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Legal Rights of Women in Russia, 1100-1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

George G. Weickhardt
George G. Weickhardt*
Affiliation:
law firm of Adams, Duque & Hazeltine, San Francisco
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Extract

This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1996

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References

The author wishes to thank Nancy Shields Kollmann, Richard Hellie and Michelle Marrese for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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