Kadri Kruus.  The Upbringing of Girls

From the opening sentence, Tolstoi's Anna Karenina concerns itself with the family and, more explicitly, with the problem of family happiness. At first, Anna Karenina seems to be an extraordinary woman because of her beauty, charm and knowledge.  However, inside she was miserable.  This was because of her unhappy marriage.  From the start she did not love her husband, and as the book progresses, she comes to despise him. Other women in the book show a similar dissatisfaction with their place in life.  Dolly, for example, is tormented by her troubled marriage and feels at times that her life has been wasted.  While we can not assume that all women were unhappy as Anna and Dolly, Tolstoi’s depiction raises important issues and problems that were obviously present in the society. 

It is my belief that the difficulties women were having in finding satisfaction and fulfillment in life were connected with their upbringing.  The way girls were raised, what amount of education did they receive, and what were the beginning relationships to opposite sex, could be all the factors that had a strong impact of women's future life. Girls were not prepared to make the right choices for themselves, and parents often intervened to make the wrong choices for them. Tolstoi’s writings about the whole issue with Kitty, whose parents argue whom should she marry, lead me to the thought that perhaps parents were playing an important and powerful part in upbringing the child, and maybe they were greatly influencing girls choices in terms of whom to marry.

Girls were raised under strict control since they were little. Sofia Kovalevskaya's book “A Russian Childhood”, gives a good idea about how girls were raised during nineteenth century Russia. But not just parents were raising the children and influencing girls. Besides mother, older women, such as grandmother, nurse, governess-played a great part in girls early childhood, and they provided feminine companionship and alternative role models. In early childhood, many girls were brought up their nanny, and later the education was taken over by their governess and tutors.

Fathers play relatively insignificant role when girls are small, but as they move in adolescence a young adulthood, they become more important. During the early childhood, father's concepts of child-rearing were very elementary, and the whole field of pedagogy seemed to them as female and not male concern. However, father role in daughter's life changed over the time.  As daughter grew older, father got closer to daughter.  For example, Kitty had a very close, warm and loving relationship with her father. Fathers were often influencing girls decisions in terms of whom to marry.  In worst cases, fathers were deciding whom the daughter should marry.   Father could stop the daughter to marry the man she loved because the fiancée was poor, without rank and a social nobody.  It was explained by the fact that father had the daughter’s happiness foremost in his mind.

Although many of the mothers were not deeply involved in raising children when they were still babies, mothers still had the strongest impact in upbringing daughters. In fact, the most important task a woman faced after a child-birth was to see that her daughters were properly married. Mothers had a great power over daughters and also a complete responsibility for them until their marriage. Mothers controlled daughter’s lives greatly.   Mother's were often deciding whom the daughter had to marry.

The beginning relationships with opposite sex were very limited.  Girls were raised separately from boys, and therefore they did not know a lot about masculine world.  Kitty met Levin only during family dinners and in public places. Because girls were raised under strict rules, the relationship with opposite sex members was very limited, and their parents were controlling and influencing their decisions, girls were often just not ready to face the challenges that the real adulthood consisted.