamental values that defined women’s natures and duties. Nor did he advocate limiting the power of senior men. The Honorable Mirror of Youth, an etiquette manual published in 1717, advised its female readers, “You must acknowledge your own weaknesses, frailties, and imperfections, and be humble before God and consider your fellow beings more than yourself.”3 Gender change is often accompanied by such reaffirmations of core values. In contemporary France and England, the same emphasis on female frailty prevailed, and the few women in the West who aspired to be artists or writers were often reminded that their role was to appreciate the works of men, not to create their own.
Peter’s involvement of noblewomen in social life did promote an understanding among the highest ranks of the nobility that women should be something more than the dutiful housewives of The Domostroi. Their wishes were to be consulted by parents arranging their marriages; their husbands were to permit them to chat with, even flirt with, other men. They were to embody, literally, a femininity that was on public display, and this was a major change from the seclusion of the past. Furthermore, Peter’s reforms and the examples of his sisters and his court became the foundation on which subsequent generations of elite women built for themselves a significant position in Russia’s secularizing elite culture. Central to that process were two of Peter’s female successors, the empresses Elizabeth I and Catherine II.