From the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean: Three Governor’s Wives in Russian America

While some work has recently been done on native women in Russian America, very little has beenwritten about Russian women and even less about the European non-Russian women who went toRussia’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 vonWrangell, Margaretha Etholén and Anna Furuhjelm, and their experiences as governors’ wives in RussianAmerica between 1829 and 1864. As the wives of governors, these women had a semi-official role asrepresentatives of the Russian empire, which meant that they were expected to contribute to its civilizingmission in the colonies.The paper aims to understand the experiences of these women as governors’ wives in the light ofprescriptive notions of true womanhood and of the role of women in the civilizing mission. What was itlike to be a young woman in the most remote part of the Russian empire and how can these experiencesbe related to the cult of domesticity and the new ideal of womanhood that took form in the nineteenthcentury? What was expected