Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/99

 Rh rather quaint; and others cast a peculiar light on the part played by the female sex in the Muscovite household—the woman is not to go to church unless her avocations permit it.

We shall see they left her very little leisure! The head of the family is expected to show greater assiduity, but the recital of his duties and functions unpleasantly recalls the national legislation. It reads like another penal code. The husband, father, master, is commanded to use discernment in the matter of punishment, but without any undue weakness. He must avoid striking guilty persons on the head or 'beneath the heart'; he must not use his feet nor any instrument likely to break the skin. Certain contradictions appear amidst these precepts. Thus, in one place the use of the stick is forbidden, while in another we are told, 'If thou strikest thine unruly son with a stick, it will not kill him.' This is the drawback to all compilations. The family relations between the beater and the beaten seem to have been limited, in any case, to an allotment of the blows to be inflicted or endured. Some consideration is allowed in the wife's case. The husband is to take her apart, far from curious eyes, and, having stripped her of her shift—this point is insisted on, and is of capital importance, indeed, in a book in which the idea of order and economy holds so large a place—without any anger, holding her hands kindly, but using all the requisite strength, he is to toy upon her shoulders with his whip, and is bound, the correction once administered, to behave affably and affectionately, so that conjugal relations may not suffer by these interludes!

Their tolerably frequent recurrence seems highly probable. For if the functions of the man who beat the woman seem to have been practically restricted to performances of this kind, those of the woman he trounced were numerous and sufficiently severe. Having risen earlier than anybody else, she was bound, after her morning devotions were accomplished, to assign and overlook the tasks of all the servants, and set them a good example by being constantly at work herself. She must be skilful in all manual occupations, an expert dressmaker, laundress, and cook. Neither her husband nor her visitors must ever find her sitting with her hands before her. She must not joke with the women about her, nor exchange idle talk with them, and she must never open her door to the gossips of the neighbourhood, to fortune-tellers, nor even to female pedlars.

This is but an ideal rule, evidently, a picture turned upside down, as it were, which must be twisted round again if we are to obtain any clear view of the realities corresponding to it. This remark applies to more than one page of the book, to the paragraph which counsels women to drink nothing but kvass,