A Woman's Kingdom
Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861
Michelle Lamarche Marrese
A Woman's Kingdom
Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia, 1700–1861
Michelle Lamarche Marrese
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Description
In A Woman's Kingdom, Michelle Lamarche Marrese explores the development of Russian noblewomen's unusual property rights. In contrast to women in Western Europe, who could not control their assets during marriage until the second half of the...
This excellent book opens up the possibility of some fascinating comparisons. It illustrates, for example, how in comparison to the rest of Europe, Russia was both less bourgeois and less aristocratic.... Historians will note with interest Michelle Marrese's conclusion that female property rights were a uniquely Russian but by no means ancient phenomenon, and that they were indeed, as their advocates asserted, an important factor in enhancing the everyday freedom and life-chances of a large slice of Russian elite society.... In Professor Marrese's view, the advantages Russian noblewomen gained by control over property were far more than theoretical. They had a big impact on women's relative power, freedom and security in Russian elite society.... The place of property law within the whole Russian debate on modernization is a fascinating issue.
It is an immensely authoritative, comprehensive, and important study of value not only to Russian historians but also to all serious historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This is an important book, on an under-studied subject, and it makes a very valuable contribution to our knowledge of Russian women's history.
Marrese has carefully constructed her argument on an extraordinarily wide source base drawing from Moscow and four provincial archives: Vladimir, Kashin, Tambov, and Kursk. She has made judicial use of notarial records, records of the sale and purchase of serfs and estates, wills, dowries, deeds of separation, and petitions for divorce, along with memoirs and contemporary literature. It is difficult to find any flaw in her meticulous research.... Marrese places her argument in two significant broader contexts, that of Imperial Russian culture generally and women's property rights in Europe.
This pathbreaking analysis of noblewomen's control of property in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries uses an astounding range of regional and national archival sources to examine inheritance law, testamentary behavior,... and legal petitions and suits.... This book should be required reading for scholars and students in European history, women's history, women's studies and Russian history. Summing Up: Essential.
This study of noblewomen's control of property in Russia is an example of women's history at its best. It provides both a... study of Russian noblewomen's economic activity, thereby overcoming the tendency of many historians to ignore or make invisible women's role in this area, and it has important implications for the study of the Russian nobility as a whole. It is, thus, more than a corrective history of the 'marginal': rather it demands a rethinking of a whole noble culture of property, including attitudes of the Russian nobility to inheritance, to investment strategies, to the legal process, to the state, to corporate privileges for the nobility, and to a growing sense of individualism versus claims of the clan.
Michelle Lamarche Marrese is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto.