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Monday, February 13, 2017

Rusia today again:
Renominating savage marital practices

Η Ρωσία σήμερα και πάλι:
Αναζωπύρωση βάρβαρων ενδοοικογενειακών ηθών




It is thus all the more striking to realize that there is another tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. True, old Russia was not exactly a haven for battered women. Russian justice was patriarchal, and, like Byzantine law, resolutely on the side of the pater familias. A wife could successfully protest beating only if it endangered her life. Even entering a convent (and wives could be beaten precisely to drive them into convents, so that the husbands could marry again) did not always work: if a woman had been beaten, and entered a convent to escape, her motivations were not ‘sincere,’ and she was returned to her husband. In the absence of laws giving women protection and redress, it is not surprising that before 1917 women matched men in only one kind of felony: spousal murder.



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