Excerpts of manuscript

Subordinates in the households in the early modern era were often subjected to violence. This violence served as both a physical and psychological manifestation of patriarchal power. Susan Dwyer Amussen, “Gender, Family, and the Social Order 1560-1725,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 1985), 196-218; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 71. Wife-beating played a vital role in early modern patriarchy and “it relates to personal dynamics at the innermost level of marital relationships.” Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 192. When the head of the household employed violence or deprivation of food or shelter, society and the state typically found it simpler to justify it as exercising discipline than to condemn it for fear of undermining the existing order. In the rhetoric and this justification of patriarchy, unjust or excessive violence by superiors contradicted the social order, potentially undermining it, yet the use of corporal punishment in the household was typically ignored, or even if it was understood as transgressing the norm, little action was usually taken. Even in many seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century European conduct books, whose authors typically advised that wives be reproved only with words of meekness and patience, they nevertheless conceded that husbands were legally entitled to correct their wives with condign and moderate physical punishment. Thus, the writers of these books concurred that husbands had the duty and right to admonish their wives, but the use and extent of violence remained divisive. Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England, 63; Amussen, An Ordered Society, 42-43. Wives were commonly instructed that their “highest duty was ‘to suffer and be still,’” in response to husbands’ violence. Cited in Margaret May, “Violence in the Family: an Historical Perspective,” in Violence and the Family, ed. J.P. Martin (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 138. Moreover, it remained uncertain at what point reasonable correction became excessive violence, and the courts, the church, and the state failed to define with clarity in addition to the fluctuations in what was accepted. Moreover, wives who complained about their husbands were already challenging the patriarchal order in the very act of the complaint. Although actual households and spousal relations rarely reflected the patriarchal ideal, the sheer ubiquity of patriarchal complaint against the male head of the household illustrates that such challenges were real, even if muted by the contemporary state, church, and society. Hunt, “Wife-beating, Domesticity, and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” 14; Roderick Phillips, Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 98-99; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 72. The husband’s duty to control and to correct his disobedient wife was understood as a requisite of maintaining his household authority and honorability. Canon law and custom since the medieval era accepted this right, and although challenged by some of the new religious communities in the sixteenth seventeenth centuries in Europe, in response in part to the religious divisions, little was done with few exceptions to prevent husbands from exercising their rights. Phillips, Untying the Knot, 98. In early-modern England, husbands had the right to beat their wives under common law. Reva B. Siegel, “’The Rule of Love’”: Wife Beating as Perogative and Policy,” Yale Law Journal 105, 8 (June 1996): 2118; Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 19. Nevetheless, this right was not limitless, as illustrated in ecclesiastical courts’ discussions and in the debates in contemporary conduct literature. The law however failed to offer what were the boundaries between legal discipline and abuse, with the only clear illegal act that of killing one’s wife. The ideological construction of hierarchy, articulated often in homilies, sermons, and advice manuals, offers some sense of the prevailing views that the state, church, and society, because it buttressed the structure of all three, thus they offer a useful window into these efforts, even some framework for popular behavior, even there were lacunae in the ideals and practice. Advice literature in this era advocated that a wife’s “disobedience is a problem caused by male incompetence and that female subjection is natural.” It additionally offered that the head of the household’s role “was the exercise of authority tempered by love; the female role was one of submission and obedience.” Cited in Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 103, 112; Amussen, An Ordered Society, 7. Based on these beliefs, accused men before courts often overtly admitted that they had used various forms of correction, they rejected the term abuse, whether physical, deprivation of food, etc., on their wives or other subordinates. Laura Gowing, “Language, Power and Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London,” in Women, Crime and Courts in Early Modern England, eds. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press: 1994), 136; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 73. These men often framed their actions as a means of upholding order in the household, and by association in the state and society, a commonly accepted response to disorder or negligence. In reality, as Margaret Hunt observed, “relatively few men or women…thought wives had an absolute right not to be beaten.” Hunt, “Wife-beating, Domesticity, and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” 23-24. Wives and others who opposed such violence had their own discourse of unmanliness and cowardice for men who beat their wives. Using unreasonable force equated to a man’s inability to control his household, thereby potentially undermining patriarchy itself, and potentially leading to community intervention. Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England, 66; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 78-79. Nevertheless, the prevailing beliefs and discourse accepted moderate correction, however undefined, and the head of the household’s right to employ it “to support patriarchal household authority and read as such by its victims, its witnesses and its defenders.“ Gowing, “Language, Power and Law,” 136. In Russia, these issues of violence and patriarchy were intertwined not only with the hierarchy, but with arbitrariness (proizvol) in various relationships, a “delegated absolutism, whether in the family, landowner-serf, as smaller variations of the autocracy itself over the Russia people, as just a few examples. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 28. This “delegated absolutism” empowered the superior to use physical force to address disobedience, improper respect, and to establish genuine respect for authority at all levels, buttressing “an ethos of submission and obedience.” Susan Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2006. Catherine II for example continued to endorse this idea of delegated absolutism or authority that enabled landowners to use corporal punishment on their serfs. Engelstein, “Weapon of the Weak,” 685. Arbitrariness, as opposed to legality (zakonnost’), prevailed in Russia, with the subordinate in the relationship, whether social, political, or familial, having few if any means for redress against the superior, without the rule of law to circumscribe such behavior. Instead, the custom of benevolent patriarchy was offered, but it was only an ideal. In reality, crucial to all of them was the threat of or actual application of some type of violence or deprivation of freedom or sustenance to anchor these relationships. “Violence,” as one scholar has suggested, “was part of the discourse of early modern interpersonal relations.” Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. In a study of interspousal relations among the Tver’ nobility in the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century, Zanegina, for instance, encountered numerous examples of husbands’ abuse of their wives and the frequent powerlessness of the latter. She draws a partial conclusion that noble women in the above-cited period were truly deprived of any type of rights. “A woman was completely subordinated to the arbitrariness of her husband who with impunity can insult her, deprive her of maintenance commensurate with her position, and to driver her out of the house.” Even when women tried to complain about their husbands, it was not just the church, but officials, such as the marshals of the nobility, who sought to reconcile spouses rather than to interfere in family affairs. Nevertheless, to conclude that they were always powerless is incorrect, and she acknowledges that the evidence shows that there were a variety of situations that both support her initial conclusion and that contradict it, as the paradoxes of interspousal relations among the nobility illustrate a complex story. Wives found a number of means to realize their wishes even when they contradicted those of their husbands. N.V. Zanegina, “Osobennosti otnoshenii muzha i zheny v dvorianskikh sem’iakh Rossii v kontse XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (na materialakh Tverskoi gubernii),” in Rod i sem’ia v kontekste tverskoi istorii: sbornik nauchnikh statei (Tver’: Lilia Print, 2005), 68, 69, 74. In other cases as will be discussed, wives managed their own estates, and sometimes even their husbands’ properties. On this theme, see for example, Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013); V.V. Gur’ianova, “Tverskaia pomeshchika vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka Praskov’ia Il’inichina Manzei,” in Zhenschiny v sotsial’noi istorii Rossii (Tver’: Feminist Press, 1997). Moreover, the author of an 1826 article in the Russian periodical Damskii zhurnal recognized that the internal dynamics of the home could be and often were complex, offering that there were typically two ways someone rules the home: “the first is an expression of the will which belongs to strength and the second is through the power of gentleness to which force itself bows. The husband uses the first and the wife should avail herself of the other singularly.” In order to so so, a wife should “never give homilies to her husband, to convince him by example…” It was imperative to this author that wives seek to change their husbands’ views only in a kind way, gradually, and never to challenge him openly. Damskii Zhurnal XXI (December 1826): 104-105; cited in Elena Lavrent’eva, Svetskii etiket pushkinskoi pory (Moscwo: “Olma Press,” 1999), 275. Theoretically each spouse had her or his own way of running the household, and while wives certainly did govern some households, husbands enjoyed the legal and customary advantages if they desired to use them. Violence of various types was common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia in various loci, and the intersection of gender and violence both within and outside of the family is instructive in discerning the dynamics of the two. For example, noble women were nobles, hence accorded some privileges, but they were also women with all the legal, customary, and social limitations, and thus had the consistent reminder, for example, of the sexual exploitation of serf women, illustrating vividly the control noble men had over women’s bodies, similar to the power over their own bodies and lives. Marianna Muravyeva, ”Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia: suprezheskoe nasilie v russkykh sem’ykx XVIII v.,” in Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI-XXI vv), eds. M.G. Muravyeva and N.L. Pushkareva (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2012), 81. Moreover, noble women indeed had a similar problem as their serf counterparts, despite material differences, specifically stark limitations on their personal freedom, subjected to their fathers and later husbands. Noble women indeed obtained their social positions from their family and their husbands, and their options for their daily activities depended on their family or husband’s permission. Elena Pervushina, Peterburgskie zhenshchiny XIX veka (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Tsentrpoligraf, 2013), 155. Thus, despite the privileges inherent in belonging to the nobility, gender roles and their associated distinctions meant that noble women were defined as women, who experienced the legal and social boundaries of that reality daily. Violence in general, and domestic abuse specifically, the latter typically a way to dominate another or others exploiting a variety of techniques, often including, but not limited to, both the threat of and the application of physical violence, deprivation, and psychological terrorization, share numerous traits with other forms of abuse. Even early modern states and societies sought to project the use of violence not as forms of abuse, counter to their ethics and standards, but rather as instructive and corrective. Therefore, as early modern states increasingly viewed violence between unrelated men and women outside the household as problematical, they continued minimally to tolerate, and even encourage, the head of the household to fulfill his duty of righteous violence for reasonable discipline. Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, 49. The employment of correction therefore has been not only accepted but encouraged in many cultures at many times, given various contexts, that is, it has legitimacy as long as done in response to specific situations and under specific conditions with the appropriate amount in both degree and frequency. In divorce petitions, depictions of violence were not limited only to acts of beating or even physical contact, but certainly included them. In these divorce narratives in petitions, the applicant offered images of obloquy, jealousy, lack of providing basic necessities, sexual abuse, and extreme chastisement. The literature from various countries is replete with these narratives, found in a variety of petitions in different countries. See for example, Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţelescu, “Judicial Archives and the History of the Romanian Family: domestic conflict and and the Orthodox Church in the eighteenth century,” The History of the Family 18, 3 (June 2013): 266. Societies have informal rules and limits to correction for informal control, whereas states typically established increasingly more formal rules and regulations in this era as a crucial means to exert state power and keep social control. Both states and societies have used and accepted violence of various types as a form of correction, but directed against specific malefactions. Women often believed correction was appropriate as they had been acculturated to accept both male control and female submission but this correction should not be exceeded to abuse and based on a woman’s inappropriate behavior. It was not supposed to be used for trivial matters or out of anger, but for serious disobedience and rebellion. Finally, the broader community, including neighbors, friends, and extended family at times became involved when someone overstepped the bounds of what was deemed correction, and sought to curb such violence when appropriate. On the other hand, religious tradition, civil law, and custom offered husbands and fathers at times almost complete authority in the early modern households across Europe. The ability to correct was critical to maintaining patriarchal power in the home, giving husbands and fathers the authority to employ coercive punishment to compel denizens of the house to act appropriately, and also to protect the stability of state authority. Vintilă-Ghiţelescu, “Judicial Archives and the History of the Romanian Family,” 266; Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 67. There were other voices who opposed any use of correction, for example, a number of Puritans, though not all, in England and in the colony of Massachusetts, where by 1641 the law required a whipping or a fine for a spouse who struck their partner except in self defense. Nevertheless, despite these voices and even some legal efforts, the reality in early modern Europe, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was that social, political, and religious authorities generally endorsed this right. Much greater change that more consistently criminalized wife-beating only really emerged in the nineteenth century and later, but with inconsistent application. Philipps, Untying the Knot, 98-99. In addition, the understandings of family violence and the methods of discourse in which people framed it were changing, at times in flux. One noted scholar of early modern England for example has argued that in the final decades of the seventeenth century a discursive shift occurred. The rejection of wife-beating on the grounds that it was unchristian, uncivilized, and counterproductive began the process of metamorphosing into the demonization of family violence. In this case, the effect was the gradual production of the culture of “secrecy and stigma” that characterizes more modern domestic violence. Margaret Hunt, “Wife-beating, Domesticity, and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” 24-28. Despite the fact that some religious figures opposed such violence, most of the various denominations typically supported it when ostensibly used solely for moral instruction and maintenance of the so-called natural hierarchical order. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 132-133; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’ 72. The seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Russian state and society fit into this broader schema of the use of correction as a means of buttressing hierarchy and subordination in both the state and the family, consistently applying the analogy of the family with the state. Peter the Great himself had commented about his role as a father who had to use patriarchal authority to advance the Russian people about whom he asserted, “Our people are like children [italics in original] who would never of their own accord decide to learn.” Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 103. The eighteenth-century Russian official and historian Vasilii Tatishchev articulated the link between the state and the family, when he wrote “On such a foundation monarchies typically rest. The monarch is as a father and the subjects are his children.” Vasilii Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia, 7 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962), I: 360. Nicholas I helped to connect even more closely the link between autocracy and the family. Those who opposed the autocracy were in effect committing “a biblical sin against the father, while violation of family morality would throw into doubt the moral foundations of autocratic rule.” Moreover, his relationship with his first-born son, Alexander, offered an analogy to those of superiors and subordinates in Russia, in addition to the heir’s training, which illustrated in the most clear terms the microcosm of the family (in this case the royal family) and the macrocosm of the country. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 334-335, 343. One of the proponents of Official Nationality and a professor at Moscow University M.P. Pogodin asserted in a speech that “the secret of Russian history that eludes all Western thinkers” is that “Russia is a single family in which the ruler is the father and the subjects the children. The father retains complete authority over the children, providing them with full freedom.” In such a sitatuation, “there can be no suspicion, no treason.” Pogodin extended the metaphor throughout Russian society with the often used conception that the officer is the father of his soldiers and the landowner the father of his serfs. M.P. Pogodin, Rechi proiznesennie v torzhestvennikh i prochikh sobraniiakh, 1830-1872 (Moscow: V sinodal’noi tip., 1872), 90. The Russian state, the Orthodox Church, and the emerging educated society in these centuries consistently compared the family to the state as the former, in this perspective, was a microcosm of the latter, and just as the tsar ruled the country, the father and husband governed the family. Raeff analyzed a theory of kingship concerning the Muscovite period that “emphasized the moral and social responsibility of a prince toward his people, equating it with the responsibilities of a father for the good conduct, moral life and religious orthodoxy of his children.” Such a perspective remained in the imperial era. Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia; the Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 26. The family served both as an anchor to the political and social order and as a school of acculturation for the political and social order and people typically learned their roles vis-à-vis other people from various estates, and social and political institutions in the gendered, hierarchical order in the family that prepared men for service to the state and women for service in their own families. Indeed service and hierarchy were learned in the family, as it served as the means through which people understood life as an adult with its attendant responsibilities, their position in the larger society. It offered important lessons for life in the empire, it mirrored the hierarchy in the larger society, including the requirement of subordinates to show deference to authority and the significance of service. The family or household offered “both a practical and theoretical model of state power.” Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 101; Jessica Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 1-4, 37, 158-159, 161-162; Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, xvi, 31-35; Education and socialization also played crucial roles. For example, sons of the elite typically received their education, at age six or seven, supposedly the age of reason according to moralists, segregated from their sisters, in homosocial environments such as boarding schools, academies, and universities. These young men were trained to prepare to work as officials and officers, whose primary practice was to obey and to give commands. Their families provided the original foundation for hierarchy, and then they were acclimated to learning and working in a system that made it unusual and problematical to question the bases of the autocratic system. Nicholas I and his brother followed this path, see Leonid Liashenko, Nikolai pervyi: sluchainyi imperator (Moscow: “Ast-Press Kniga,” 2013), 11. Female nobles often received training to serve as wives and mothers at home. One headmistress wrote a letter to the mother of one of her charges’ that her daughter was too dedicated to her studies. She pointedly commented that Sonia Tselovskaia’s “passion for knowledge [would be] commendable in a man, but not in a well-bred girl of noble family,” therefore her studies were not only pointless but could inhibit her opportunities to make a useful match. Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change, 5, 163, 164, 292, 321, 324-325, the quote is taken from Tovrov, 164. One early nineteenth-century moralist wrote a conversation between a mother and her daughter in which the former explained to the latter that “…the goal of any proper education consists of making people capable of doing what they need to do based on their station in life; and you know that the greatest distinction in this discussion is found between men and women.” “Razgovor materi s docheriu o znaniiakh, nuzhnikh molodoi osobe,” Drug Iunostestva (January 1807): 35. Young noble women were taught that their young lives led ineluctably to marriage, as one mid-nineteenth century female protagonist acknowledged: “Marriage they [young women] accepted as the aim and object of their existence.” Vladimir Polunin, Three Generations: Family Life in Russia, 1845-1902, trans. A.F. Birch-Jones (London: Leonard Hill, 1957), 128. A number of eighteenth-century Russian writers, such as N.N. Karamzin and M.M. Kheraskov, endorsed the rule of patriarchy whether in marriage, the estate, or in the nation, “the rule of a strong, authoritative leader who acts as a parent to his (or her) people,” as the means to “the earthly good life.” In a number of their stories, they articulate support for the wise patriarch who sees his poepole as his children and privileges their welfare above his own. Whereas a number of Enlightenment thinkers sought to replace “the empire of the father” with “the empire of reason,” in the words of Blackstone, in other words the age of the young to replace their parents, several Russian authors, two of whom are mentioned above, continued to endorse the former and saw the ideal society based on the rule of the patriarch who used both beneficence and tradition as the basis of his authority and leadership. “The family therefore served as a metaphor for political authority and social organization in general, with changes in the former thought to affect the latter.” Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 124-128; the quote is from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, cited from Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4. Illustrating a similar link one century later, the mid-nineteenth-century Russian legal scholar Alexander Kranikhfel’d asserted the important links between marriage, the family, and the state in his research on Russian civil law that “[M]arriage…,” and “…the family union is the basis of the the state union. From this one may see that marriage is the institution whose protection is necessary for the well-being of the State.” Alexander Kranikhfel’d, Nachertanie Rossiiskago grazhdanskago prava v istoricheskom ego razvitii, sostavlennoe dlia imperatorskago uchilishcha pravovedeniia (St. Petersburg: v tipografii II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E.I.V. Kantselarii, 1843), 10. With this perspective, rulers, writers, the church, and educated society understood that effecting change or preventing it within the family could offer an essential way to re-organize life or to seek to maintain the status quo in the larger state and society. William Wagner articulated the analogy of the family with the prevailing hierarchical order of the government: “Under such conditions, broad statutory sanction for the unlimited authority of husbands simply mirrored and reinforced the practice of arbitrary personalized authority that dominated tsarist social and administrative institutions and that constituted a fundamental principle of the autocratic political system.” William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3, 66. The Domostroi (The Book of Household Management) the sixteenth-century conduct and household management manual, portrayed the elite family as a microcosm of the state, that functioned harmoniously, under the rule of the husband, who was ostensibly the wise, benevolent patriarch at whose side stood his wife, who ideally offered assistance by completing her domestic responsibilities and commanding those beneath her. The pater familias served as the household’s link to the outside world, and his duty was to offer education for proper behavior and to punish transgressions against authority. His failure to fulfil his duty or abuse of this power technically made him answerable to authorities, who were superior to him, such as the ruler and god. The author did not purport to depict reality, but gave an ideal image to which the elite should strive. Despite the prescriptions, real families did not follow this formula perfectly, and it was expected that women may have to face abuse of various types. Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 21, 26-28; S.S. Shashkov, Istoriia russkoi zhenshchiny (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A.S. Suvorina, 1879), 60-62, 71-74; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 53; Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class; Miller, Transformations of Pariarchy in the West, 1. The author’s analogy of the family as a microcosm of the state and idealization of a hierarchical family followed general European thinking as it was the basic social unit undergirding the social order, anchoring such order in the larger state and society, in addition to the locus where people learned to live in a hierarchical and patriarchal structure. In parts of Western Europe, for example, “[c]ivil law theory increasingly replicated the absolutist state in family legislation, erecting the husband and father as the domestic equivalent of the monarch.” Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 4; Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change, 45-47. The government additionally understood the family to be the basic building block of the larger society, and it also served as a school for individuals to learn lessons of how to live and how people learned their place in a gendered and estate-based hierarchical order of subordination and authority. The concept of social order in Imperial Russia derived directly from moral idea of the household. As mentioned, the family or household was a school where people learned their place and how to live, but it also defined a person’s immediate social relationships, based on hierarchies of birth, gender, and age. Just as the tsar was the father of his people, similar relatonships permeated the society: head of the household, landowner and serfts. Within the household, regardless of class or estate, superiors were enjoined to supervise the material and spiritual needs of their dependents. Pavla Miller, The Transformation of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). In return, subordinates were expected to maintain their obedience, often despite various forms of abuse. It was common for the same person to be both a subordinate and a superior during the course of their lifetime and even to act in these roles simultaneously. Linking the household to the larger society, people experienced the same situation. An official or officer commanded his subordinates or soldiers, but he served at the will of a superior officer or official. The Orthodox Church supported the importance of mutual obligation, linking it to both the family and the society, asserting that it was natural to be obedient to superiors who had a duty to punish those who defied authority and did so out of magnanimity. Thus, the superior in the relationship was supposed to offer assistance to the subordinate in return for loyalty and obedience. In this way, social relationships based on patriarchy and hierarchy, linked to the mutual obligations were critical to the established order. Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 83-84. As Morrissey has suggested, “paternalism was not a unitary ideology but a combination of sometimes conflicting attitudes and practices. As an ethos of mutual obligation (at least in principle), paternalism also shaped the practices and language of many less powerful members of society.” Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia, 147. Clearly the power of elites placed them in a position to exploit those beneath them in the hierarchy of the empire, but part of official rhetoric recognized the mutuality of relationships. There was some expectation that subordinates, such as wives did have avenues of redress for wrongs or abuses that they faced, and these expectations grew as the eighteenth century faded into the nineteenth. Patriarchy has become not only a historical but an ideological and sociological category. Scholars who see in patriarchy the framework for household, community, and seigniorial relationships tend to emphasize mechanisms of social control and the inequitable distribution of power. Feminist critics may recognize the functional benefits of patriarchy as a principle of social organization but reject the idea that it could also serve the moral and emotional needs of women. In their conception, patriarchy institutionalized female inferiority in the interst of male domination. Historians have usually concluded that patriarchy mirrored absolute monarchy in sanctioning oppressive subjugation. Historians however have illustrated that while patriarchy subjugated women, it could not deny them subjectivity and agency. The women of gender studies emerge as autonomous historical actors as well as victims. Male domination did not go unchallenged, for women successfully subverted subordination through acts of self-affirmation and conscious resistence. Eighteenth-century Russia provided fecund soil for exploring the interplay between female agency and patriarchal authority. From 1725-1796, four of Russia’s rulers were female, and all told they reigned for about 66 years. Equally significant, historians of the nobility document the strength of women’s property rights in the early imperial period and their concomitant economic power. The political and economic visibility of women could not alter the reality that hierarchies of age and gender invariably assigned primacy to the male head of household. It was no accident that the eighteent-century female rulers did not marry after they ascended the throne. Because elites of the era expected a wife to be subordinate to her husband, to marry would have brought the empress into conflict with patriarchal authority. Female agency existed, but it was not necessarily opposed to patriarchy. To assume an essential opposition between female agency and patriarchal authority yields limited results when applied to a society in which the abuses of husbands, fathers, and masters were regularly acknowledged, but without reference to the feminist critique of patriarchy or the principle of equal rights for all citizens. As an analytical category, patriarchy is most effective when it encompasses hierarchies of gender and age and social status. Patriarchy in Russia may have represented more than the principle of male authority. By adopting a broad definition that incorportates hierarchies of age, gender, and social station, it becomes clear that patriarchy functioned not only as an instrument of male domination, but, more importantly, as a mechanism for controlling human passions in the interests of stability and good order. Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater, 54-55. The conceptualizations of the family as a microcosm of the state were widespread although all thinkers and writers did not concur with this analogy. On this theme, see for example, J. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, and many other studies. Writers, government officials, clerics, jurists, and the like used this same analogy in different countries during this period, although the ideological foundation varied. For example, in the eighteenth-century United States, the family provided a similar analogous locus where to learn one’s place in the world, except it was to discover how to be virtuous republican citizens and to instill such ideals into the next generation. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), ch. 9; Merril D. Smith, Breaking the Bonds: Marital Discord in Pennsylvania, 1730-1830 (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 1. In early modern England, authors of domestic handbooks directed their work at the male heads of households. These writers typically envisioned the family was “a little commonwealth,” and the father served as “a king in his own household.” Catechisms of the seventeenth century offered admonitions on how to be good subjects, instructing that the family served as the “fundamental social institution, and that order in families was both necessary for, and parallel to order in the state.” In the UK, writers of catechisms and homilies asserted that the family was not a private institution but rather a public institution whose activities and functioning related to the state and its orderly functioning. The analogy of state and family served as a tool to maintain authority and order, because disciplined families served as a basis for a smoothly functioning social and political order. The relations between the head of the household and his subordinates was equivalent to a benevolent patriarchy, with the former offering protection and care in return for obedience and respect. Either subordinate or the superior could disrupt that order if they transgressed the boundaries of that relationship. Amussen, An Ordered Society, 35-38, 39, 41; Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 73. The Anglican Church also emphasized these points in homilies and catechisms, additionally stressing the divinely sanctioned hierarchy and gendered order. Cited in Amussen, “’Being Stirred to Much Unquietness,’” 73. Into the nineteenth century, many Victorians in England believed that the patriarchal ideal was relevant and important as “the only certain bulwark against a strange and hostile world.” Marriage as a sacrament, with a clear male head of household and a submissive wife and children maintained the family as “the essential building block of a civilized society…,” truly, “a microcosm of the larger society, authoritarian in nature and carefully structured as to hierarchies and duties.” Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 6. In Revolutionary France too, there were discussions of marriage and the family, as the basic unit of the society, reflecting the organization of the state, and offering the key building block based on domestic and political ideology, thus, “a democratic family had to correspond to a democratic nation.” Giacomo Francini, “Divorce and Separations in Eighteenth-Century France: An Outline for a Social History of Law,” History of the Family 2, 1 (1990): 102. In Russia, the autocracy saw the hierarchical family, with order and subordination as its basis, as the first school to learn one’s place and one’s appropriate actions to prepare for the world of hierarchy and subordination. Along the border with the Muscovite state in Poland in the seventeenth century, for example, there was a similar dynamic, with the patriarchal model functioning in “other larger organisms” and shaping them according to a “patriarchal schedule.” It started with the ruler as the father and permeated all social relationships of subordinates and superiors, with the family at its base. Amussen, An Ordered Society, 1; Maria Bogucka, “The Foundations of the Old Polish World: Patriarchalism and the Family. Introduction into the Problem,” Acta Poloniae Historica 69, 1 (1994): 37, 38. The oldest extant published book on marital relations in Poland, Jan Mrowiński Płoczuwłos’ sixteenth-century treatise The Married Couple had apotheosized “marriage as the foundation of the social order.” Discussing themes that echo in parts the Domostroi, discussed later, he asserted that the patriarchal family existed as a mini-kingdom ruled by the strict but benevolent father whose wife exists to help him. Andrzej Wyrobysz, “Patterns of the Family and Woman in Old Poland,” Acta Poloniae Historica 71 (1995): 70-71, 81-82. In Russia, as Elise Wirtschafter has explicated, “…in the official family, duty was a reciprocal concept that set a moral standard and implied interdependence rather than difference,” and “[a]longside deference to authority, patriarchy also taught that the household head had duties to family members and other subordinates.” Cited in Wirtschafter, Social Identities in Imperial Russia, 10; cited in Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 6. Duty of course was not always fulfilled as the patriarchal ideal was just that an ideal, but it set a standard for the mutual relations and interdependence of the various members of the family. Thus, the family was the crucible in which people in this era received their social place and lived under an inner hierarchy that reflected the other relationships throughout the larger society. Bogucka, “The Foundations of the Old Polish World,” 37, 38. In these relationships, gender played a pivotal role in the way early modern Europeans approached relationships of power, and the ways in which they saw disorder. As Merry Wiesner has explicated: Not only did the maintenance of proper power relationships between men and women serve as a basis for and a symbol of the larger political system, but also for the functioning of society as a whole. Relations between the sexes often provided a model for all dichotomized relations that involved authority and subordination, such as those between ruler and subject. Women or men who stepped outside their prescribed roles in other than extraordinary circumstances and particularly those who made a point of emphasizing that they were doing this, were seen as threatening not only relations between the sexes, but the operation of the entire social order. They were ‘disorderly’… Thus, disorder in the household undermined not only life in the family but threatened the very social and political order, necessitating correction from those in authority and could and potentially would destroy the fabric of state and society. Moreover, complicating and aggravating these concerns, in the early modern era and later, women were regarded as “disorderly” in body and mind, because they were portrayed as unreasonable, subject to their physical body, thus preventing order. Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Second Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 306-307. Moreover, as Schrader has argued, mid-ninenteenth-century Russian officials, profoundly concerned with the social anxieties of the time, conceived of women’s bodies as unknowable and incomprehensible and often thusly connected to insanity, in particular during pregnancy. This status led to instability, and ultimately to this disorder, as one scholar has written, “[w]omen, by their very nature, are a source of disorder to the state.” These officials say disorders as of two, specific types. One, they determined as a sense of “civil disorder” and “a breakdown of law and order. The other meaning “refer[s] to an internal malfunction of an individual as when we speak of a disordered imagination… The term thus has application to the constitution of both the individual and the state…Women…are a source of disorder because of their being, or their nature, is such that it leads them to exert a disruptive influence in social and political life. Women have a disorder at their very centres—in their morality—which can bring about the destruction of the state.” Women’s “place” or “social sphere, for which they are fitted by their natures – the family’ exacerbates the threat of their disorderliness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had asserted almost one century earlier that women’s disorderliness threatens the state and order. Cited in part in Abby Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 164. The original, longer quote is found in Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 17-18. Thus, it was imperative to control women’s disorder in all its iterations for stability in the home and in the state. Writing about the era of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt suggests that a reconception of the Freudian formulation of family romance, originally conceived by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as a means for young boys to free themselves from their families in order “to fantasize about their place in the social order,” connecting their individual psyche “to the social order through familial imagery and through intrafamilial conflict,” serves as a useful approach to understand the links and analogies between the family and the state. She asserts that it is useful to apply this formulation not just to the individual psyche, but “to the political—that is, the collective—unconscious…” Family romance then from this perspective may be understood as “the collective, unconscious images of the family order that underlie revolutionary politics…” adding “…that the French had a kind of collective political consciousness that was structured by family relations.” While she does not assume that this experience was universal, she also claims “…most Europeans in the eighteenth century thought of their rulers as fathers and of their nations as families writ large.” Moreover, “the ideology of absolutism explicitly tied royal government to the patriarchal family,” and thus the use of the term “fraternity” for the French revolutionaries “implied a break with this prior model.” Thus, “revolutionary family romances were creative efforts to reimagine the political world, to imagine a polity unhinged from patriarchal authority.” Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, xiii-xiv. This approach is fruitful for the study of Russian social, intellectual, and political history as well, with family romance serving as a way of understanding collective unconscious about the family order, whether endorsing autocracy and hierarchy or fighting against the social and political system and order in the tsarist state, offering a means to support or reject it through the family. By the nineteenth century, there emerged new ways of understanding the family, the roles of its members, and they reflected on a developing national identity, based in part on the dynamics of the family. As the family and the conception of how the family functioned changed among the educated elite, so too did their understanding of the state, how it functioned, and its role as did the understanding of what it was to be Russian. Women’s roles played a vital role in these formulations and lived experience. Complicating these issues were the legal statuses of wives, linked to the various relationships, such as legal, cultural, religious, between spouses. For example, in much of Western Europe the legal principle of coverture or a similar legal principle predominated in the early modern era. In Britain coverture defined a husband and wife as one person legally, with the wife subsumed into the husband, therefore, a wife could not own property unless there was a prior provision in a contract, and she could not sign a contract, execute a will, or any other such act because of this legal status. Based on the common law, a husband controlled the property of his wife from before and during the marriage. Barbara Evans Clements, A History of Women in Russia, From Earliest Times to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 79; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age—Further Explored, 3rd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1884), 20; Frances Dolan, “’Home-Rebels and House Traitors:’ Murderous Wives in Early Modern England,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 4, 1 (Winter 1992): 5-6; Holcombe, Wives and Property, 18; Susan Hamilton, Frances Powers Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2006), 64; Siegel, “’The Rule of Love,’” 2122. The renowned eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone defined coverture tersely: “By marriage the husband and wife are one in law: -- that is, the very being or moral existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage…and her (the wife) condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” William Blackstone, “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” in Women in European Culture and Society, 36. Almost one century later, the British feminist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, who played a critical role in changing married women’s legal status in the United Kingdom, issued a short book in which she intentionally articulated in precise language the current law about coverture, fastidiously avoiding polemics, in order to allow the words to speak for themselves: “A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirebely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or cover, and her condition is called coverture.” Because a husband was legally responsible for his wife for her actions, then in such societies, the law and the state considered him both her legal representative and her moral guardian. Therefore, a husband received the right “to control her actions and to chastise her to keep her within the bounds of wifely duty.” Chastisement did not necessarily equate to physical punishment, it could be simply admonishments or confinement for example, but it was not uncommon for husbands to use violence or confinement to chastise their wives. Wives’ legal recourse were limited but they could file charges. Cited in Holcombe, Wives and Property, 29-30. Thus, in countries with coverture or similar systems, men had legal responsibility for their wives, hence these countries’ legal systems gave men the right to avail themselves of discipline, including physical, over their wives to control their perceived unruly behavior. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 4. In the state, the ruler and government had both the responsibility for their subject, they also possessed the right to punish their subjects for their improper behavior; coverture offered the same rights and responsibilities to husbands. Married women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had many limitations in their legal rights vis-à-vis their hubands, existing in most ways legally similar to children as perpetual minors, that is perceived as lacking “the attributes of personal autonomy.” Engelstein explicates that the governments decision to exempt females from corporal punishment in 1863, was not some type of benefit for the, but instead “marked women as in need of special care,” whereas men were “potentially capable of self-governance.” Thus, exemption from public jurisdiction excluded women from the civic community and left them subordinate to the patriarchal or private authorities, typically their fathers and husbands. Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 71, 73, 74. Chakrabarty asserts something similar concerning the “standard European-bourgeois modernity” that “[a]nything that could not align itself with the laws of public life would eventually be assimilated into a structure of private repression.” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 143. Schrader concurs in her discussion of when Russian officials exempted Caucasian women from lashings, thereby privatizing punishments, and acquiescing to husbands’ ability to use private beatings. Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 74-75. Therefore, various prohibitions on public violence did not stop and even promoted so-called “‘reasonable’ corporal punishment on a number of subordinates, be they wives, children, servants, etc. Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 168. Thus, women’s life choices remained circumscribed in important ways in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As Barbara Evans Clements has noted, because “…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.” Clements, A History of Women in Russia, 64. Indeed, mid-nineteenth century Russia remained a largely traditional society in which patriarchal forms of governance played a critical role. The government brooked no opposition and regarded political and social power as absolute and hierarchical. In this hierarchy, the tsar was absolute and the batiushka (little father) to his subjects; the noble was the master to his serfs, and the father was the head of the household. The law buttressed these hierarchical relationships and their concomitant ideals. The tsar, serf owner, husband, and father wielded almost complete administrative and judicial authority over their subordinates, who were legally bound to obey. The patriarchal system in Russia legitimized the political order, preserved the social order, and facilitated daily governance, when it placed individuals into hierarchies defined by such categories as estate, age, and seniority, and gender. Susan Morrissey, “Patriarchy on Trial: Suicide, Discipline, and Governance in Imperial Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 23-24. Despite these limiations, noble women in Russia were noted for and enjoyed a primary distinction from their counterparts in the West; married noble women were not one legal entity concerning property, subsumed in their husband’s legal identity. Thus Russian noble women, as will be discussed elsewhere, by the second half of the eighteenth century (even earlier in some respects) did not face such legal limits on their ownership and use of property despite the other personal restrictions they encountered. Tsaturova, Tri veka russkogo razvoda: XVI-XVIII veka (Moscow: Logos, 2011), chapter 3 passim. Regardless, noble women’s property rights were profound and were crucial as an avenue of autonomy for women despite other restictions noted above because the ownership of property was a crucial avenue to prestige and power. Indeed, these property rights of married women, offering them independent avenues of activity in the public sphere, stood in marked contrast to the prevailing gender relations, family law, custom, and religious teachings, that circumscribed their activities and placed them in subjugation to their fathers and husbands. Wirtschafter, Social Identities in Imperial Russia, 13; Michelle Lamarche Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 72-73. Russian married noble women not only owned property in their own names and independently of their husbands, but they regularly exercised this right, managing their own property, independently acquiring new and separate property (through purchase, gifts, inheritance or by any other means), and some managed their husbands’ property, typically when they were away in state service. In contrast to their West European counterparts, they could represent themselves and their interests in court, and at times successfully sued to protect their property rights against their husbands. Thus, they were not limited to the financial benefits from this property, but actively owned it and could dispose of it, rent it, etc. See for example, George Weickhardt, “The Pre-Petrine Law of Property,” Slavic Review 52, 4 (Winter 1993): 663-679; George Weickhardt, “Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100-1750,” Slavic Review 55, 1 (Spring 1996): 1-23; Eve Levin, “Women and Property in Medieval Novgorod: Dependence and Independence,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 10, 1-2 (1983): 154-169; Sandra Levy, “Women and Control of Property in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 10, 1-2 (1983): 201-212; William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994); Alexander Kranikhfel’d, Nachertanie Rossiiskago grazhdanskago prava v istoricheskom ego razvitii (Saint Petersburg: Tip. III otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E.I.V. kansteliarii, 1843); Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom; Michelle Lamarche Marrese, “From Maintenance to Entitlement: Defining the Dowry in 18th-Century Russia,” in Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003). This legal right was genuine and offered these women access to resources and often even greater liberty than their West European counterparts, potentially offering a haven or some type of protection against abusive husbands. Such situations often offered noble women a greater voice in the family. Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom, 72; Robin Bisha, Jehanne M. Gheith, Christine Holden, and William G. Wagner, eds., Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience and Expression, An Anthology of Sources (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 12. These opportunities also often led to disputes between spouses, some of which led to violence or deprivation of freedom or sustenance. Examples will abound in this text and in many sources and studies. As described earlier, state legal systems, churches, and prescriptive literature accepted moderate correction, but the reality was that the precise severity of that chastisement remained ambiguous. The interpretation of one of the founders of canon law, the twelfth-century legal scholar and monk Gratian, was influential in much of Europe in subsequent centuries: “A man may chastise his wife and beat her for her own correction; for she is of his household and therefore the lord may chastise his own…so likewise the husband is bound to chastise his wife in moderation.” Cited in G.G. Coulton, ed., Life in the Middle Ages, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928-1930), 3: 234. There was no precision offered to what was correction as opposed to abuse. Early modern European judiciaries generally avoided involvement in cases of domestic abuse, with the exception of extreme applications, and even then infrequently. Moreover, domestic violence did not typically enter either criminal law or criminal codes until the nineteenth century. Correction here also was supposed to be moderate, but because the meaning was nebulous, the possibility of maiming and even death were real and certainly happened repeatedly. The apocryphal rule of thumb in England, in which Judge Buller supposedly ruled in 1782, and a number of writers referred to it as a fact, that it was theoretically acceptable to discipline one’s wife with a stick no larger than the thumb, provided little, useful guidance as did the prohibition againsts drawing blood if a husband wielded a club. While correction denoted punishment for a transgression, the law in England did not accept random beatings, but the applied phrase “lawful and reasonable” also proved imprecise for what constituted abuse and what was correction. It was not until the passage of the Act for Better Protection of Aggravated Assault upon Women and Children in 1853 that at least legally that the English government placed a strict limitation on such violence by automatically attaching punitive sanctions against people who inflicted bodily injury upon women. Parliament, under strong pressure a few years later, followed that law with the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, often named the Divorce Act. This law removed divorce proceedings solely from the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, where they had been located for centuries because marriage was a sacrament, and occasional acts of Parliament, which were much rarer, only since the seventeenth century, and only after the ecclesiastical courts had given a divorce a mensa et thoro (bed and board) into new a secular court, called the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. Previously a full divorce from the bonds of matrimony (a vincula matrimonii) had been limited to such causes as consanguinity, insanity, physical incompetence, etc. A bed and board divorce, in which the couple could not remarry but were allowed to live separately was easier to obtain, but still not simple, was based on three reasons, sodomy, cruelty (almost always physical violence), and adultery. All divorce proceedings had been prohibitively expensive (by the 1850s, a mensa et thoro divorce 300 to 500 pounds for an uncontested divorce and one thousand potentially if contested, whereas an act of Parliament cost 600 to 800 pounds) and lengthy, thus only the wealthy had the opportunity to divorce until the above-cited act passed. Because of the expense and stigma, Parliament had granted only 224 total divorces from 1700 until 1857, of which only 4 were given to women. Phillips, Untying the Knot, 98; Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 251; Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 192; May, “Violence in the Family,” 139, 140; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Harper & Row, 1977), 38; A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52-67; Siegel, “’The Rule of Love,’” 2118; Holcombe, Wives and Property, 94-95. With the passage of the Divorce Act, the government recognized a decree of judicial separation, replacing the divorce a mensa et thoro, meaning that they could not marry again. A new decree of absolute divorce, replacing the divorce a vincula matrimonii, enabled divorces based on a variety of causes. For a woman, she could initiate a divorce if her husband was guilty of bestiality, sodomy, or rape, or adultery paried with other grounds, including bigamy, incest, or cruelty with desertion without just cause of at least two years. Later, Parliament passed the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act that offered a wife the right to separation based on several grounds, one of which was domestic violence, defined as aggravated assault upon her, and the husband had been convicted. Holcombe, Wives and Property, 98-99, 103, 105-106; Hamilton, Frances Powers Cobbe and Victorian Feminism, 1. In Great Britain, the new laws and changes thus afforded women the opportunity to gain separation or divorce with greater ease by the mid-ninteenth century, although it was still not simple, and cruelty, often understood as physical violence was an acceptable cause. In Russia, however, legal authorities largely ignored cruelty in marriages, and even fatalities from discipline, as accidental, with minimal punishment common, if any at all, although educated public opinion rejected violence in marriage even by the late eighteenth century, denouncing it as cruelty. May, “Violence in the Family,” 135; Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 133-134; Holcombe, Wives and Property, 94-95. The state and church largely agreed with educated society about the use of violence, reflecting, for example, Catherine the Great’s belief in the “softening of manners” in advanced, enlightened societies. Bruce F. Adams, “Progress of an Idea: The Mitigation of Corporal Punishment in Russia to 1863,” The Maryland Historian XVII, 1 (Spring/Summer 1986): 62-63. Although much of her rule often did not reflect this softening, the rhetoric of her reign and the public efforts to evince a civilizing influence influenced educated society, many of whose members began calling for an end to private violence (in the spousal relationship or the landowner-serf relationship). Catherine offered models and set the tone for the elite’s conduct, as she demonstrated for her servitors that they should live according to Enlightenment sentiments by evincing “affection” and “considerate self-restraint.” She expected then that Russia’s elite should act with a “genteel enlightened cultivation, civility that separated them from…the crudeness of those deprived of breeding and education.” They asserted that the empire should adopt the “moral standards disseminated by Enlightenment thought.” Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 132; Engelstein, “Weapon of the Weak,” 686. The ideas about criminal behavior, its causes, and punishment from various writers, such as Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and others, led educated society, as it became acquainted with these writers and their ideas, to rethink the use of corporal punishment, and concomitantly violence in various scenarios. Beccaria’s writings in particular resonated with thinkers and the broader public, as they came to associate corporal punishment and violence as uncivilized, indeed, barbaraic. Members of educated society already by the latter half of the eighteenth century became aware, prompted from Enlightenment ideals that corporal punishment first, and later its derivatives in the household, were incompatible with the dignity of free men, and this generation considered it ignoble for itself to bear the indignity of corporal punishment. Similar invectives of Englightenment writers attacked tyranny in the household, insisting that “the authority of husbands and the subordination of wives should be based on love and respect rather than force.” Adams, “Progress of an Idea: The Mitigation of Corporal Punishment in Russia to 1863,” 58-59, 61-62; Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 64. Over the course of the next few decades, however, Russia’s changing elite began to include people from other classes, and women, as also deserving freedom from this most barbaric treatment, stigmatized as uncivilized. Moreover, they, as their numbers grew and became increasingly acquainted with ideas from the West, began to recognize that the use of such violence served no purpose but to taint their country and themselves as not truly educated and civilized. Such ideas became increasingly inculcated into the nobility through many conduits and venues, such as catechisms, prescriptive literature, educational institutions, and the like. These conduits for disseminating ideas, in addition to the work of playwrights in the eighteenth century and later Sentimental and Romantic literature, also introduced ideas concerning the importance of the individual, the significance of emotions, and marital relations and endorsed mutuality, love, and happiness between two moral spouses, influencing the elite’s thinking concerning physical violence. In addition, when the Empress Catherine liberated the nobility from corporal punishment in The Charter of the Nobility, she illustrated and reified this “softening” mentioned above, so vital to these changing mores. Adams, “Progress of an Idea: The Mitigation of Corporal Punishment in Russia to 1863,” 58-59, 61-62; Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound, 103; Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 67-72; Tovrov, The Russian Noble Family: Structure and Change, 6-7; Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police (Monreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 13. The Charter facilitated revulsion against domestic violence among the educated elite. Because the Charter recognized the elite and its special function in the state, it by definition distinguished it from the rest of the population, for example exempting its members from corporal punishment. As Engel has written, “if violence brought “dishonor” to noble men, did it not insult women too?...Challenges to the legitimacy and the notion of illegitimate cruelty, while aimed primarily at the master-serf relationship, also carried over to family relations and likewise undermined the legitimacy of marital violence among noble elites.” Engel, Breaking the Ties that Bound, 103-104. Moreover, the government itself sought an end to cruelty as well, linking its end with supporting the existing order. The prevention of such cruelty served to uphold the regime and its social system as it offered the protection of state paternalism and upheld the concept of mutual obligations of superiors and subordinates. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia, 147. By the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, educated society considered such brutal behavior the province of the uncivilized masses, specifically the lower classes, incorporating the peasants in addition to the barbaric “Asians,” who could serve that role potentially as the ignorant, unmanly other. Indeed, the elite’s response to Paul I’s reign illustrated in part its revulsion to his brutality. These attitudes lasted into the second half of the nineteenth century as Morrissey indicated in a story about an attorney in 1868 who defended his peasant client from a charge of driving his wife to commit suicide. He asserted that cruelty cannot be universally defined, but is a product of the cultural level of the people involved. He boldly declared that wife-beating was acceptable among peasants whereas it was unacceptable among educated people. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia, 220-221. The educated public dismissed corporal punishment as “an affront to civilization.” Thanks to the above-cited Enlightenment and cultural movements, educated Russians began to consider the importance of legitimacy in political authority and social views on physical violence, even against criminals, reflected the general feeling of revulsion amongst the educated classes against physical abuse. Thus such brutality contradicted love, indicated a lack of refinement and civilization, and by definition was not European. People who gleaned values from Europe began to equate physical violence and various forms of abusive actions as unacceptable, primitive, and part of the other, that is from the uneducated, whether from the lower classes or from what they conceived as ahistorical cultures who contributed nothing to civilization, as the nineteenth century dawned. For example, the debates that emerged in Russia in the early to middle nineteenth century over the abolition of corporal punishment illustrate the perceptions of certain types of violence as a trope for backwardness. The official termination of corporal punishment was not simply the consequence of class or personal interests. The support for the abolition of serfdom also grew out of the desire of Russia’s emerging educated classes who sought to implement a program of liberal reforms to modernize their country, similar to what Europe had accomplished more recently. A critical part of that desire stemmed from their wish to consider themselves modern Europeans and to have Europeans accept them and their nation as European. Their feeling of shame at the barbarity of their country was a pivotal motivation for both the abolition of serfdom and penal reforms. Bruce Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1996), 198; Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 150-153. Wife-beating was assumed to be quite widespread among peasants and workers in the nineteenth century. In the opinion of many observers, wife-beating was a product of the ignorance and low morality of peasant society in general and the belief that peasants assumed that they had the right to beat their wives. Newspapers and magazines ran numerous stories about cruelties, atrocities, and even lethal injuries sustained by peasant women. In fact, it became common for nineteenth-century writers to blame corporal punishment, the noted Slavophile Ivan Aksakov for one charged it was an alien barbarity, such as the use of the knout, for example, the slitting of nostrils, and other related violent punishments as the legacy of the Mongols and their yoke on Russia, a vestige of that very backwardness, despite the fact that legal scholars proved that these punishments predated the Mongol invasion into medieval Rus’. Adams, “Progress of an Idea: The Mitigation of Corporal Punishment in Russia to 1863,” 63, 64-65. Those writers who sought penal reform reflected then the so-called civilizing of Russia and thereby illustrated a vivid manifestation of Russia’s Europeanness. Another writer asserted that Russia must discontinue corporal punishment because it was inappropriate, by which he meant Asian, thus counterposing civilized Western Europe where civility was the standard. These allegations offered a crystal clear message. To be true to Russia as a European state, which it most certainly was to these writers, the state must end corporal punishment. Corporal punishment was an inferior Asian tradition, not a progressive European tradition. Adams, The Politics of Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917, 198-199; Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 150-153. The very use of the Mongols as the originator of these heinous actions, regardless of historical veracity, stigmatized corporal punishment, as the Mongols were a trope to Russian sensibilities of everything that was primitive, crude, and barbaric. Similar ideas influenced perceptions of domestic abuse, in particular physical violence, by the nineteenth century as the product of uncivilized types, alien to a new Russia, very much a part of Europe. Despite these images of violence as connected to the lower orders and ahistorical civilizations, noble men perpetrated violence in many milieus, including in the household against their wives. According to the data gleaned from the archives by Muravyeva for the late eighteenth century (1780-1800), noble women submitted to the St. Petersburg consistory court almost fifty percent (29 0f 60) of complaints against husbands for domestic violence. Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality,” 231, 231f. The numbers could be skewed by other factors, such as noblewomen’s willingness and access to the court, cultural expectations of the nobility as discussed above, etc. Nevertheless, physical violence remained a genuine problem even among the elite. Commenting on a similar theme in England, William Blackstone equated such uncivilized behavior with “the lower rank of people.” He added in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England” that at one time “[t]he husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of restraining her.” He opined that at an earlier time even educated people availed themselves of “domestic chastisement,” comparing the wife’s position to that of an apprentice or a child. Blacksone added that husbands still reserved the right to “chastise” their wives, but that “…the husband was prohibited from using any violence to his wife.” Therefore “the power of correction began to be doubted: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband.” Thus, husbands had this right but it was limited to when he was chastising her. Moreover, if a wife faced a threat of bodily harm, then the wife could submit a petition for court protection which had the power to require the husband to offer a guarantee or security bond if he committed acts of violence against her outside of his legal authority to chastise her. In addition, Blackstone regarded such antiquated and barbaric notions of chastisement as almost solely the acts of the uneducated “lower ranks of people.” Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of the Land (Dublin: Printed for J. Exshaw, 1771), v. 1: 444-445; Siegel, “’The Rule of Love,’” 2124. Similar views were common among the middle classes in England in the nineteenth century. May, “Violence in the Family,” 141-142. Indeed, the late nineteenth-century British feminist Frances Power Cobbe, in her “Wife Torture in England,” located domestic violence of all types in Orientalist metaphors of the oppression of women and compared with the slavery/master relationship only recently ended legally in the United States. Hamilton, Frances Powers Cobbe and Victorian Feminism, ch. 5. She additionally cited the ignobility of lower-class life in Great Britain with commentary on alcohol and the squalor of working-class life, thus rejecting the notion of “the ideal wife-beater,” who was “sober” and industrious, tropes for the middle classes. While she acknowledges some such men do use violence, it is only “occasional” and “of a not dangerous kind.” She specifically cites “dangerous wife-beaters” as belonging “almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes.” Frances Powers Cobbe, “Wife Torture in England,” in Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Nineteenth-Century Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1995), 132-171. Thus, physical violence became at least publicly anathema to the educated classes, representing the other, uncivilized behavior beneath the dignity of an educated man, fit for the lower orders and the so-called backwards peoples, from ostensibly non-historical countries, based on the language of the day. The conception of class was illustrated by such views as the expectations of what was appropriate behavior, including domestic violence, were seen through the prism of class. Moreover, the educated society’s beliefs and assertions that domestic violence was a lower-class problem, and at most an aberration among the elite, established a false conception that domestic violence was then not the problem of the elite. Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 5-6; A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (New York: Routledge, 1992), ch. 3. These ideas foreshadowed and mirrored the perceptions of Russia’s educated elite in the nineteenth century. Such ideas, indeed, resonated among the educated elite in Russia. The fluid responses of an emerging educated society in Russia in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century to the employment of violence in both the home and in the broader context of state employment to maintain patriarchal governance in both loci illustrate important changes in the educated strata’s perceptions of their country, themselves, and were critical to the debates within this society, notable within the famous debates of the early to middle nineteenth-century disputes; indeed, these perceptions and the disputes about marriage and the role of women were a crucial part of the renowned arguments concerning the accursed questions about Russia’s past, present, and future, and its identity that emerged in the early and mid-nineteenth century among the Westerners, Slavophiles, and Official Nationalists. These debates in part focused around a number of issues, including what is Russia, what is its relationship to the West, was there a Russian culture sui generis, or had it been sterile, bereft of civilization? Scholars have rarely discussed the critical links however between these debates and perceptions of national identity in this era and the recasting of domesiticity and family roles. As important as these attempts to experiment and to develop more affective ties within families were, the goal was much greater: educated elites in the empire, much as the church and the state, perceived the family as a pivotal locus for change or stability-its organization and the ongoing reformation of domestic life could be the key to inculcating social and political values that could be useful to change not just their family lives, but to remake their country into the new Russia that they sought, one marked by civilization, humane treatment, dignity and respect for the individual, in other words from the perceptions of a crucial segment of this elite, European. The studies on the accursed questions and societal responses are vast. A small sample of them includes, for example, Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Pavel Miliukov, “”Liubov u idealistov tridtsatikh godov,” in Iz istorii russkoi intelligentsia: sbornik statei i etiudov, second edition (St. Petersburg: Znanie, 1903), 73-168; Derek Offord, Portraits of Early Russian Liberals: A Study of the Thought of T.N. Granovsky, V.P. Botkin, P.V. Annenkov, A.V. Druzhinin, and K.D. Kavelin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801-1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Priscilla Roosevelt, Apostle of Russian Liberalism: Timofei Granovsky (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1986). Whereas Nicholas and the Official Nationalists regarded the Russian state as not only different from, but superior to Europe, others among the educated elite believed that Russia was following the European path, and this path was their beloved homeland’s future. Moreover, stopping the use of physical violence and other forms of abuse was not then simply a personal issue but a pivotal watershed in Russia’s development as a world historical nation. Thus in these debates, one may clearly see the connection between public and private life in Russia. Indeed, all sides saw that the way the family functioned and intra-family relations were vital to Russia’s present and future society and state. Therefore, the struggles over home life and interspousal relations were vital to the larger project of creating a new Russia or maintaining the old Russia. In addition, because they lived in an autocracy that limited what they could do politically, the most prominent and effective locus for societal initiative was the home where they could focus on the ideal of moral self-perfection, so prominent and even promoted by the Russian government since the eighteenth century. Indeed, contemporary Russian state with its political and legal-administrative practice ironically and in some respects offered its own template for those seeking change. Peter the Great introduced the well-ordered police state into Russia in order to maximize his government’s ability to mobilize resources for state power and to promote the ordering of life in the empire politically and socially. According to Wirtschafter, Peter and his successors used “institution building and legal prescription” to begin and to control “social change so as to realize the material and spiritual potential of the state…and its inhabitants.” The government thus sought to create and to protect the common good. Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 54, 137. Based on this approach, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, St. Petersburg endorsed the idea that reforming both society and state institutions, and the realization of justice, was not only a product of changes in political and social arrangements, but dependend on the moral improvement of the individual. The government’s restrictions on politics while encouraging Enlightenment principles of earthly progress led the educated eliten in the eighteenth century to focus their efforts “on the practice and lived experience of the Enlightenment,” that is a “how to lead an enlightened, morally purposeful, and spiritually uplifting life…” The focus of improvement and progress came from the individual and his or her own efforts at self-perfction. Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 163. Therefore, the government inspired intentionally the beginnings of an educated public already in the eighteenth century, and unintentionally the origins of an intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, in part through its own system and the messages conveyed by that system. Thus, the efforts to seek self-perfection were often practiced in the home and linked the private to the public. They “sublimated” politics by seeking self-actualization and relevance first for themselves and later for Russia as the culmination of the process. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism; Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia. The government, the iniator of these changes having forced elite society into Europe began to pull back from these efforts out of fear for its own authority, as parts of elite society then became the new initiators of change in a role reversal. Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 169. The emerging intelligentsia experimented with a number of ideas and movements from the West, including ith German Idealistic philosophy and later French utopian socialism, as guides to life, and these Western influences informed their relationships to each other, to the authorities, to their families, to women, including to legal subordinates. They also adopted and adapted the long-standing idea of the family as the microcosm of the state, but instead of perceiving it as a bulwark of the autocratic, hierarchical state, a means to undergird the prevailing order, they began to envision new types of family relations as the beginning of the means to re-create a new type of state based on relations within the family that would be loving. In their view, the civilized, humanitarian family of loving spouses would offer a hothouse to begin the growth of a better society and state by which they could create the new, humane, civilized Russia, one part of which was a family and society free from violence. By the nineteenth century, members of the educated elite often repudiated their parents’ conceptions of marriage, envisioning a loving relationship of partners, free of the overbearing patriarchal hegemony typical of their forebearers, with a variety of symbols of dominance and abuse. For example, marital relations and even the matrimonial ceremony itself evidenced the patriarchal rule of the husband in the Muscovite period. According to Valerie Sperling, patriarchal wedding ceremonies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, featured brides’ fathers giving a whip to their daughters’ new husbands, stressing an end to matrifocal practices. Valerie Sperling, “Rape and Domestic Violence in the USSR,” Responses to the Victimization of Women and Children: Journal of the Center for Women Policy Studies 13, 3 (1990): 19; for more on these practices, see also, V.I. Sergeevich, Lektsii po istorii russkago prava (St. Petersburg: Tip. S. Volpianskago, 1890), 564. The father took the whip and struck his daughter with it, and then instructed her that “With these blows, daughter, you know the authority of your father; now this authority transitions to another set of hands; instead of me, your husband will instruct you with this whip for your disobedience.” The father then gave the whip to the groom, who placed it over the marital bed as a reminder of his power and the right to correct his wife in the event of poor behavior or disrespect. In other cases, the groom kept the whip in his boot and a jewel in the other boot. The wife was to select one of the two boots. Her choice supposedly portended her future. In addition, a foreign visitor in this era noted that the whip, whether as symbol or instrument, was useful to compel the wife to render due homage to her master. Shashkov, Istoriia russkoi zhenshchiny, 111-112; Jakov Reitenfels, Skazaniia svetleishemu gertsogu Toskanskomu Koz’me Tret’emu o Moskovin, Paduia, 1680 g. (Moscow: Tipografiia Obshchestva rasprostraneniia poleznykh knig, 1905), 178; Samuel Collins, The Present State of Russia: in a letter to a friend at London (London: Printed by J. Winter for D. Newman, 1671), 8-9. The whip thus embodied both the ability and the duty of the husband to correct, i.e., to punish and to discipline his wife. M.F. Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor istorii russkago prava (Kiev: Tip. G.L. Frontskevicha, 1886), 91. Some foreign observers of the time also commented about what they perceived was a general lack of affection between spouses among the elite. One writer noted that the wedding guests sang verses lamenting the newly married bride’s fate, suggesting popular beliefs that their fate after marriage was not desirable. Shashkov, Istoriia russkoi zhenshchiny, 107; Dorothy Atkinson, “Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past,” in Women in Russia, eds. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 19; Reitenfels, Skazaniia sveitleishemu gertosgu toskanomu koz’me tret’emu, 177. In addition, the mid-seventeenth-century German traveler Olearius even commented that, because of the way elite Russians arranged marriage without prior familiarity with one another “that husbands and wives often live together like cats and dogs, and that wife-beating is so common in Russia.” The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia, 165. Olearius also mentioned the prior idea from earlier writers about Russian wives that they believe that “frequent blows and beatings” are a sign of their husbands’ love, and that they saw no such violence as reflective of a lack of affection. He mostly dismissed such ideas as contrary to reason. These comments illustrate at least as much about Olearius and other visitors’ perceptions as they do about the status of spousal relations, yet they offer testimony to the prevalence of wife-beating. Another practice among the elite had the father proffering his future son-in-law with a symbolic rod, proclaiming to his daughter that she “hast not so much escaped from sway, as rather passed beneath that of another.” Cited in Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy: The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 106. This act served as a trope for her subordination and the husband’s authority. The giving of the rod illustrated, as mentioned above, that the husband wielded authority over his wife, as her new guardian and the rod epitomized the idea of correction, i.e., the use of punishment, including physical force, which was the duty of a husband to use in order to teach his wife and children appropriate respect for authority and proper behavior. Despite the fact that one observer noted that the wedding vows required the husband to promise not to beat her and for her not to deceive him, the reality was quite different, and the church and state endorsed the idea of correction and thus the use of discipline in family relations. Reitenfels, Skazaniia svetleishemu gertsogu Toskanskomu Koz’me Tret’emu, 177. The church supported this right, including the use of violence when necessary, based on several sources, most importantly the Bible, apostolic canons, and church fathers’ writings, although it also insisted that correction be limited. Nancy Kollman, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 75-77; Nancy Kollman, “The Extremes of Patriarchy: Spousal Abuse and Murder in Early Modern Russia,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 25, 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1998): 133-140; Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Slavs, 900-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 337-343; Muravyeva, ”Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia,” 65-66. It continued to do so throughout the history of the empire although limited ways with few options for redress. Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, chs. 2, 3. The Muscovite and early Petrine state buttressed patriarchy in other ways, and one of the most conspicuous means was through the legal system, after the adoption of the Ulozhenie of 1649 and the new criminal law codex of 1669. For a discussion of the 1669 codex, see A.F. Man’kov, Zakonodatel’stvo i pravo Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVII v. (St. Petersburg: “Nauka,” 1998), ch. 7. For example, the state proscribed a special punishment for wives who killed their husbands, and this response illustrates it vividly, whereas men who murdered their wives because of giving correction did not face spousal murder as a specific crime, because their actions were incorporated under unpremeditated murder but often unpunished. Husbands received lesser sentences by claiming that the murder was not premeditated because premeditated homicide was punishable by execution. Atkinson, “Society and the Sexes,” 19; Kollmann, “The Extremes of Patriarchy,” 135-136. The English traveler Samuel Collins wrote in the late seventeenth century, “for in this case they have no Penal law for the killing of a Wife or Slave, if it happens upon correction.” Collins, The Present State of Russia, 9. According to the nineteenth-century Russian jurist Konstantin Nevolin, Collins’ observation was incorrect because he found a mid-seventeenth-century example of a husband who killed his wife ostensibly for adultery, who was sentenced to the knout and then remanded into care. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii K.A. Nevolina, 6 vols. (Saint Petersburg: V tipografii Eduarda Pratsa, 1857), v. III: Istoriia Rossiiskikh grazhdanskikh zakonov: 79; Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor istorii russkago prava, 444-445; Ikonnikov, Russkaia zhenshchina nakanune reformy Petra Velikogo i posle nee, 51. Kaiser asserts that husbands’ use of violence against wives in early seventeenth-century Russia was often “public,” in the sense that others often knew about it or at least claimed they did, despite the fact that many men considered it private because Russian men regarded their correction of their wives as a private act under their household authority, not subject to punishment from the state. Therefore, violence was both public and private, the former because it was widely known and the latter because violence against household subordinates, including wives, remained their right and the state tended not to intervene. Daniel Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private’: Spousal Violence and the State in Early Modern Russia,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 58 (2001): 135, 137. Any response from a wife led to state reprisal. In one 1836 case, Tihkon, a Cossack, died at the hands of his wife. While under interrogation and being tortured, a common part of interrogations, she admitted killing him, but asserted that she did it out of fear, based on his abuse. She claimed that “I had no more strength to live with him, he beat me all the time.” Despite her assertions that she had no conspirators and feared for her well being, she was executed, according to Kollmann, probably by burial. Her husband’s violent abuse in no way mitigated her crime of killing her husband and in so doing, questioning the gendered and hierarchical order. A wife never had the right to strike back at her husband. These laws existed in large part to maintain social stability, and because “the family was the key building block of Muscovite communities,” the law punished women severely who dared in any way, in particular violently almost regardless of circumstances, to question their husbands’ power over them. Kollmann, “The Extremes of Patriarchy,” 138, 140. The Ulozhenie of 1649 thus helped to initiate the intervention of public law into these situations as briefly discussed above. Church courts lost their monopoly on authority in issues of family violence, and they had been limited to fines or theoretically to authorize divorces, but could not punish physically and the state lacked specific laws to address and to punish. The Laws of Rus’-Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, trans. and ed. Daniel H. Kaiser (Salt Lake City: C. Schlacks, 1992), 42-50; Man’kov, Zakonodatel’stvo i pravo Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVII v., 200; Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private,’” 137. The fact that husbands who abused their wives faced minimal sanctions at most and were not subject to public law in addition to the tradition and culture of patriarchal power facilitated and legitimized husbands’ power and use of punishments. Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private,’” 137. Following the enactment of the Ulozhenie, the state began to intrude more directly in private life, intervening in church courts’ authority by placing state organs directly into jurisdiction over family violence. Thus, the state and the law began to address husbands’ mistreatment and even murder of their wives, but not to the same degree as wives who murdered their husbands nor was the sanction specifically for assaulting one’s wife. The law did not protect women from abuse and did little to limit a husband who sought to use discipline. Kollmann, “The Extremes of Patriarch,” 136-137. For example, men were punished by mutilation if they killed their wives for minor violations of a general character, whereas the law condemned him to a beating with the knout for killing her for adultery. Therefore, technically men faced consequences, and at time were punished for killing their wives; the law did not permit them to kill their wives, not even for adultery, but the prohibition was enforced specifically for premeditated killing. Husbands were theoretically allowed to send their wives to a monastery as punishment for adultery until the law was officially changed in 1845. On this issue, see N.L. Pushkareva, “Pozoryashchie nakazaniia dlya zhenshchin: istoki i posledstviia gendernoi asimmetrii v russkom traditsionnom i pisanom prave,” in Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI-XXI vv), eds. M.G. Muravyeva and N.L. Pushkareva (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2012), 22. Intent itself emerged as a primary issue with murder, and the 1669 criminal codex made this distinction clear. It also contained provisions addressing crimes and murder with a family. Man’kov, Zakonodatel’stvo i pravo Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVII v., 197, 200. These changes reflected the encroachment of the Muscovite state and courts into previously private life, a husband or father’s domain, and judges began to intrude “the public claims of the state at the expense of husbands’ private prerogatives,” and “…seventeenth-century judges took the first step toward breaking down the claims of privacy that had shielded abusive husbands from public punishment.” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii K.A. Nevolina, 6 vols. (Saint Petersburg: V tipografii Eduarda Pratsa, 1857), v. III: Istoriia Rossiiskikh grazhdanskikh zakonov: 79; Vladimirskii-Budanov, Obzor istorii russkago prava, 444-445; Ikonnikov, Russkaia zhenshchina nakanune reformy Petra Velikogo i posle nee, 51; Kaiser, “Invading the “’Private,’” 142. Nevertheless, even when punished, typically men were less harshly subjected than their female counterparts. The Ulozhenie prescribed that a wife received the punishment of burial up to her neck while still alive. Moreover, the code offered no mitigation or circumstances in the event of the homicide of a husband, “If a wife kills her husband, or feeds him poison, and that is established conclusively: punish her for that, bury her alive in the ground and punish her with that punishment without any mercy, even if the children of the killed [husband], or any other close relative of his, do not desire that she be executed. Do not show her the slightest mercy, and keep her in the ground until that time when she dies.” The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, Part 1: Text and Translation, trans. and ed., Richard Hellie (Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks Jr., Publisher, 1988), 221. She additionally was deprived of food and drink with a guard watching her. Weickhardt, “Legal Rights of Women in Russia,” 20; Atkinson, “Society and the Sexes in the Russian Past,” 19; Muravyeva, ”Povsednevnye praktiki nasiliia,” 68; Shashkov, Istoriia russkoi zhenshchiny, 156. The church often commuted the ‘execution by burial’ to one to three days of internment followed by the confinement to a monastery for life, if the woman survived the burial during that time, in an act that ostensibly illustrated Christian mercy. In 1689, beheading replaced burying alive, although burying alive remained in use. Regardless of the reason given for murdering husbands, the state penalized women with the death penalty until 1744, when the government revised the punishment to heavy labor in Siberia. Marianna Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality: Violence against Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture, ed. Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 227; Kollmann, “The Extremes of Patriarchy,” 134, 138. The church also illustrated its willingness to engage in violence as a form of punishment for actions detrimental to the social and religious order. In 1697, the Patriarch Adrian released instructions to the clergy in which unwed mothers were to be compelled to repent for their behavior, and face interrogations, after which they were “mercilessly beaten by slapping,” and then forced in chains to go to a convent. James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 96. Violence, if buttressing patriarchy, was deemed appropriate, but women’s violence against men, regardless of the situation, offered subversion of both the gendered and the social order, and therefore necessitated punishment to deter such acts, to deter “the ‘unnatural’ disorderliness of feminine violence. Courts in Russia were willing to accept that men acted violently with their wives but the reverse could never be justified. Regardless of the suffering a woman may have experienced, there was absolutely no legal basis for wifely violence against a husband. The 1637 case of a Russian woman who killed her husband highlights this inescapable fact. This woman, Dunka, acknowledged her guilt but asserted that she had killed him without malice of forethought or any accomplices, but simply out of self-preservation. She had no options under current law to end his abuse. According to Kaiser, while the surviving records do not indicate the final decision, it is clear that she was executed because she had murdered her husband and abuse of any type did not serve as a legally mitigating factor, although her pregnancy, unknown in Moscow until after the execution, led to considerations about pregnant women facing execution. The case is discussed in more detail in Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private,’” 138-139; Kollmann, “The Extremes of Patriarchy,” 139; N.E. Nosov, Zakonodatel’nye akty Russkogo gosudasrstva vtoroi poloviny XVI-pervoi poloviny XVII veka: Teksty (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1986), no. 244. In another case, an Udmurt woman named Oksa suffered beatings for several weeks from her new husband. She killed him in 1736, when she fought back to defend herself. The trial judges followed the law and sentenced her to death, although, in an unusual twist, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in a monastery because she converted to Christiantiy at the bequest of a Church official who intervened in the case. Muravyeva, FIND SOURCE, . Men could face some possible legal repercussions, although infrequent, but even when they did, they often readily acknowledged beating their wives even in the small percentage of times they faced a court, but they justified their behavior as addressing the latters’ disobedience which acted as a catalyst, thereby usually legitimizing to the courts their actions. Women however could not so easily admit violence against their husbands, because they lacked grounds for striking their husbands; they did not have this right of correction. Hunt, “Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” 18; Nada Boškovska, Die russische Frau im 17. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 76. Such a gender difference in the treatment of husbands and wives demonstrates vividly the unfavorable position of women caught in a patriarchal trap of obedience and humility. Such distinctions between punishments for husbands and wives for spousal murder were not unique to Russia. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ch. 1. For example in England from a statute enacted in 1352 until its abrogation in 1828, a wife who committed the willful murder of a husband was charged with petty treason, a crime at microcosm analogous to an attack on the king or queen. This law defined this act as personal treachery, as the wife attacked divinely sanctioned hierarchy, even if in response to spousal violence. Miller, Transformations of Patriarcy in the West, 19. It manifested disorder and disobedience, thereby challenging the authority of superiors over subordinates. A justice of the peace explained the distinction between uxoricide as a crime of simple murder, not treason: “for that the one is in subjection and oweth obedience, and not the other.” The punishment for defying the hierarchal and gendered order was being “burnt to ashes,” i.e., burnt at the stake, the identical punishment for women charged with high treason. Uxoricide however did not engender the same fears, nor was it deemed as treacherous because it did not challenge the gendered order and hierarchy, and could even be mitigated by the husband’s duties as head of the household. Cited in Dolan, “’Home-Rebels and House Traitors,’” 4. Murder of a husband thus had political and public significance far beyond that of uxoricide. Moreover, as Walker has asserted in her study of early modern England, what was “[c]rucial,” was the “then notion of natural authority. Men’s domestic violence was perceived as an extension of their nature and expected role; women’s martial violence was a manifestation of unnaturalness [italics in original]. Whereas male violence was sanctioned to uphold household order, female violence subverted it. Husband-murder was a ‘radical disobedience to social order;’ Uxoricide was not.” Men could be and often were punished, because while correction was accepted in England during these centuries, it only did mitigate, not in practice excuse uxoricide, which distinguished English criminal law from Russian law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Amussen, “’Being Unstirred to Much Unquietness,’” 75; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, 49-50, 138, 140; Dolan, “’Home-Rebels and House Traitors,’” 4-5. By the reign of Peter the Great during his transformations of Russia in the early eighteenth century, his officials debated issues related to spousal assault during their work on compiling a new law code, which was never completed. During these sessions they discussed the legal responses in the event that a wife assaulted her husband; the state was supposed to submit the case to the highest ecclesiastical court, i.e., the recently created Holy Synod as grounds for divorce. In the opposite situation, when a husband “tyrannically assaults his wife,” then the case would be handled with the same severity as an attack against a stranger (the punishment for assault differed based on the character of injuries, for example, but included corporal punishment, imprisonment, and payment of a fine). If a wife injured her husband, however, they punished her with an immediate dispatch to a spinning mill for penal labor, the specific punishment reserved for female offenders. Premeditated murder of one’s husband or wife, however, earned the death penalty although, as mentioned, men could and did avoid this sentence. RGADA 342/1/33-II, ff. 268-268 rev. As the eighteenth century passed and the nineteenth century emerged, however, imperial law became more invasive in marriage and married life, in large part based on the church’s stiffening of its position concerning the sacral nature of marriage, which, while not new, its capacity to enforce became more effective. Law defined clearly the rights and responsibilities of each spouse, including mandating that they must cohabitate, except when the government exiled the husband. A wife technically could not even leave her husband’s home for a short time to stay somewhere else without his explicit approval. Moreover, he had the right to demand complete obedience from her as long as he did not ask her to break the law. Although parental authority remained over daughters even after marriage, family law enshrined clearly a husband’s power over the wife, even superseding that of her parents. The Senate ruled in 1802 that a person cannot be under the unlimited power of two different authorities, hence a daughter, even one who lived at her parents’ home, must obe her husband above all other individuals. This decision carried over into the Digest of Laws where it read, “A wife is obligated to obey first of all the will of her husband, although with that she is not liberated from her obligations in her relationship to her parents. With these legal rights came responsibilities. A husband was legally bound to take care of his wife. As has been illustrated, the legal requirements often varied from the daily lives of spouses. D.I. Meier, Russkoe grazhdanskoe pravo, ninth edition (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Merkusheva, 1910), 572; cited in Nevolin, Polnoe sobranie sochineii, III: 83. Based on this understanding, the spousal relationship placed the responsibility on the husband to take care of the economic needs of the wife and, in return, the wife was obligated to be obedient and show humility towards her husband. This relationship mirrored that of a subject, who was supposed to obey the state’s orders and suffer patiently the punishment for disobedience, as in the well-ordered police state. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 79-130; Amussen, An Ordered Society, 36-45; Mark Raeff, Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). The full onus of religion, civil law, and custom endowed the husband and father with almost total power in the early modern household. In Europe, for example, some Protestant and Catholic thinkers were beginning to instruct restraint in the use of force for the patriarch to maintain his authority, yet they endorsed the occasional use of some form of corporal punishment when necessary to undergird that authority. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 132. Biblical authority shaped such thoughts, based on St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Indeed, the Orthodox wedding service instructed the couple of their future responsibilities toward each other and emphatically pronounced their unity: For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word […] In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself…each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. “Ephysians,” 5:22-33. Thus the church offered its vision to its Orthodox members from biblical authority. Moreover, early modern Europeans tended to see women as passive and unengaged before male violence thereby limiting women’s options to defend themselves. These perceptions however could also offer empowerment to women. Because Christianity proffered a message in which “suffering was redemptive and valuable,” and “constructed the qualities of idealized femininity—the passive acceptance of suffering, humility, and meekness—as victimhood.” Such an image of “vulnerability and passive suffering implied feminine virtue and evoked a certain pathos.” Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, 50. The institutions of the Church played less of a role than how many women themselves understood their faith and how proper conduct could serve as a weapon against their abuser in addition to establishing motives for their actions, regardless of societal views; the use of religion offered possibly sanctioned rationales for their actions. During the early nineteenth century, the wives of the exiled Decembrists, for example, many of whom accompanied their husbands to Siberia, also offered an example of women who sought to recast themselves as dutiful wives by offering their adherence to the Orthodox Church’s canons, based on its advocacy of the sacramental nature of the institution. In this way, they defended themselves against the charges of abandoning their children whom Nicholas I compelled them to leave behind if they accompanied their husbands. Some later saw these women as continuing in the self-abnegating tradition of the memoirist Natalya Dolgorukova who had followed her fiancé, then husband into exile in the reign of Elizabeth. See Catriona Kelly, A History of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820-1992 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994), 49-50. They offered their own vision of their departure for Siberia to undermine the state’s vilification of the Decembrists and their collaborators as traitors, and as women who renounced their sacred duty as mothers before the more sacred role as wives based on church and biblical authority. They accepted marriage as a lifelong sacrament, echoing the church, thus promoting the sanctity of marriage, but combined with affective relations between spouses. They portrayed marriage and domesticity as products of religion and love. Anna Biel, “Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty: The Representations of the Decembrists’ Wives in Russian Culture, 1825-Present,” (Ph.D. dissertation: University at Albany, State University of New York, 2011), 4, 17, 61-62, 103. The government however offered them the opportunity to divorce based on imperial law that enabled spouses to divorce state criminals sentenced to Siberia, as noted in an 1828 letter from the head of the Third Section to the tsar. This letter from Alexander Benkendorf from 7 November 1828, originally found at GARF, f. 109, 1 eksp., 1826, d. 61, ch. 4 (2), l. 52; part of the letter may also be found in Biel, “Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty,” 112. The state and church’s conceptions of women’s roles were not identical and these women used these differences to their advantage. Similar to ideas about the significance of affective ties in marriage, critiques of domestic violence in Russia originated in the late eighteenth century, in part the consequence of Enlightenment ideas that redefined the relations both of men and women and of ruler and ruled. Daniel Kaiser, “Invading the ‘Private’: Spousal Violence and the State in Early Modern Russia,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 58 (2001): 135-142. The ideals gleaned from the Enlightenment and recent literary, artistic trends offered a new model of domestic felicity and connubial love, in essence in marriage rendering physical violence more distasteful. Stone suggests that in England by 1780 ideals of romantic love and the popularity of the romantic novel indicate that marriage based on romantic love were acceptable, and even endorsed among the elite classes. These novels became commonplace on the library shelves of the educated public, offering images of passion and love between spouses. Such writings affected the educated elite in many ways, and abuse and violence in marriage and in the public did not stand up to this image of love, thus they used Enlightenment critiques of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of political authority, expecting rulers to adhere to the rule of law and tradition, and attacking despotism, anathema to many of these elites who rejected the arbitrariness and hence illegitimacy of such authority. The macrocosm of the ruler’s illegitimate behavior offered a critique of the domestic sphere and the prevalence of arbitrary, despotic behavior in the private sphere. By the late eighteenth century, the domestic sphere, just as the elite hoped the state would become, was being recasted as a realm of virtue. Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, 284; Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater, 66-67. Such emerging beliefs influenced the educated elite who encountered or read about the so-called “barbaric peoples” in the periphery of the empire. Many of the educated elite in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries interpreted their own culture and country as superior to the various “others,” the uncivilized, or even as children, whom the civilized elite Russians were to educate. For example, an educated Russian man treated a Russian woman with respect and love, and thus were models of virtue and Europeanized masculinity. They linked their notions of progress with companionate marriage. From this assumption, “women’s place in society stood as an index of civilization…” The belief here was only civilized, that is European men, “knew how to treat women.” Writing about the British Empire, Levine asserts that “[t]he behavior, the demeanor, and the position of women thus became a fulcrum by which the British measured and judged those they colonized. Women became an index and a measure less of themselves than of the men and of societies.” Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Centry,” in Gender and Empire (The Oxford History of the British Empire), ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51; Philippa Levine, “Introduction: Why Gender and Empire?” in Gender and Empire (The Oxford History of the British Empire), ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. Similarly, English thinkers believed that “[t]he tenderness with which women were treated in England…were the mark of England’s advanced state of civilization, and the brightest ornament of that civilization was its ‘domestic virtue.’” Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 151. Similar ideas fit the “civilizing” and “European” Russian Empire, although Russia was in the mediating position as both civilized and civilizer, learning to be European from the West and bringing civilization to the benighted peoples in its empire. Thus, it observed the “others” behaving poorly with their native women, illustrating their primitiveness, and thus they could not be European until civilized. Moreover, for educated Russians living among these indigenous peoples, they often conceived of these people as lacking civilization, as savages and also alien. As Slezkine wrote, “if not having European traits made an alien savage, then sharing certain traits with an alien could be very embarrassing.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 118. See also Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small People of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 57-59. Another scholar noted the same perceptions and efforts in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century as Russian writers sought numerous ways to Russianize-cum-Europeanize the local populations there, focusing on “cases that involved violence against women and children…,” as only the civilizing force of the empire could show the proper masculinity to the men in the region. Although the imperial state did not intervene in local family life as vigorously as some writers wanted, “tsarist commentators had nothing but derision for Caucasian gender politics, they championed Russian treatment of women and children as a model, emphasizing companionate marriages, a peaceful family life, and the benefits of a peaceful Christian religion-Orthodoxy.” Kristine Collins-Breyfogle, “Negotiating Imperial Spaces: Gender, Sexuality & Violence in the Nineteenth-Century Caucasus,” (Ph.D. diss.: The Ohio State University, 2011), 14, 2-3, 26-30. The Russian church, state, and society by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century endorsed the belief that men avoid employing physical violence against their wives; they should instead use reasonable methods, for example admonitions and other similar approaches to guide their wives. Peter the Great had profoundly altered and expanded the links with Western cultures, ideas, and even people, and despite his own brutality, had begun the process of the introduction of gentility and new social manners and familial ties, all of which he himself endorsed. As the author of an article about women in Damskii zhurnal (The Ladies’ Journal) emphasized repeatedly in 1827, women were the loving and emotional centers of society and the family. Men owe them gentility in life and all that is best in it because women offer men a true loving companion. “O zhenshchinakh,” Damskii Zhurnal XX, 23 (December 1827): 165-169. Mid-nineteenth century educated society regarded a man’s gentility as based most importantly on his treatment of his wife. The cultivated man was to show respect to and to act with restraint with his wife. Regardless of a wife’s actions, an educated, civilized man should never physically assault her. Such a man served as a model for the future of Russia, a marker of civilization who portended Russia’s belonging to the West. Such restraint differentiated him from a man of the lower classes and backwards civilizations. Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound, 104. In the church journal, Khrestianskoe chtenie, an anonymous writer asserted in 1824 that Christianity endorses mutual love and ensures peace and virtue, but later, the author elucidates if mutual love is lacking, then spouses must bear the marriage with patience and indulgence. “Beseda o vzaimnykh obyazannostyakh myzhy i zheny,” Khrestianskoe chtenie, 1: 420-421. Accompanying these views was that husbands should not abuse their wives as a moral principal, contrary to nature and the teachings of the church. While the church revisited its conception of spousal relations as complementary and supported strongly an affective relationship, it did not base such views on the changing sense in part of the West that marriage was increasingly seen as a contract, but firmly entrenched in the sacralization of marriage. Thus the church could simultaneously almost prohibit divorce for the Empire’s Orthodox subjects, yet offer advice on felicitous relationships without providing much if any assistance in the case of discordant marriages, beyond counseling and enjoining the husband to stop as will be analyzed next. Husbands’ actual, severe behavior often contradicted these very expectations of gentility and spousal respect, and probably played a role in the increasing number of petitions with complaints from wives to diocesan authorities by the second quarter of the nineteenth century to address their husbands’ unseemly behavior toward them, for example embezzling their wives’ property, physical assaults, or abandoning the family without the means to survive. Because of these limited possibilities and the duration and uncertainty of divorce petitions, many women began to submit petitions of complaints against their husbands, or, to seek redress by placing criminal charges against their husbands based on maiming or severe injuries. On the increasing numbers of petitions based on husbands’ uncivilized behavior, see V.A. Veremenko, “Semeinye nesoglasiia i razdel’noe zhitel’stvo suprugov: problema zakonodatel’nogo regulirovaniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka,” Dialog so vremenem 18 (2007): 328. Based in part on these changing expectations of gentility and more refined, civilized behavior from men, there emerged an increase in requests to various organs, both local and national, such as the Synod and police from elite women to seek some protection against their husbands’ cruelty and violence. The Third Section received anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 petition annually by the 1840s, covering a number of requests from traveling abroad to trade contracts to family problems. Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 89. The following example from a petition to the Third Section illustrates the expectations of noblewomen about their husbands by the early nineteenth century. Nadezhda Stakhovicheva requested assistance from Nicholas’ gendarmerie in 1835. She lamented her husband’s ill-treatment of her and directly attacked his behavior as befitting the benighted masses. She articulated that his actions were reminiscent of the “kind of cruel treatment that would be reprehensible even in someone of the lower orders.” Cited in Engel, Breaking the Ties that Bound, 104; Zanegina, “Osobennosti muzha i zheny v dvorianskikh sem’iakh Rossii v kontsa XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v.,” 64-77. As Muravyeva has suggested, Stahkovicheva’s complaint illustrated that if a noble man behaved in a way indicative of the lower classes, or even extraordinary by such a low standard, such actiions could only be explained by “acceptable discourses of deviancy.” Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality,” 232. It simply did not correspond to the accepted normative lives of civilized Russian men. The Holy Synod, the dioceses, and the gendarmes often proved unwilling or even helpless to intervene to correct these problems following the submission of a petition. In response to this flurry of petitions, the Synod sent instructions in which it manifested the church’s inability to do much more than ask the spouses to reconcile and to stop the abusive behavior. The church, however it may have admonished men not to abuse wives, offered little more than counseling to the couple, if accepted, and repeating to women to have patience if their husbands abused them, but officially it rendered no direct assistance. Thus, women who found themselves in abusive marriages also then had an unusual relationship with the Orthodox Church for these very reasons. If the efforts of the priest failed, or the accused did not even show (a common problem), then the Synod ordered the diocese to pass the case and information to the civil authorities, usually to the police or even to the governor depending on the social estate of the accused. These cases fell into a bureaucratic circle because nineteenth-century Russian law proscribed the police from interfering in cases of spousal discord until it reached an actual prosecutable crime, such as murder, and often women refused to seek prosecution for a number of reasons, be they financial or the power of acculturation and social pressure. Thus, upon receiving the information from the diocese, the police were obligated to return the case to the diocese, and the petition often found its way in various government organs. In one case, E.E. Burtaeva petitioned to subdue or pacify her husband V. Burtaev’s brutal behavior. Numerous government agencies reviewed this request, including the Saint Petersburg Consistory twice, and she received no results from any of them. Veremenko, “Semeinye nesoglasiia i razdel’noe zhitel’stvo suprugov,” 329; from RGIA, f. 1261, opis’ 1, d. 88, g. 1841, ll. 104. Because of the ambiguities of jurisdiction and the inability to respond to marital discord effectively, the Synod in the mid-nineteenth century requested a clarification from the Ministry of Justice and the Second Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancery, in order to delineate which cases fell under the purview of the religious officials, and which were under jurisdiction of the secular authorities. “The church, sanctifying marriage, can end one by means of its courts, in cases of the destruction of the sanctity of marriage because of adultery, because of the transgression against purity and marital felicity, in the hope of correcting, to purify and to heal through repentance and penances, the discordant spouses, or the aggrieved one with an exhortation to reconcile with their spouses.” The Synod however was unsure what to do in non-divorce cases except exhortations. It thus requested from the responsible secular authorities what their roles were in cases of marital abuse when the church failed to resolve the problems. It therefore wanted the secular authorities to exercise “the executive power” at their disposal because “all these actions are violations of public order.” In response, however, both the chief of the Second Section Count D.N. Bludov and the Minister of Justice V.N. Panin rejected acting on the request to establish procedures and a law that would enable the government to inteverene in family matters, as both officials regarded it “as impossible to enter into any type of instructions on the subject of these relationships.” Excerpts from the Holy Synod’s letters and the response originally in RGIA, f. 1261, opis 1, d. 88, ll. 7, 42-44, cited in Veremenko, “Semeinye nesoglasiia i razdel’noe zhitel’stvo suprugov,” 330. As is illustrated above, despite the commonality of violence and abuse within families, the police and judicial organs preferred not to act even if charges were filed for numerous reasons, including because patriarchy retained a powerful legitimacy, and they only acted at all if the attacks exceeded and thus undermined so-called legitimacy of correction. Veremenko, “Semeinye nesoglasiia i razdel’noe zhitel’stvo suprugov,” 329; M.I. Kulisher, Razvod i polozhenie zhenshchin (Saint Petersburg: Tipo-lit. B.M. Vol’fa, 1896), 148-153, 178-183. Moreover, few wives sought prosecution because a husband’s arrest deprived a family of its primary source of both financial support and labor in addition to the reality that once the husband completed his sentence, the wife once again was compelled by law to reside with him. The Senate had ruled earlier that personal offenses between spouses were not punishable, but the use of violence could be punishable based on specific acts leading to arbitrariness. For example, husbands’ authority was so extensive over wives that they even had the right to act violently in someone else’s home to return their wives if they were living there. Kulisher, Razvod i polozhenie zhenshchin, 148-153, 178-183; Orshanskii, “Lichnie i imushchestvennye suprugov,” 18-21, 52-65; Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia, 144. Thus, the Church and the state refused to help them with ameliorating the abuses until it became close to fatal. Implicit within the underlying perception of the role of a husband was that he was honor-bound to treat his wife well and certainly not to abuse her as a moral principal. These beliefs fit into the emerging concepts of companionate marriages. As Levine suggests, such marriages may be understood as a means “to distinguish between marriages in which women were a commodity and an investment to their husbands and those – dubbed companionate – in which affection and companionship were key components.” Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, ix-x. Thus, affective ties and a partnership of spouses, although not equality, defined in part emerging from the Enlightenment ideals, novels, especially Sentimental and Romantic, both of which also showed the significance of the mother’s influence on her children, and the church’s own evolving views. Nevertheless, there was no contradiction between the idea of patriarchal and companionate marriage. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, similar beliefs were found within the tsarist bureaucracy. Numerous officials endorsed the view that gentlemanly behavior toward women helped to establish the larger moral tone of Russia. They furthermore connected such ignoble behavior of wife-beating with the lack of culture and civilization of the lower classes, whose actions distinguished them from the elite. Russian officials accepted these ideas through a class prism. Violent behavior was expected among lower-class husbands, typical among such unruly, benighted people, as opposed to anathema among the elite where wives had the right to expect gentility, and such behavior was nothing other than abusive. Engel, Breaking the Ties That Bound, 121; Muravyeva, “Between Law and Morality,” 229. This perception is clear in the words of the mid-nineteenth-century Minister of the Interior Peter Valuev, who asserted: “it is well known that among the lower and in part, among the middle estates women do not enjoy the respect that they deserve. Even husbands do not perceive their wives as equals but frequently consider them slaves and treat them cruelly.” As Abby Schrader also contends, such officials saw a direct link between the domestic sphere and progress in Russia because the latter was connected to the public sphere, and as she notes, “assuming that women’s role was primarily familial—authorities suggested that freeing women from floggings would have ‘positive consequences for the family and society.’” Despite such considerations, they resolved not to act because of a profoundly felt reticence of involving the state too deeply into domestic life, especially the elite’s relations. Nevertheless, these officials thus linked addressing domestic violence to their larger civilizing efforts. Cited in Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 164-165. The 1827 letter of Ekaterina Trubetskaia, the first Decembrist wife to follow her husband to Siberia, to the governor of Irkutsk illustrates numerous issues of understanding of marriage in the early nineteenth century among the educated elite. It shows a calculus of marriage predicated on love combined with religiously sanctioned marital duty, as an explanation as to why these women left behind their privileges and families to follow their spouses to Siberia. The state, in its actions, was consciously and intentionally attacking the Christian belief in both the sacrament of marriage and loving relations by forcing wives to choose between their children and husbands: The feeling of love for my Friend compelled me, with greatest impatience, to wish to join him…To leave my husband, with whom I had been so happy for five years, to return to Russia, and live there in the circle of my family with all external comfort but with a dead heart—or, out of love for him, to surrender all the comforts of the world with a clear and calm conscience, to subject myself voluntarily to new humiliation, poverty, and all countless difficulties of his miserable situation—in the hope that, sharing his suffering, I could sometimes alleviate his grief, even if slightly, with my love?...But even if my feelings for my husband were different, there would be even more important reasons which would compel me to make this decision. Our Church regards marriage as a sacrament and nothing can tear apart a marital union. A wife must always share her husband’s fate, in happiness and in sorrow; no circumstance can serve her as an excuse not to perform her most sacred duty. The letter is found in M.P. Alekseev, B.S. Meilakh, eds., Dekabristy i ikh vremia. Materialy i soobshcheniia (Moscow, Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1951), 215-216.) Thus, she portrayed marriage and the deep emotional attachment she had to her husband, causing her to leave behind everyone else, and she cites specifically both her Christian and wifely duties. Some women used these opportunities, coupled with some established custom and societal support, to show their agency, which, despite its fragility, also offered them a powerful ability to live as they chose, even within circumscribed options. Trubetskaia’s appeal to the governor vividly demonstrates how deeply inculcated into her mind “the idea of the sanctity of marriage and of the supremacy of marital duties” was. Through this approach, they offered their own version of the ideal wife, who, following religious convictions and emotional love for her husband, sacrificed everything for him. Biel, “Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty,” 109, 138. In addition, for some women, their patriarchy, faith, and its requisite decorum offered them opportunities to acquire patrons and family members who could intercede in a variety of ways against abusive spouses. According to Wirtschafter, patriarchy had a certain value to those who accepted it, because “it impose[d] control on potentially explosive social relationships. By articulating a moral idea of obedience, duty, and obligation, patriarchy created the basis for good order in the family and by extension in society at large.” Indeed, she added that patriarchy should not be understood simply as “a mechanism for imposing male dominance and female subjugation, though this might be one of the results. Patriarchy developed as an institution designed to reconcile individual desires with social order. By organizing household relationships around the principles of obedience, duty, and obligation, patriarchy effectively harnessed human passions in the interest of the shared good.” Thus it linked the individual and their welfare to their family, and ultimately to the state and society. Wirtschafter, Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 6-7. Moreover, patriarchy could and did serve noble women well in some ways. First and foremost, it could provide them both material support and security of social place in the hierarchy of the society and the family for those who accepted the obligations of service to the empire as a wife and mother. Second, patriarchy offered the latent possibility of an active social life and a chance in the future to manage a family and its interests in partnership with a powerful, benevolent husband in the role of his junior partner. Robin Bisha, “The Promise of Patriarchy: Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1993),” 222-223. Nevertheless, it also led to numerous problems and arbitrariness as noted next. The well-known Anna Labzina story illustrates another example of the use of faith as a source of gendered power and limitations. In her memoirs, she tells a story vividly illustrating the role of religious belief and societal expectations and how they both circumscribed noble women’s activities and behaviors and how they could also serve as a means to alleviate some of the worst excesses of abuse and proffer at least some means of assistance. Moreover, as Marker has observed, her religious perspective played an invaluable role, not as a means to reject the Enlightenment, but to engage it, to help her “to situate herself in a world that was not of her making,” but it helped her “to make sense of it on her terms.” In other words she employed her faith as a means to engage the world around her, to employ “female agency,” not simply “a guide to silent suffering and obedience. Gary Marker, “God of our Mothers: Reflection on Lay Female Spirituality in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, 193-209 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University University Press, 2003), 209. Labzina encountered a world, at times complex and torturous for her, by using her faith as a medium through which not only to survive but to live in that world. She found a means to live her own way, even if defined in large part by her gender, estate, and circumstances. Labzina entered an arranged marriage when she was only thirteen because her mother was dying and her father had long since perished. While thirteen was quite young, it was legal and it was common for a bride to be younger than her husband, for a number of reasons, including the likelihood that a much younger bride was more likely to be obedient because of her youth and inexperience. Pervushina, Peterburgskie zhenshchiny XIX veka, 251. Her mother informed her about marriage and wifely duties on the day of her wedding. She told her that once married, “You will no longer be dependent upon me, but upon your husband and your mother-in-law, to whom you owe unbounded obedience and true love . . . obey him [husband] in everything; you will not be submitting to him but to God, for God has given him to you and made him your master. If he is cruel to you, then you will bear it all patiently and oblige him. Don’t complain to anyone.” Her family and friends agreed that it was her sacred duty to be obedient to her husband. The last endorsed similar views, instructing her shortly after the marriage that “From now on your love should be all mine, and you should give no thought to anything but how to please me. You now live for me and for no others.” Anna Labzina, Days of a Russian Noblewoman: The Memories of Anna Labzina, 1758-1821, translated and edited by Gary Marker and Rachel May (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 23, 24. Shortly after Labzina’s mother’s death, her aunt offered parting words of advice that echoed these sentiments: “You must unfailingly and obediently submit to all experiences that your husband imposes upon you. By your own submission and obedience you shall win his love…you should already be living under his laws. We have done the same for our husbands. You already know how great and sacred is your obligation to your husband, so, when your carry this out, you shall be carrying out God’s law.” Labzina, Days of a Russian Noblewoman, 37-38. These views were common in the contemporary noble culture, as one moralist asserted that even if a husband were wrong, a wife must use only prudence and meekness to help him, but she cannot resist him. Ivan F. Bogdanovich, O vospitanii iunoshestva (Moscow, 1807), 222. Such ideas continued into the nineteenth century, as Praskovi’a Tatlina, née Alexeeva, acknowledged that after she married her husband, he replaced her father as her guardian: “I transitioned from the guardianship of my father to the guardianship of my husband, who said that he loved me.” Praskovia Tatlina, “Vospominaniia Praskovi’i Nikolaevny Tatlinoi,” Russkii arkhiv 37, 10 (October 1899): 198. Such sentiments illustrated that affective ties were important, but this perception of guardianship sacralized patriarchy. Labzina’s husband sought to debase and to corrupt her during their marriage, challenging her religious views and mocking them, thus visiting much suffering upon Labzina. She, however, followed her family’s advice, found solace in her religion, despite his contempt for it, and received encouragement and support from a number of people because she lived by what she regarded as correct behavior and humility as a means of strength. Her husband’s boss while they lived in the capital, the vice president of the College of Mines and the poet Mikhail Matveevich Kheraskov, served as her benefactor, but under specific conditions which he gave her, thus illustrating a hierarchical relationship similar to a father and daughter, demanding from her “complete obedience, submissiveness, humility, meekness, and patience,” requiring her “not [to] take any independent actions, but simply listen, stay silent, and obey.” Several years later on the eve of Kheraskov’s departure, he offered her paternalistic advice because he was well aware of her husband’s libertine proclivities and the importance of virtue for her as he understood it: “I request…that you be virtuous and that you conduct yourself so that he cannot reproach you for anything, and that you uphold his good name and honor. His behavior will not bring shame on your or besmirch your honor, but rather it will elevate your virtue and make everyone respect you more. If you stumble and enter into vice, however, you will bring dishonor to him and yourself, and you will be debased before everyone.” He ended his dissertation with the importance of faith, asserting “…you will still have what is most precious to you, your virtue, and our Savior will not fail to reward you. He will grant you strength and fortitude, but you must not abandon Him and must always ask His help.” His advice offered her some solace; Labzina however also had to endure mental anguish as well and ultimately the support others offered typically only served her for a short time. Only her husband’s death liberated her from his tyranny. As mentioned previously, as a noble woman she had to face the realities of being a woman and a wife, both of which left her few options. According to Nadezhda Durova, the early nineteenth-century cavalry maiden, her mother described women’s position as a form of slavery: “She spoke to me in the most terrible ways about the fate of this sex. A woman’s lot in her opinion s was to live and die in slavery.” N.A. Durova, Izbrannye sochineniia kavalerist – devitsy N.A. Durovoi (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1988), 34. The emerging and growing opposition by the late eighteenth century among the educated elite to overt physical violence was manifested as well in states’ penal policies and exemptions from corporal punishment, and led some to circumscribe the death penalty. Elizabeth had abolished the death penalty in 1753 although as Engelstein asserted, it was ambiguous if she intended to abolish it absolutely or to allow it as a policy of last resort. Catherine the Great, for example, endorsed legislation that exempted the nobility, clergy, and merchants from corporal punishment as a product of their social status. She also addressed exempting women and raising the age of raising the age of majority, thus exempting more young people from corporal punishment. These decisions by the two empresses illustrated that Russia, regardless if the death penaly and corporal punishment remained in use or that subjects in the empire still experienced various forms of violence whether public or private, was beginning to enter the European family of civilized nations where the rule of law had begun to govern. Engelstein, “Weapon of the Weak,” 685; Schrader, Languages of the Lash, introduction, chs. 1-2. Therefore, the legal and moral discourses endorsed and buttressed patriarchy and the concomitant submissive position of women in the family; men in turn were supposed to manifest calm behavior and not abuse their wives. The reality frequently contradicted this image. Physical violence in addition to other forms of correction were used to discipline wives; because men had a historically and culturally accepted right to punish and correct their wives, they only needed to present an ostensibly proper cause. Women were not allowed to respond. According to culture, custom, and even religion, they were supposed to suffer patiently and to ask for help from the authorities, preferably clerical, but even secular, or both, before applying for divorce, although this option was attenuated except for among the elite by the late eighteenth century. The ecclesiastical authorities were obligated to oversee spousal relations and punish abusers by inflicting penances, which were meant to prevent abuse and maintain the stability of the family union and proper social order, although with mixed success at best. Veremenko, “Semeinye nesoglasiia i razdel’noe zhitel’stvo suprugov,” 329. Both men and women often cited jealousy to explain attempted and successful spousal murder. Nevertheless, gender differences were evident not only in the punishments as explained earlier, but in the defenses as well. Most prominently, husbands often charged their wives with committing adultery as a means to legitimize the attempt at killing or the actual killing. The case of a deacon accused of murdering his wife in 1717 illustrates these issues. He testified that his wife failed to discharge her duties because she was a drunkard in addition to being a thief, whereas he fulfilled his duties in the household. He admitted stabbing his wife, but claimed that they began their quarrel over the fact that she had returned home drunk again, while he was working. Then he told her that she had to return some shirts that she had stolen from the priest with whom they had resided earlier. His wife, according to the deacon, refused to listen to him, so they entered into a quarrel. He asserted that he sought to fulfill his role as head of the household to correct her immoral and inappropriate behavior for the above-cited reasons in addition to his charges that she was an adulterer who had infected him with a venereal disease. Thus, his actions were legitimate because he had not attacked her with malice of forethought. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 815, d. 2, l. 19. In another case, Andrei Protopopov assaulted his wife’s lover after finding them together in 1742. She tried to protect him, enabling her lover to escape. After the man fled, Protopopov fatally assaulted his wife with a stick and a whip. Following her death, local authorities were in a quandary what to do for two reasons. One, they were unsure, at least officially, what actually killed her, the attack or her epilepsy. Two, the local judiciary had to consult with the capital, because they were unsure what to do with a case in which a husband was charged with murdering his adulterous wife. Because it was clearly not premeditated, he was convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to serve a term of six months in a monastery. RGIA, 796/28/156. A wife who killed her husband fulfilled almost all theoretical requirements of wrongful violence. Such an action was believed to be the product of the disorder, disobedience, and the evil nature of women. In Russia during the seventeenth century, the authors of didactic literature and clergy in sermons frequently portrayed women in a dichotomy of the good and the evil, although even this division did not protect the former completely, because the very presence of women was pregnant with problems, first and foremost as temptations for men. Nevertheless, the first were good, entailing being an exemplar of Christian virtues, such as humility and obedience. The second were evil, who were independent, disobedient, prideful, and thus flouted patriarchal authority. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 53-59 Thus, the murder of a husband transgressed both moral and natural law as well as upset public peace and challenged the patriarchal order, and by extension state power, in the microcosm. Motive, nor intent were relevant, because neither fit an accepted category of excusable and justifiable killing. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender, and Social Order in Early Modern England, 140–143. The causes of spousal murder across all social classes were in fact connected directly to gender and were interconnected with the gender hierarchy. Philippa Maddern, Violence and the Social Order: East Anglia, 1422-1442 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Find page. Because severe beatings were common in the era and there was, as mentioned earlier, an unclear line for what was correction as opposed to abuse in addition to the authorities’ general lack of assistance, many tormented women faced the often dangerous consequences. In the event of the latter, if charged, husbands faced possible convictions of unpremeditated murder or manslaughter, but rarely murder. Many of the husbands whose wives had died during an altercation with them offered explanations based on available gendered discourses. They gave a picture of their dead wives as acting with impropriety, contradicting the social representation of the ideal femininity. Their wives allegedly were guilty of one more transgressions, for example, they committed adultery, drank to excess, failed to take care of their families, left the home without prior permission, and did not offer the requisite respect for their superiors, i.e., their husbands.