Domostroi, the Russian domestic code, compiled in the sixteenth century confines woman to the kitchen and to purely domestic occupations. Woman's virtues are said to lie in silence and humility. She was to speak only when spoken to. She was to ask questions and advice with utmost deference. She was to have no secrets from her husband. Her husband's will was her law and her guide in life. Her aim in life was to save her soul, to please God and her husband. Her husband could even apply the rod to her in case of a serious transgression on her part. In her harem-like seclusion, Russian woman acquired a taste for luxury in apparel and house decoration and developed many varieties of fine handiwork. This seclusion of woman and her separation from her husband's company had as their result a general coarsening of social tastes. Men amused themselves with bear hunting, pugilism, and other rough sports. When engagements were arranged between persons totally unacquainted with each other, when a wife was purchased, when another girl was substituted in the place of the one bargained for, and when the engaged parties could not see each other until the very wedding ceremony, marriages were often a failure, and led to a mutual deceit, secret immorality, and not infrequently to crime. Even one of the most enlightened Russian writers and educators of the seventeenth century, Simen Polotski, advised that woman should be kept like a slave or a wild beast. We read of many cases where men chastised their wives with heavy whips. One Russian woman is reported to have frequently cried over the fact that her husband, a German by birth, would not whip her, which to her was a sign of indifference. Men got rid of their wives by sending them to a convent, or by poison. The code of Alexis Mikhailovich does not even punish a husband for disposing of his wife in a criminal way. But if a woman destroyed her husband, she was buried in the ground up to her neck, and everybody had a right to abuse her until she died. There was no education to be had for woman, and she grew up, lived, and died in ignorance and superstition. The Russian Middle Ages have left to posterity the memory of only one woman who took an active part in history Martha Boretskaia, the wealthy _posadnitsa_ (mayoress) of Novgorod the Great. The steady growth of the power of the Moscow princes in the fifteenth century began to be dangerous to the independence of the ancient northern republic. The intelligent, energetic, and freedom-loving Martha became on her husband's death an active leader of a powerful political party advocating union with Poland, a union which was to save Novgorod from being subjugated by Moscow. Conscious of her power, Martha often offended the Moscow representative in Novgorod, and was slow to give satisfaction to Ivan III., whose life work it was to unite all Russia under the sovereignty of Moscow and to throw off the Tartar yoke.