ABSTRACT
In 1910, a series of columns in The Kopeck Gazette (Gazeta-kopeika), a popular ‘boulevard’ newspaper published in St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, described a ‘typical story’ of gender, sex and emotion in the modern city. ‘Liza’ was 22 years old, cheerful and pretty. The author had first met her at a friend’s home, where Liza worked as a maid. Like most female domestic servants, she likely grew up in a village. City life, it seems, made her ambitious and dissatisfied. Seeking a change, she welcomed the promises of a polite and nicely dressed woman who seemed to be offering her a better job but was actually luring young women into prostitution. Liza’s ‘fall’ is marked by some of the usual elements of deception and victimization in such tales. But Liza is also a wilful subject, far from innocent. When she quit her work as a maid, she did so declaring ‘What am I, a slave or something? I will be my own mistress!’ Soon, she was promenading down Nevsky Prospect, the capital’s main business and shopping street, wearing ‘gaudy silk finery and a huge fashionable round hat’. Her former employers wished they had reminded her of the virtues of ‘labour, honour and modesty’. But Liza would likely have rejected their moralizing appeal, having implicitly embraced an alternative moral argument: her right to choose and the values of ‘finery, pleasures, wealth and a life limited by nothing’.
