Show RUSSIAN BEAUTIES II I I Peasant Girls and How They i Dress and Work I i QUEER MAIDENS OF TiE VOLGA Russian Courtship and Jlarriaee How I I Ensslan Noble Got 50000 with HsI American Bride Amerlcn Moscow Sept 1 1S92 Special correspondence cor-respondence of THE HEUALDJ The women of Russia I How shall I describe them They are like no other women on the face of the globe and still among their millions the have types of almost every raws of women known to man In St Petersburg you see the fairhaired blue eyed freckledfaced maidens from Finland walking the streets side by side with the red haired girls who have been imported thither from the Caucasus and Georgia and here at Moscow you see the Tartars the Cossacks and the Armenians mixed together to-gether with the other different types of the eighty provinces of this vast empire Along the Volga you will meet different costumes and different races of women at every landing place end the girls of Little RussIa wear different clothes and havo different manners from those of Groat Russia and South Russia Here in Moscow there are 1 vast number of gipsies and Russia has the harem of the Moham metan the polyandry of the Himalayas Hima-layas and all the varied combinations of civilized love and marriage Th9 pure Russians look upon marriage much as we do and of late years the relations of the sexes among the upper classes have been almost as free as they are with us The Russian lady of today has her friends among the young men of her acquaintance and though she rarely goes about without a chaperone she receives her callers in her own home and her ideal marriage is one of love 01 Into years the laws of marriage have been radically changed and now females are forbidden to wed save between the ages of 16 and 6 Men cannot marry until they are over IS nor after they are S and divorces are less common in Russia than they are with us The church ot Russia objects to more than one marriage It has its penances for second and third marriages mar-riages and a man who marries a fourth time is excluded from the holy communion f Few marriages are made in the upper I classes without the consent of the parents and in most cases the woman is expected to bring a very respectable dot with her I know of an American girl who recently married a Russian noble The noble came to America and the wedding was celebrated in one of our large cities Before it took place however the groom called upon the brides father and asked about the settle sette settlement What settlement said the old man who had considerable wealth but who had not hitherto had a daughter marry a European baron The settlement upon my wife wes the reply Dont you intend to give her something some-thing at the time she is married I bad not thought of it replied the old man And how much do you think she ought to have Wel said the Russian noble with ahem a-hem and a haw it seems to me that she ought to have at least 50000 It would not be a bad idea i the sum was 100000 I dont know whether the old man objected ob-jected or not butas the story is told here he raised the 50000 and put the securities for it in the bank to his daughters order before the marriage took place The Russian woman now has more rights after marriage than she ever had before Two hundred years ago she was little more than a slave and the husbands horse whip always hung over the bed of the married pair and it was used freely Women were then seldom seen upon the streets and Peter the Great had a way of kicking them when hemet he-met them here or in St Petersburg and telling them that their place was home and that they ought to be in it The wifebeat ing of today is almost altogether confined to the peasants and the Countess Tolstoi told me that even the peasants were improving im-proving in the treatment of their women The peasant women have in fact many rights of which the women of the other parts of the world know nothing In the communal systems by which the villages of Russia are governed the women stand on an equal footing with the men as regards the distribution of property and they have their share of the property of the village according to their share in the work According to Russian law the legitimate legit-imate wires and daughters of the man get only onefourteenth of the family inheritance inherit-ance but by the law of the peasants the right of inheritance comes from work alone and there is no distinction between l wives and concubines The husband inherits in-herits the wifes property only when they I have lived together more than ten years nnd otherwise it goes back to her parents p The peasant women take part in the village vil-lage assemblies and widows who are the heads of families have the right to voter vote-r There are cases in which tie whole village assembly is made up of women and this assembly as-sembly divides the land of the via e and a woman may be mayor of the village if she is elected as such The peasant women of Russia are all hard workers You see them everywhere in the fields mowing and reaping spading up the ground and raking the hay and dot do-t ing in fact everything that man can do They work in gangs of twenty or thirty and each gang of women is usually directed by a man who acts as overseer and keeps them at work They go into the fields almost as soon as they are able to wait I and they work until they are gray haired Hard labor coon takes the beauty out of l them and tho older women have faces like t leather full of wrinkles and furrowed tt with care The younger girls are plump L brighteyed and in some cases pretty I k have seen few beautiful women among them but there ate few very ugly ones The typo of the Russian peasants face is that of the best typo of a kind mother and the most of the faces show strength I of character and many of them are what you would call fine looking Marriages among the peasants are made both on theo the-o grounds of convenience and love The l sexes associate so closely together In their work and in the villages that they have a chance to net thoroughly thor-oughly acquainted with one another and a good strong woman just doubles the working force of tha man who marries mar-ries her without very materially increasing increas-ing his expense Neither sex among the peasants spends much upon dress The women wear nothing but handkerchiefs upon their heads while working in the fields and their feet are generally bare In tho summer such shoes as they use are made of bark woven into tho form of slippers like basket work and in the winter win-ter they put great heavy boots of felt upon their feet Neither sex wears stockings and they wrap a cotton rag around the foot and up the ankles to about the middle of the calf tying it round and round with a string Their dresses are short and they tuck them up while they are working They wear little or no underclothes and their summer dress consists of this shirt a chemise and a short sack whlcji extends c only t the waist Even on a fete day their dresses are not very expensive and a costume cos-tume consisting of a white chemise cut low at tho neck with long full sleeves and w dropping down to the knees with an apron tied around over the bust constitutes a womans outfit chemisehko dress is gi fastened over the bust and under the arms ic and h held by braces over tho shoulders The apron is tied around the waist as well us over the shoulders and the skirt reaches r nearly to the feet The dress is embroidered embroid-ered with a crossstitch of red and blue and the neck above the chemise is often covered with strings of beads I These costumes vary in different parts of the country In Little Russia the dresses t 4 are often one mass of embroidery and the women wear a very pretty embroidered crown over their heads and the dresses come high about the neck The nurses everywhere have dresses of their own and the French girls who act as the wet nurses for the buoiae at St Petersburg always have crowns upon their heads and I you can tell a nurse as far as you can see her The peasant woman knows nothing of the corset and she has no idea of fashion fash-ion The people1 wear the same costume from year to year and the peasant dress of todayis the same as that of a generation ago I s win Kazan Mohammedan women who wore acks over their heads with the sleeves hanging down on their shoulders and with only a crack at the front through which they could bee as they went along the street and the dress of these women was almost al-most exactly like that of the women of Korea I saw other women there whose heads and breasts were covered with gold coins just like those of the women whom you see in the Himalay mountains of India on the borders of Thibet and these Tartar hibet women have the same bronze faces and high cheekbones that are found in the girls of the Himalaya mountains They are of the Mongolian origin and they look mora like Chinese than Americans The coins which tney wear are real coins and they generally represent the dower which the woman hrings into the family when she is married Some of the women of Little Russia have a singular way of ornamenting ornament-ing themselves and I got a photograph of one who had a breast plate covered with gold coins and whose bead was loaded down with them Speaking of womans work among the peasants the hardest field work is done by the women and they get lower wages than the men Their hours are from about 4 in the morning to 7 or I oclock the evening I I and 15 cents a day is big wages I they I receive food their wages are even less than this and in some parts of Russia girls get 8 cents a day and board themselves 10 other regions their wages rise as high as 20 cents and in a very few parts of the empire they are paid even more than this They are as a rule better workers than the men and they do not seem to appreciate how badly off they are I hear them singing in tho fields as I travel through the country and they do not seem to thing their life a hard one They seem to think they were made for work and married or single their life is one of toil almost from birth until death They marry young and the rule here is a large family Nearly every woman you see has a baby at the breast and Russia has perhaps more children to the population popula-tion than any other country on the globe Marriages among the peasants are often arranged by the parents and there are frequent fre-quent lovo matches at which the priest is not called in The habits of the people aro such that it i a wonder there is not even a greater per cent of illegitimate births than there are The sexes herd together like cattle in these little Russian huts and young girls and unmarried men and the women and men of several families will crowd together upon the lodge of the Rusian stove and there is no such a thing as single beds in a Russian village Above the peasants is the merchant class and the women of this class are to a cUBS large extent different from those of tho nobility or the peasants They do not do the hard word of the peasants nor have they the intelligence of their sisters of the nobility Tho merchants of Russia form to a large extent the middle class and the merchants wives and daughters are kept out of sight They spend their time in dressing smoking and eating and their husbands when they chat with tKeir fellows fel-lows about women usually speak of them as the children of the devil and they are full of all sorts of superstitions concerning con-cerning them In none of the Russian churches is a woman permitted to go into the inner sanctuary and if one is going out hunting it is considered bad luck to meet a woman and he had better turn back The daughters of these merchants are often very religious and very superstitious Their marriages are usually made by matchmakers and the merchant is expected ex-pected to give a good dowry with his daughter when she enters matrimony Long engagements are not common and they seldom last more than two or three months Among the peasants the girls usually weave and embroider their own wedding gowns and they begin to get ready for marriage as soon as they are old enough to sew Among the merchants mer-chants after a girl is engaged her friends como in and help her sew upon her wedding wed-ding outfit and she has sewing circles and quitnJ bees in preparation for the marriage mar-riage These sewing circles are held during dur-ing the afternoon and after tea the bridegroom bride-groom ana a few of his bachelor friends drop in and the girls and the future bride have a dance with them during the evening eve-ning Russian marriages generally take place at night and the ceremony is performed by the priest The bridegroom meets the bride at the church and the pair carry lighted tapers with them to the altar The taper that burns out first is supposed to indicate in-dicate the death of Its holder After the ceremony the bridal party walk three times around the part of the churchwhere the cross is and after the benediction they kiss the holy picture of the church and they kiss each other three times during tho ceremony When the whole service is over the bridegroom leads the bride to his house where his peasants peas-ants greet him and where they are blessed with bread and salt There is a wedding supper after this and during it the bride and bridegroom go oft to bed Every Rus alan man wears boots and it used to be the custom that the bride must pull off her husbands boots first night of the marriage In one of these boots before going to the wedding be usually secreted a sum of gold or silver but he did not tell his bride in which boot the money was I she got the right boot the money beloneed to her and her husband had to draw off his own boots in the future I she got the wrong one he bad the right to use her as a bootjack whenever he pleased This however Was a custom only of the lower classes and it is now more honored In the breach than the observance The Russian bride however has her happiest time just at the marriage The peasants wife has perhaps as hard a lot as any woman in the world and this is especially es-pecially so during the first years of her married life She Is the slave of her husband hus-band and what is worse she is usually the slave of her motherinlaw and sho is treated as badly I as the widow is in India Here where the families of three generations eneratons often live together in a hut of one or two rooms the young bride is not welcomed and the husband can do little to protect her The oldest maa of the family boss of the household and the Russian author Tikhomirov gives a number of songs which Illustrate how the bride is received into the family InLittle Russia they say Who is to bring the water The daugh terinlaw Who is to be beaten 1 The daughterin law lawWhy is she beaten 1 Because she is the daughterinlaw As soon as she comes into the family the i older members of it make war against her Say fatherinlaw They have brought us the bear Says motherinlaw They have brought us an eater of men Say the brothersinlaw They have Drought us an unclean thing Say the aunts They have brought us a spinner of naught And so the young woman spends her honeymoon and so she lives until she becomes be-comes an old woman and is ready to avenge her wrongs upon her daughterinlaw of the future Think of tho troubles of woman wo-man and of the horrors of having to raise families and go tbrough all the pains and troubles of motherhood under such circumstances circum-stances Still this is what these people do while laboring day after day in the fields they accomplish on the poorest of food the work of able bodied menThe men-The women of the higher classes of Russia Rus-sia are among the best educated and most intelligent women of the world I met a sweet little Russian on tho Volga steamboat steam-boat Missour who told me she liked phil osophy better than fiction and that the only novels she cared for were those she could have in her own life She was on her way to the summer resorts in the Caucasus Cau-casus and she had tho same loving and lovable ways of tho summer girl of America I had a delightful time with her until T happened to mention that I was married and then she forsook me for the bachelor from America who was traveling with me She rather thought I was going through Russia nder false pretenses because I had not a plain gold ring on the wedding finger and she said every married gentleman in Russia had to wear one She spoke Eng lish in a sweet broken way and talked French and German fluently Every girl in fact in a welltodo family in Russia begins to prattle in foreign languages almost al-most as soon as she cuts her first teeth She has three or four governesses nnd she 4 learns her French German and English asa as-a child Many of the ladies of the higher classes here have been educated in the colleges of Europe and until within a few years ago a woman could get a good college education in Russia All of the female colleges but one however have been abolished as the gorernment thinks they are the hot beds of nihilism and they were closed by the imperial order about five years ago In 1872 a womans medical college was opened at St Petersburg and it had about 400 students and during the ten years of its existence It graduated 600 women doctors It was closed however and though there are some women who still practice medicine medi-cine in Russia the bulk of them are permitted to do their work only as assistants and they are tolerated only as an experiment Wnen the present pres-ent czar came to the throne he prohibited prohib-ited the practice of medicine by women but they have been allowed to practice though their work is in reality contrary to the law A largo number of women are school teachers here in Russia and there are 5000 school mistresses in the empire Women do a great deal of business in the stores They act as nurses in the hospitals hos-pitals and some of the largest charitable institutions of Russia are practically managed by women There is an institution institu-tion at Moscow which is known as The College for the Girls of the Nobility and I understand that this institution has branches in other parts of the empire It is for the poorer classes of the nobles and the girls are taught at the expense of the czar I visited this school here and 1 have never seen prettier or brighter girls Alter their graduation many of them will become governesses and others will go into I the schools of the country to teach About twenty years ago some of the leading lead-ing women of Russia were nihilists and there are many tree thinkers among the Russian ladies of today though I have seen no shorthaired women as yet Alexander Alex-ander I though ho was liberal in other things could not tolerate the shorthaired girls and the freethinking girls of his time had a costume of their own and one day one of them met him on the street She bowed to him as he passed by ana he looking very curiously at her returned her salute The next day she received a summons sum-mons from the police She was terrified and she went to the superintendent who told her that the emperor had said he was much displeased with her and she would have to sign an agreement not to cut her hair in the future or go to prison She signed the agreement It is generally supposed that these women of the upper classes of Russia are very loose in their social relations and the story has gone forth that every Russian noble has a mistress in addition to his wife und that it Is not uncommon for the wife to have her lover in addition to her husband This is true to a certain extent but not more so I think than you will find in some of the other great capitals of Europe There are as many faithful wives and husbands in St Petersburg as there are in London and the fact that 2000 wives care enough for their husbands to follow them into exile to the wilds of Siberia Si-beria every year shows that married love is strong in Russia the czar himself is said to be one of thE best husbands in the world and the conduct of the empress is above reproach FRANK G CAUPEXTEU |