Abstract
While some work has recently been done on native women in Russian America, very little has been written about Russian women and even less about the European non-Russian women who went to Russia’s North American colonies in Alaska—the easternmost outpost of the Russian empire in Alaska—from the western periphery of the empire. This paper is about three such women, Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholen and Anna Furuhjelm, and their experiences as governors’ wives in Russian America between 1829 and 1864. As the wives of governors, these women had a semi-official role as representatives of the Russian empire, which meant that they were expected to contribute to its civilizing mission in the colonies. The paper aims to understand the experiences of these women as governors’ wives in the light of prescriptive notions of true womanhood and of the role of women in the civilizing mission. What was it like to be a young woman in the most remote part of the Russian empire and how can these experiences be related to the cult of domesticity and the new ideal of womanhood that took form in the nineteenth century? What was expected of them as representatives of the Russian empire and how did they themselves perceive this role?
Highlights
ISSN 2042-6348 ©Susanna Rabow-Edling process of eastward expansion that was instigated by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the predecessor state of modern Russia, in the mid-sixteenth century
Cultivating the new lands of the empire and pacifying, enlightening and converting its new subjects became Russia’s own mission civilisatrice, the way it was expressed differed somewhat from the West European variety.[4]. This imperial ideology was applied to its colony in the new world, but as the state became more and more involved in the Russian-American Company, it became apparent that its activities in Alaska were far from civilized
This study confirms previous findings that point to the significance of gender to colonial projects
Summary
Count Nikolai Rezanov, Natalia Shelikhova’s son-in-law and chief secretary of the imperial senate, visited the colonies in 1805 as a governmental inspector. In order to improve this situation, the board of directors of the RAC decided in 1829 that the Governor of Russian Alaska had to marry before he left Europe for the colonies In this way Elisabeth von Wrangell became the first European woman who travelled to Russian America as a governors’ wife. She would reside in Sitka during her husband’s five-year appointment. Etholén and Furuhjelm are especially interesting to study from the perspective of women’s and gender history They lived in an era when the cult of true womanhood, as well as the ideology of imperialism, spread across Europe and, by extension, the world.[14] They were all very young and newlywed when they went to Russian America. With more than a little exaggeration, it was sometimes spoken of as a “Paris on the Pacific.”
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