There were many other groups of women in the expanding Russian Empire. Within the Russian heartland, towns contained, as they had for centuries, artisans, laborers, market vendors, and small traders. At the top of the urban pyramid were the merchants, whose tax burdens and economic privileges were set out in government charters. Russia’s merchantry never enjoyed the corporate rights that had defined the merchants of France or England as important members of their societies since the medieval period. Furthermore, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russia’s economy did not experience the rapid expansion that fostered the growth of cities and empowered the middle classes in Western Europe. Consequently the merchants remained politically insignificant and wedded to Muscovite traditions well into the nineteenth century.
The lives of poorer women in the cities ran along traditional tracks as well. They participated in the economic ventures of their families as urban women had in past. Most lived in households containing nuclear families, that is, parents and minor children. The homes of wealthier merchants also included live-in servants and employees. Senior women managed the housework, as had their predecessors in the era of The Domostroi. Poorer women sold wares and food in public markets, worked in taverns, and assisted male artisans in manufacturing consumer goods such as textiles, tools, and utensils. Poverty was an endemic problem that particularly afflicted widows. Daniel Kaiser has found that such women made up 55 percent of the urban poor in ten Russian cities in the early eighteenth century. Some of those women received help from relatives or charities, although not enough, evidently, to raise them out of poverty.54