This article addresses questions concerning the impact of rural-urban migration, the market economy and the new consumer culture on the lives of peasant women who moved to a major city. Its focus is Evdokiia Kulikova, born to an impoverished peasant household, raised in rural Tver' and unhappily married to a fellow villager, who sought to escape that marriage by petitioning the tsar. The dossier generated by her appeal sheds light on the opportunities that urban life might offer an intelligent, literate, enterprising and attractive young woman in the sphere of sexual relations, self-presentation and social mobility. The testimony of individuals across the social spectrum demonstrates Kulikova’s success in transforming herself from a village woman (baba) to a lady (baryshnia), and in making taste, rather than birth, the marker of her social position and character. At the same time, however, her history illuminates some of the ways that restrictive laws and arbitrary administrative practices continued to restrict mobility and retard individual autonomy even in the context of a major city.