WOMAN IN RUSSIA.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5180, 29 October 1877, Page 3

WOMAN IN RUSSIA.

(From the North American Review.) In the diverse conceptions of, woman’s claims and function encountered up and : down the scale of ranks in Russia, we have the most decisive proof of the moral dualism between the crust of refinement and culture superposed by Catherine 11. and the organic structure of old Muscovy. As regards the high society of St. Petersburg, or even the middle grades of the nobility, or of civil and military functionaries throughout the country, it is certain that the ladies are at least equal, perhaps superior, in breeding and education to the men. It is wholly otherwise in the trading and farming class, which constitutes the mass of the population, and whose ideas and customs keep the impress of Asiatic or Byzantine manners. Indeed, 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 precise features of indigenous Russian life which have most shocked foreign travellers from the sixteenth century up to our own day. It is to Herborstein, who disclosed to Continental Europe the interior of Muscovy, that we owe the familiar 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 movijik cannot be made to understand how his right to chastise his helpmate can be questioned, and when he is summoned for this offence before a magistrate serenely explains that the victim was his wife, his property. Here and there the popular songs bear traces of the griefs which in the rough furrows of daily life the Russian woman finds it prudent to conceal. “Ages have rolled away,” says the poet Nekrasof, “the whole face of the earth has brightened, only the sombre lot of the moiojih's wife God forgets to change.” And the same poet makes one of his heroines say, apropos of tlu; enfranchisement of the serfs, “God has forgotten the nook where he hid the keys of woman’s emancipation.” In a word, the wife of the Muscovite peasant seems to have been until recently the slave of a slave, and to have borne on her head the whole weight of a double edifice of servitude. Yet it may be that to rehabilitate her a little liberty and comfort would suffice, and probably 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, the mother of adult children, for instance, enjoying a certain consideration, and the management of the household being occasionally intrusted to the widow of the head. The progress of individualism and the development of a sentiment of personal dignity cannot but inure to the profit of the female sex, although thus far melioration in this direction is rather a hope than a fact.