Women in Russia have had a rich and varied history during numerous regimes over the centuries. Since Russian society is multicultural, the experiences of women in Russia vary significantly across ethnic, religious, and social lines. The life of an ethnic Russian woman can be dramatically different from the life of women in minority groups like the Bashkirs, and the life of a woman from a lower-class rural family can be different from the life of a woman from an upper-middle-class urban family. Nevertheless, a common historical and political context provides a framework for speaking about women in Russia in general.
History
Archaeological evidence suggests that the present day territory of Russia was inhabited since prehistoric times: 1.5-million-year-old Oldowan flint tools were discovered in the Dagestan Akusha region of the North Caucasus, demonstrating the presence of early humans in Russia from a very early time. The direct ancestors of Russians are the Eastern Slavs and the Finnic peoples. For most of the 20th century, the history of Russia is essentially that of the Soviet Union. Its fall in 1991 led, as in most of the former communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe, to an economic collapse and other social problems.
Women in Russia are not a monolithic group, because the country itself is very diverse: there are almost 200 national/ethnic groups in Russia (77.7% being Russians - as of 2010), and although most of the population is (at least nominally) Christian Orthodox, other religions are present too, such as Islam (approximately 6% - see Islam in Russia).
Famous women in Russian history include Anna of Russia, Elizabeth of Russia, Catherine the Great, and Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova.
Eighteenth century
Women of eighteenth-century Russia were luckier than their European counterparts in some ways; in others, the life of a Russian woman was more difficult. The eighteenth-century was a time of social and legal changes that began to affect women in a way that they had never before experienced. Peter the Great ruled Russia from 1682 to 1725 and in that time brought about many changes to Russian culture, altering the Orthodox traditions that had been observed since the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 1450s. The three major social classes present during these reforms experienced changes in varying degrees according to their proximity to the tsar and urban settings where reforms could be more strictly enforced. Large cities underwent the westernization process more rapidly and successfully than the outlying rural villages. Noblewomen, merchant class women, and peasant (serf) women each witnessed Petrine reforms differently. For the lower classes it was not until the end of the eighteenth-century (during the time of Catherine the Great's reign) that they began to see any changes at all. When these reforms did begin to change women's lives legally, they also helped to expand their abilities socially. The Petrine reforms of this century allowed for more female participation in society, when before they were limited to roles as wives and mothers. “The change in women's place in Russian society can be illustrated no better than by the fact that five women ruled the empire, in their own names, for a total of seventy years.”
Legal changes Arguably the most important legal change that affected women's lives was the Law of Single Inheritance instituted by Peter the Great in 1714. The law was supposed to help the tax revenue for Russia by banning the allowance of noble families to divide their land and wealth among multiple children. This law effectively ended the practice of excluding women from inheriting patrimonial estates. The Law of Single Inheritance was clarified in the decree of 1725. It sought to address the question of married daughter’ inheritance rights. The law mandated that if a man was survived by unmarried daughters, the eldest daughter would inherit his estate, while the remaining sisters would divide his movable property. His married daughters would receive nothing, however, since they would have received dowries at the time they married.
In 1730 Anna Ivanova revoked the Law of Single Inheritance, as it had been a major point of contestation among the nobility since Peter first announced it in 1714. After 1731, property rights were expanded to include inheritance in land property. Women also gained greater power over the estates that had been willed to them, or received in their wedding dowry.
Education for women In pre-Petrine centuries the Russian tsars had always been concerned with educating their people, neither the wealthy nor the serfs. Education reforms were a large part of Petrine Westernization; however, it was not until Catherine II's reforms that education rights applied to both men and women of each class. Education for girls occurred mainly in the home because they were focused on learning about their duties as wife and mother rather than getting a full education. “The provision of formal education for women began only in 1764 and 1765, when Catherine II established first the Smolny Institute for girls of the nobility in St. Petersburg and then the Novodevichii Institute for the daughters of commoners.”
Women in the nobility
In the eighteenth-century Petrine reforms and enlightenment ideas brought both welcome and unwelcome changes required of the Russian nobility and aristocratic families. Daughters in well-to-do families were raised in the terem, which was usually a separate building connected to the house by an outside passageway. The terem was used to isolate girls of marriageable age and was intended to keep them "pure" (sexually inexperienced). These girls were raised solely on the prospect of marrying to connect their own family to another aristocratic family. Many rural and urban lower class houses had no space to separate young women so there was no designated terem to keep them isolated. Women of lower classes lived and worked with their brothers, fathers, and ultimately, husbands, as well as manage all household matters along with them. Marriage customs changed gradually with the new reforms instituted by Peter the Great; the average marriageable age increased, especially in the cities among the wealthier tier of people closest to the tsar and in the public eye. “By the end of the eighteenth-century, brides in cities were usually fifteen to eighteen years old, and even in villages young marriages were becoming more and more rare.” Marriage laws were a significant aspect of the Petrine reforms, but had to be corrected or clarified by later tsars because of their frequent ambiguities. In 1753, a decree was issued to assure that noble families could secure their daughter's inheritance of land by making it a part of the dowry that she would have access to once she was married. The Petrine reforms precipitated a number of changes that could be confusing to navigate. Family as well as marriage disputes often went to the court system because of the confusion about the dowry, and the rights it was supposed to ensure, in the event of a father's death or in disputed divorces. For women, the right to own and sell property was a new experience that only came about because of Russia's gradual westernization in the eighteenth century.
Women in the merchant class Merchant class women also enjoyed newly granted freedoms to own property and manage it; with this new right, upper-class women gained more independence from their patriarchal restrictions. Wives of merchant class men had more independence than wives of the nobility or peasants because of the nature of their husband's work, especially when their husbands were away from home on government service, as they were frequently and for long periods of time. The rights of married women from the nobility and merchantry to own and manage their own property offered them an opportunity to become involved in commercial and manufacturing ventures.
Women in the peasantry
A life among the peasant class was hard whether that peasant was male or female; each led lives filled with strenuous labor. They participated in work in the fields and in the making of handicrafts. Women were expected to do domestic work such as cooking, weaving clothes, and cleaning for their families. During planting and harvest time, when help was needed in the fields, women worked with their husbands to plow, sow seeds, then collect and prepare the crops. Early in the eighteenth-century, the average age for peasant girls to marry was around twelve years old. At this time they were still learning what would be expected of them as wives and also needed their parent's consent to marry. “The requirement of the law code of 1649 that girls not marry before the age of fifteen was rarely observed.” Various permissions for marriage were required; widows and unmarried women living on government owned property had to obtain the permission of the village assembly before they could marry anyone. Young peasant women (like other Russian women) spent far more of their child-bearing years as married women than their counterparts in Western Europe did. Childbirth was dangerous for both mother and child in the eighteenth-century but if a peasant woman was able to, she could potentially give birth, on average, to seven children. In the harsh climate of the Russian steppe, and a life of labor from an early age, perhaps half of all children would live to adulthood. “The birth of her first child, preferably a son, established her position in her husband's household. As she continued to bear sons, her status further improved.” Russian peasant families needed help in the fields and to manage the household; not being able to hire anyone for these tasks, children were the only way to get the help they needed. Having a son ensured that the family name would continue as well as any property they might own, though as Petrine reforms came into effect, it began to be equally profitable to have a girl. However, women of any class could turn infrequently to the ecclesiastical courts to resolve their marital conflicts.
1850 to 1917
By the mid-nineteenth century, West European notions of equality were starting to take hold in Russia. In 1859, Saint Petersburg Imperial University allowed women to audit its courses, but the policy was revoked just four years later. In the 1860s in Saint Petersburg, a feminist movement began to coalesce, led by Anna Filosofova (1837–1912), Nadezhda Stasova (1835–1895), and Mariia Trubnikova (1835–1897), together known as the "triumvirate". Along with members of the Saint-Petersburg literati, such as Evgenia Konradi (1838–1898), they petitioned universities to educate women and wrote to prominent male figures to support their cause. This group also founded organizations to help unattached women become financially self-sufficient, and in 1878 they helped to establish the Bestuzhev Courses, which for the first time gave Russia's women reliable access to higher education. By the early 1900s Russia boasted more female doctors, lawyers, and teachers than almost any country in Europe—a fact noted with admiration by many foreign visitors. However, most educational benefits were reaped by urban women from the middle and upper classes. While literacy rates were slowly growing throughout the Russian Empire, educational and other opportunities for peasant remained relatively few. Their main role was to have children.