Woman's Kingdom

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 nineteenth century, married women in Russia enjoyed the right to alienate and manage their fortunes beginning in 1753. Marrese traces the extension of noblewomen's right to property and places this story in the broader context of the evolution of private property in Russia before the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Historians have often dismissed women's property rights as meaningless. In the patriarchal society of Imperial Russia, a married woman could neither work nor travel without her husband's permission, and divorce was all but unattainable. Yet, through a detailed analysis of women's property rights from the Petrine era through the abolition of serfdom in 1861, Marrese demonstrates the significance of noblewomen's proprietary power. She concludes that Russian noblewomen were unique not only for the range of property rights available to them, but also for the active exercise of their legal prerogatives.A remarkably broad source base provides a solid foundation for Marrese's conclusions. These sources comprise more than eight thousand transactions from notarial records documenting a variety of property transfers, property disputes brought to the Senate, noble family papers, and a vast memoir literature. A Woman's Kingdom stands as a masterful challenge to the existing, androcentric view of noble society in Russia before Emancipation.

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.

Michelle Lamarche Marrese is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto.