The Enigma of Married Women's Control of Property in Eighteenth‐Century Russia

Abstract

In his recital of the symptoms of moral decline at the eighteenth-century Russian court, Prince M. M. Shcherbatov drew particular attention to a 1753 decree granting married women control of their property. The impact of this innovation, he claimed, had been no less than to "loosen the bonds of matrimony." Shcherbatov represented the ruling as a radical break with tradition, and went on to attribute the deplorable change in women's legal status to imperial favoritism. "Count Pyotr Ivanovich Shuvalov needed to buy an estate, belonging to a certain Countess Golovin ... who lived apart from her husband, and hence could not secure his consent." At Shuvalov's suggestion, Shcherbatov claimed, "a decree was drawn up" that did away with "this sign of female subjugation." Shuvalov then "bought the estate and thus gave occasion for women to leave their husbands at will, to ruin their children, and having left their husbands, to ruin themselves." 1 Remarkably, with the exception of Shcherbatov, contemporaries passed over the 1753 ruling in silence. In striking contrast to Western Europe, where lawmakers adopted the married women's property acts only after prolonged and violent public debate, the transformation of women's relation to property in Russia inspired neither criticism nor commentary on the part of the elite. Not until the nineteenth century did the unique legal status of Russia's women become the subject of discussion among scholars, who noted the ironic disparity between Russia's archaic political and economic institutions and the relative emancipation of the female sex compared with their counterparts in Western Europe. While married women in England and France waited well into the nineteenth century before they were judged capable of controlling their assets, Russian noblewomen freely disposed of their fortunes after 1753, became active participants in the market for land the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1 Prince M. M. Shcherbatov, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, ed. and trans. A. Lentin (Cambridge, 1969), 219-21. The Russian Review 58 (July 1999): 380-95