Tracing the problems of emancipation across the various estates, Jenny Kaminer probes the social position of women in the second half of the nineteenth century as a microcosm for Russia’s larger-scale reevaluation of social institutions, with an eye to the new opportunities for work and education available to women, as well as to the restrictive regimes, legal and otherwise, that informed the lives of Chekhov’s struggling and often unhappily married heroines.