It is difficult to generalise about the women of Russia, so much did their identity and experience vary according to their legally defined social status, religion and ethnicity, among other variables. To be sure, gender shaped key aspects of women’s lives. Until well into the nineteenth century, if not later, most shared virtually an identical lot in life: learning women’s duties at their mother’s knee, a marriage arranged by others, then childbearing, childrearing and the labour of maintaining the home and provisioning the family. Changes that began in the reign of Peter the Great nevertheless affected the ways that women understood and fulfilled those family responsibilities; while developments in the final decades of the nineteenth century challenged the family order that governed most women’s lives, and expanded and diversified alternative ways of living. Even so, beneath the developments traced in this chapter, fundamental continuities remained.

The Petrine revolution and its consequences

The period properly begins with the reign of Peter the Great, who brought a thoroughgoing revolution to aristocratic women’s lives and initiated economic, social and legal changes that touched the lives of many of the rest. As part of his Westernising project, and in order to mobilise his subjects to suit his needs, Peter the Great endeavoured to transform Russia’s traditional family regime. From the elites, he required new women, suitable consorts for the new men of the service elite and likewise modelled along Western lines. ‘Upper-class Muscovite women were driven from the seclusion of the terem, or women’s quarters, divested of their old-fashioned robes, squeezed into Western corsets and low-cut gowns and transformed into suitable companions for their “decent beardless” spouses.’