Art and Handcraft in the Woman's Building
of the World's Columbian Exposition

RUSSIA. OUT of the distant gloom of the earliest period of our history a woman’s name shines among the beams that lightened the dawn of Christianity. Princess Olga, widow of Prince Igor, at the beginning of the tenth centuiy, went to Byzantium to be baptized in the Christian faith. During the minority of her son Sviatoslav, slie ruled her land and its chief town, Kieff. The chronicles never use her name without the apellation of “ most wise.” The church has canonized her. When, in the year 989, her grandson, Prince Vladimir, was on the point of making the choice of one of the Christian creeds for himself and his people, he said: “ Our grandmother Olga, who was the wisest woman, was baptized in Greece,” and this settled it. He was married to the Byzantine Princess Ann, sister of the emperors Constantine and Basil. In the second half of the eleventh century two Russian princesses, daughters of Yaroslar, were Queen of France and Queen of Sweden. In the course of later history, names of women but seldom appear, for the way of living prohibited them from taking any prominent part in social life. They lived in a separate part of the house—so often men- tioned in songs and poetry, the “ Tcrcm" (the “ladies’ high bower” of English poems)—and they were but very seldom allowed to come into men’s society. The Tartar yoke, that lasted from 1224- 1480, and had such a disastrous influence on the development of our civilization, in keeping us back for over two centuries, must be taken in consideration when speaking of the women at this period. The reign of Peter the Great is generally considered as the epoch of a complete change in the Russian woman's social position, but a gradual advance toward it can be followed up for a long time before. In the fifteenth century, after the fall of Constantinople, Jolin III., Grand Duke of Moscow, married tlie Byzantine Princess Sophia Paleologue (hence the Byzantine eagle adopted as the Russian coat- of-arms); from this time several names of women appear in history. Though they are not in immediate connection with any special