A Woman's Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700-1861 (review)

Michelle Marrese has written the definitive study of one of the most intriguing paradoxes in Russian history. In the 1813 painting that serves as her book’s striking dust jacket, an elegant D. A. Derzhavina, tiny lapdog on her arm, gestures proudly to a magnificent estate standing in the distance across a lush green landscape. Although Russia’s patriarchal family law imposed severe restrictions on women’s autonomy, its property and inheritance law protected the rights of women like Derzhavina to inherit, acquire, and alienate property in their own names, in marked contrast to the United States and Europe. What explains the expansion of Russian noblewomen’s property rights in the 18th century? Did those rights exist only on paper, as some historians have maintained, or did women like Derzhavina control and administer their estates themselves? How did noblewomen use their property? As Marrese methodically explores different aspects of noblewomen’s property ownership in law and practice, the confident expression on Derzhavina’s handsome face becomes entirely justified.

Meticulously researched and tightly argued, this first book shows how property and inheritance rights gave Russian noblewomen unequalled control over landed wealth, an active role in the economy, and significant authority over family and society. Marrese’s comparative context, informed by extensive knowledge of women’s property ownership in Europe and America, highlights Russian women’s unique status, whose explanation she finds not in gender ideologies but in the distinctive evolution of property and noble status in Russia. Law and property, she maintains, play central roles in shaping gender identities—not vice versa.

The first two chapters document legal changes that regularized, expanded and protected women’s inheritance and property rights. During the eighteenth century widows and daughters became entitled to a statutory share of their husbands’ and fathers’ estates, while a decree in 1753 “liberated” married women from “gender tutelage” and gave them independent control over property both brought to the marriage and acquired during it. The presence of four empresses on the Russian throne in the eighteenth century had nothing to do with these advances; nor, in fact, did women’s interests per se. Russian lawmakers almost completely disregarded gender in their decrees and rulings on property.

The elevation of women’s inheritance and property rights, Marrese argues, were the unintended consequences of efforts to protect the property rights of all nobles against encroachment by family members and the state. She emphasizes the psychology of an insecure nobility “traumatized” by long experience of arbitrary state action, and links noblewomen’s legal gains to the nobility’s wider struggle for corporate privileges and greater security. At the same time, Marrese credits individual noblewomen who petitioned and sued for greater control over their property. She may overstate the argument for noble agency behind these legal changes; it was primarily the Senate, courts and other government bodies who acted to expand noblewomen’s property rights, while the nobility itself seems mainly to have reacted by either evading or acquiescing to laws depending on their interests. Chapter 3, however, demonstrates that noblewomen used the courts successfully to defend their property against encroachment or misuse by their husbands. Although formal divorce was almost impossible to obtain until the late nineteenth century, the law of separate property facilitated informal separations from abusive or spendthrift husbands, and ameliorated women’s subordination in the family.

The remaining four chapters illuminate how noblewomen used their property rights. Given their subjugation in family law and custom, how much property did women actually possess, and how much control did they exercise over it? Marrese’s answers derive largely from the extraordinary database she constructed from the notarial records of eight thousand property transactions in four provincial districts and Moscow between 1715 and 1860. She demonstrates impressive linguistic, quantitative, and analytical skills in her use of this challenging evidence, and by analyzing transactions by both men and women, she is...