The Training and Education of Daughters as a Family Strategy

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a young woman who came from a merchant family was expected to master the mundane tasks of the household, speak several languages, and entertain guests with music, reading, and artistic skills.

One of Catherine II’s reforms involved equal educational opportunities for both sexes, which was quite untypical at the time (Vainio-Korhonen 2012, 31–33; Lagerstam and Parland-von Essen 2010; Vainio-Korhonen 2010). There were German girls’ schools (Tochterschule, Mädschenschule) in both Vyborg and Narva from 1788. The education offered was wider than at a typical contemporary girls’ school because these new schools followed the same curriculum used in boys’ schools. The ability of Vyborg ladies to speak several languages was especially admired by visitors. One Swedish visitor praised the girls’ school as the best she had ever seen; the tuition fee was low, and all children were treated equally; only their test results counted. ‘They shape both rich and poor as useful citizens’, was her final verdict (von Hauswolff 2007, 109).

However, the information available from the Vyborg girls’ school shows that only a few German girls attended the school9 and that none of them belonged to the extended family discussed in this chapter (Rahikainen 2015, 25–47; Knapas 2013, 438–448; Orrman et al. 2012, 299–305; Lusmägi 2003, 121; Ruuth 1908, 694). Perhaps the reason why the German families avoided the school lies in its social equality.

A governess could teach the girls languages and cosmopolitan manners (Solodyankina 2018, 217–243; Rahikainen 2018, 245–263). In 1844, Marie Hackman (Laube) wrote to her granddaughter, Emilie Cedercreutz, about an English governess Madame Sutthoff had brought from Paris. Marie Hackman seldom mentioned any other news than that concerning the closest family circle; in this case, it seems that the information value of the new governess induced her to gossip (Hackman 1844). Perhaps an English governess was not so typical, and perhaps the grandmother hinted to her recently married granddaughter that she should consider the same when she had children. For one reason or another, Emilie Cedercreutz indeed ended up hiring a German (-speaking)11 governess, who served her family for several years. The governess even travelled to Europe with the family in the summer of 1860 (Cedercreutz 1860).

As already noted, daughters were sent to boarding schools, or they finished their education by living with some respectable family in continental Europe. In 1853, Alexandrine Hackman, who studied French, English, drawing, literature, and the natural sciences, stayed with several families. Her sister Julie studied in Stuttgart at an exclusive boarding school, the curriculum of which followed that of a boys’ gymnasium. The school had originally been established by Queen Katharina of Württemberg for girls of all social strata. In reality, school fees and the required attire excluded the poorest girls (Jacobi 2013, 210; Tigerstedt 1952, 41, 43, 119). Julie also spent some time in Geneva either studying at a boarding school or finishing her studies while staying with a respectful family there. In 1860, a third sister, Antoinette, and her niece were sent to a boarding school in Switzerland to study languages and music.

The children’s studies in German-speaking Europe strengthened the Hackman family’s ties to the German-speaking elite of Europe. Many lifelong relationships started at the boarding schools. The girls could establish beneficial contacts with their peers and find a suitable husband among the brothers and relatives of their female school friends. On the other hand, the boarding schools were a good way to control the people the girls met. Parents ensured that their daughters did not meet young men outside their social class.

It is probable that the parents preferred boarding schools in times when social distinction was insecure or threatened. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, girls from lower social status families and those families seeking social upward mobility started to enter the local boarding schools in Finland. Sending daughters to international and exclusive boarding schools was a sign of social distinction (Rahikainen 2015, 36; Vainio-Korhonen 2012, 44–63). Hence, sending daughters abroad highlighted and strengthened the group identity of Northern Baltic Germans; in many cases, only they could afford to send their daughters to German or Swiss boarding schools. On the other hand, this was an investment in the future since it benefitted the German networks and increased their social capital.

However, none of the daughters married German men, as illustrated before. We might ask if this strategy was unsuccessful—the daughters did not marry a German or a Swiss—or if the strategy rather targeted the individual girl’s skills more. With their abilities in music, the arts, and languages, the daughters were an asset to the network when they returned home. At the same time, the network’s interest was in getting the girls married to local men from Finland. Here, cosmopolitanism met locality in an interesting way.

The Germans did not send their daughters to the most prestigious schools in Russia, such as the Smolny or Ekaterinsky Institutes, as they were too aristocratic for the daughters of German families.

The daughters of the German elite belonged to the ‘new elite’, as described by the Finnish historian Marjatta Rahikainen in her article about the education and marriage markets of young upper-class women in nineteenth-century Helsinki and St Petersburg. She suggests that the new urban bourgeois elite—the Hackmans, the Sutthoffs, and the like—determined what kind of social capital their daughters should acquire and under what kind of institutional arrangements. Furthermore, Rahikainen points out that in Russia—in contrast to Helsinki in Finland—an aristocratic ancien regime mindset prevailed longer, and it was reflected in the girls’ education (Rahikainen 2015, 25–47). If we follow Rahikainen’s theory, it is highly possible that the bourgeois German elite did not send their daughters to Smolny because it represented the aristocratic values that represented the old way of thinking, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century when the world was so rapidly changing. Instead, the German elite preferred German institutes that could introduce their daughters to the continental European upper-class and German bourgeois lifestyle.

Women could not study at the universities, nor could they get formal training in trades or crafts. The lack of formal training is visible in the letters written by the young ladies. Their handwriting is poor; both the style and the content of the letters reveal that the young women had had only a little training. They seldom refer to classical texts, and their spelling is far from impeccable. For example, when Elisabeth Sutthoff’s letters are compared with her brother’s letters, the former are lacking both in length and in style.

Despite the lack of formal education, women could possess the skills needed in business. After her husband’s death in 1807, Marie Hackman took care of the family business until her own death in 1865. During her time, new sawmills, ships, forests, and farmland were bought, and new technologies—such as steam power—were introduced to the family business.

In the Northern Baltic, as in most parts of early modern Europe, widows could carry on her deceased husband’s trade (Ilmakunnas, Rahikainen, and Vainio-Korhonen 2018, 1–23; Ulianova 2018, 159–175). To do so, such women had to have some sort of training. Marie Hackman’s mother was a merchant’s daughter, as was her mother’s mother. They could have taught young Marie everything they knew about running the family business. The business demanded skills: negotiating with other timber merchants; calculating and knowing numbers; understanding bookkeeping; and speaking—if not also writing—the local languages, such as German, Russian, Swedish, and Finnish (Ijäs 2014, 190–205, 2018b; Pickering Antonova 2013; Vainio-Korhonen 2010, 242–249; Ogilvie 2003, 128, 146–148). Marie Hackman, although writing weakly in her native German, was good with numbers and apparently a good and trustworthy partner in business negotiations. During her husband’s lifetime, she travelled to St Petersburg to meet business partners when her husband was ill (Hackman 1806).

Both in the business families and those families whose head was involved in administration, women’s skills and capabilities were crucial. Women represented their husbands—including their loyalties and political aims—at social gatherings (Chalus 2005). This is evident in Emilie Cedercreutz’s life. Her husband was a civil servant whose career took the family to Mikkeli and Helsinki in Finland and eventually to St Petersburg. Emilie travelled constantly between their villa near Helsinki and St Petersburg, taking care of her ageing and sick husband and worrying about his duties and organising social gatherings.

In 1843, a new statute for schools was given in Finland, and both boys’ and girls’ education became somewhat controlled. Private schools, however, could continue as before. If we look at the family strategies and the manner in which the German community educated their daughters, it seems that marriage and society (Rahikainen 2015, 28) did not lose their importance. However, daughters were prepared for married life differently. They had a formal, cosmopolitan education, which emphasised languages, music, and even academic skills, instead of lessons given by a random private tutor or a mother who could, at the best, only pass on the skills she had learnt from her own mother.

At the same time, women withdrew from participation in daily business life; there is no evidence from the 1830s onwards that women travelled to meet business associates (Ijäs 2014). The segregation of the public and private was enforced, and domestic life became a profoundly female domain. The studied period does not, however, cover the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when, according to Rahikainen, elite girls’ education went through a remarkable change with co-educational schools, which emphasised equality in the curriculum, at least to some level (Rahikainen 2015).