Many impulses work on the women who forsake their homeland and follow their criminal husbands imo exile. Some do so out of love and sympathy; some from a firm conviction that only God can separate a husband and wife; some leave home out of a feeling of shame. In an obscure village the stigma of a husband's crimes still falls upon the wife. For example, when the wife of a criminal is rinsing her laundry in the river, the other women call her a jailbird. Some of the women are lured to Sakhalin by their husbands, and they fall imo the trap.
While still in the ship's hold, such prisoners write lcners home, saying it is warm on Sakhalin, there is much land, the bread is cheap and the adminisuation is wonderful. They write in the same manner from the prison, sometimes for several years at a stretch, always fabricating new allure- mems. They rely on the ignorance and gullibility of their women, and this reliance was frequemly justified, as shown by the facts.9
Finally, there arc women who go to Sakhalin because they are under the strong moral influence of their husbands. Such women probably participated in the husbands' crimes or enjoyed the fruits of crime. They were not arrested, only because there was insufficient evidence to bring them to court. The majority of the women who come to Sakha- lin are moved by compassion and pity leading to self-sacri- fice, and the unshakable force of conviction. In addition to the Russian women who voluntarily follow their husbands, there are also Tatars, Jewesscs, gypsies, Poles and Gcr- mans.10
When free wives arrive on Sakhalin they do not re- ceive any great welcome. Here is a characteristic episode: On October 19, 1889, 300 free wives, teen-agers and children arrived in Alexandrovsk on the Volumary Fleet ship Vladi- vostok. They sailed from Vladivostok for three to four days in cold weather withom any hot f^^. Among them, so I was informed by the doctor, there were 26 who suffered from scarlet fever, smallpox or measles. The ship arrived late at night. The commander, who evidemly feared bad weather, ordered the passengers and freight to be disem- barked that same night. They unloaded from midnight to 2 AM. They locked the women and children on the pier in the cutter shed and in the warehouse built for storing merchandise; the sick were put in a quarantine shed spe- cially built for the purpose, and their possessions were thrown helter-skelter into a barge. Toward morning the rumor spread that waves had torn the barge loose during the night and carried it out to sea. The women went into hysterics. In addition to all her possessions, one woman lost 300 rubles. The officials recorded the disaster and blamed the storm, but on the next day they began to find the lost anicles in the possession of criminals in the prison.
On arriving on Sakhalin, a free woman at first looks stunned. She is dismayed by the appearance of the island and the conditions of penal servitude. She tells herself in despair that she was not deluding herself when she came to join her husband and she expected the worst, but the reality proved even worse than her expectations. After speaking a few words to the women who arrived before her and after seeing their living conditions, she is thoroughly convinced that she and her children are doomed. Although more than ten or fifteen years remain of her husband's term, she dreams hopelessly about Russia and has no desire to hear about local farming, which she regards as insignificant and beneath contempt. She cries day and night and is full of lamentations as she remembers the relatives she left behind, as though they were dead. Her husband, acknowl- edging the enormity of his guilt before her, remains sullenly silent, but finally, coming out of his shell, he begins to beat and berate her for having come to him.
If the free wife arrived without money or brought so litde that it was only sufficient to buy a hut and if she and her husband do not receive anything from home, they soon begin to suffer hunger. There is no way to earn money, there is no place to ask for charity, and she and the chil- dren must be fed on the prisoner's rations which the con- vict husband receives from the prison and which is scarcely enough to feed one adult.11
Here daily thoughts move in only one direction: what can I eat and how can I feed my children? In time her soul hardens from constant hunger, the mutual reproaches over a piece of bread, the conviction that it will never get any better. She comes to the conclusion that on Sakhalin no one ever fed well on delicate feelings, and so she goes out to earn five or ten kopecks, as one woman expressed herself, "with her own body." The husband also becomes hardened, he cares nothing for cleanliness, everything seems unimportant to him. At the age of fourteen or fifteen the daughters, too, arc sent out on the merry-go-round. The mothers haggle over them and arrange for them to live as cohabitants with rich settlers or guards. And all this takes place all the more easily because a free woman passes her time in complete idleness. There is absolutcly nothing to do in the posts; in the settlements, especially those in the Northern districts, the amount of farming that goes on is insignificant.
In addition w indigence and idleness, the free woman has yet a third source of misfortune—her husband. He may squander his rations and even the wife's and children's clothing on drink or cards. He may commit another crime or try to escape. The settler Byshevets of the Tymovsky dis- trict was being held in a cell in Due while I was there. He was accused of planning a murder. His wife and children lived nearby in the barracks, his house and homestead had been abandoned. In Malo-Tymovo, the settler Kuchcrcnko escaped, leaving his wife and children behind. Even if the husband is not included among those who murder or escape, the wife lives in daily dread, hoping against hope that he will not be punished, that he will not be accused unjustly, that he does not overstrain himself, or get sick, or die.
The years pass, old age approaches. The husband has served out his term of penal servitude and his term as a settler and is petitioning for his pcasant rights. The past is buried in oblivion, and he bids farewell to it, while there gleams before him, as he leaves for the mainland, the thought of a new, sensible, happy life far away. But it docs not always happen in this way. The wife dies of consump- tion and the old husband leaves for the mainland alone.
Or else she becomes a widow and does not know what to do, or where to go.
In Derbinskoye, a free woman, Alexandra Timofeyeva, left her husband, a milker, for the shepherd Akim. They live in a tiny, filthy hovel and she has already given him a daughter, while the husband took another woman as a co- habitant. In Alexandrovsk, the free women Shulikina and Fedina also left their husbands and became cohabitants. Nenila Karpenko became a widow and is now living with a setder. Convict Altukhov became a vagrant and his wife Ekaterina, a free woman, is now illegally married.12
According w the tenth census, there were 104.8 women to 100 men in the Russian guberniyas (1857--60).
This figure only indicates the composition of convicts by sex, and is useless if it is interpreted as an index of sexual morality. Women are more rarely sentenced to penal servitude, not because they are more moral than men but because, as a result of the social order and to a lesser degree because of the peculiarities of their nature, they are less exposed to external influences and to the risk of committing serious crimes. They do not work in offices or join the armed forces, they do not leave home for seasonal work, they do not labor in forests, in mines or at sea, and therefore they do not commit criminal breaches of trust or of military discipline or crimes which require masculine strength, such as looting the mails, highway robbery, etc. The laws concerning crimes against chastity, rape, seduction and unnatural vice are only applicable to men. On the other hand, women commit murder, torture, cause severe crippling and conceal murder more frequently than men. Among the men, 47 percent are murderers; among the women conviCts, 57 percent. As to those sentenced for poisoning, the number is not only relatively greater, but forms an absolute ma- jority. In I 889, there were more fe^le poisoners than men in all three districts, almost three times as many, but the relative proportions were 23 to 1. Nevertheless, fewer women than men arrive at the colony, and, regardless of the annual quota of free women, men still constitute an overwhelming majority. Such an unequal division of sexes is inevitable in a penal colony, and a balance will be achieved only when penal servitude comes to an end, or immigrants fl^^ the island and merge with the convicts, or when our own Mistress Frey appears, energetically propagating the idea that wholesome young women from por families should be transported to Sakhalin so that some kind of family life can be developed.