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.
No comments:
Post a Comment