WOMEN IN RUSSIA.

Clutha Leader, Volume III, Issue 152, 8 June 1877, Page 7

WOMEN IN RUSSIA.

The contempt for the female sex, and the debased condition of the wife, subjected to ignominious ceremonies at the time of her marriage, and to ignoble treatment on the part of her husband, are the features of indigenous Russian life which have most shocked foreign travellers from the sixteenth century up to our own day. It is to Herberstein, who revealed to Europe the interior ot Muscovy, that we owe the familar story of the Russian woman married to "a German who complained of her husband's frigidity because he had not once beaten her. There is a national proverb to the same effect, " Love your wife as your own soul, and beat her like your fur jacket." " A husband's cuffs leave no mark," is another adage put in a wife's mouth. Where such manners are consecrated by tradition, it is not to be expected that public opinion should recognise in blows and maltreatment an adequate ground of divorce. The ??ioujik cannot be made to understand how his right to chastise his helpmate can be questioned ; and when he is summoned for this offence before the magistrate, he serenely explains that the victim was his wife, his property. Here and there the popular songs bear traces of the griefs which, in the furrows of daily life, the Russian woman finds it prudent to conceal. "Ages have rolled away," says the poet Nedrasofj " the whole face ofthe earth has brightened, but the sombre lot of the mouplcs wife God forgets to change." And the same poet made one of his village heroines say, apropos of the enfranchisment of the serf: " God has forgotten the nook where he hid the keys of woman's emancipation." The truth is, that the wife of the Muscovite peasant was, until recently, the slave of a slave, and bore on her head the whole weight of a double edifice of servitude. Even now tha yoke is so heavy that to escape marital brutality not a few women have recourse to the murder of their domestic tyrant. We suspect, however, that the Russian woman has no", degenerated so far from " the strong and fair Slav type" as some malcontent poets have averred. To rehabilitate her, perhaps a little liberty and comfort would suffice. No doubt the freedom of the serf will in the end be complemented by the elevation of his companion. Already in some communes there are gleams of a new order j the mother of adult children for instance enjoying a certain consideration, and the management ofthe household being occasionally entrusted to the widow of the head. The progress of individualism and the sentiment of personal dignity must issue to the profit of the , female sex ; but thus far progress, it must be owned, is rather a hope than a fact. At present it is plain that the [ status of women in Russia is worse ' than is popularly supposed, whereas it 1 would be easy to show that in Turkey " and Mussulman countries generally it is ; somewhat better. — New York Sun.