FORMULATING THE ANALYSIS
In the early years of Alexander’s reign, Russian intellectuals launched a thoroughgoing consideration of what was called in the nineteenth century “the woman question.” What was woman’s nature, they asked? How should society be reformed so that women could fulfill their potential? If emancipated, what should women do with their lives? Maria Vernadskaia, the foremost female participant in this discussion, was a liberal feminist, that is, an advocate of the ideas publicized in the early 1850s by Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill. Women should be given the same education as men, she declared, because they were entitled to it as “equal beings.” Then they would justify their emancipation by making a positive contribution to society. “If society would only realize,” Vernadskaia wrote, “that women must be useful, that they must work, that they are created not just for pleasure but also for serious activity—then women would take an equal place to men in society and would have equal rights, for anyone who works for the benefit of others is entitled to having a place in society commensurate with his or her contribution to it.”2Vernadskaia also made the argument, around since the eighteenth century, that well-educated women would be better mothers and more interesting companions to their husbands.
After Vernadskaia’s death in 1860, other Russian intellectuals, among them Evgenia Tur and Avdotia Panaeva, the editors of progressive journals, and M. L. Mikhailov, a poet and political radical, kept the discussion of the woman question going in the press. So did two novels, Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve (1860) and Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? (1863). These books became the most widely read Russian answers to the woman question.
Both novels portray young women who break free from parents and conventions in order to dedicate themselves to doing something “useful” for society. Elena, the twenty-year-old heroine of On the Eve, confides to her diary, “To be good is not enough; to do good—yes, that is the main thing in life. But how to do good?”3 She finds her mission in marrying a Bulgarian revolutionary and taking up his struggle to free his homeland from Turkish rule. Chernyshevskii’s central character, Vera, makes a marriage of convenience with a university student, which frees her from the control of her parents. She then seeks to “do good” by running a sewing workshop for poor women and studying medicine. She also falls in love, at which point her accommodating husband goes off to the United States to learn about the emancipation of the slaves. Abandoned in the eyes of the law, Vera gets a divorce and marries her true love; the happy couple then works among the poor.
Turgenev and Chernyshevskii presented the emancipation of Elena and Vera as morally good, both for the women and for the men who help them and are thereby also emancipated from Russia’s unjust patriarchy. Learning how to treat women as equals and to support their independence was part of becoming an ethical male citizen, Turgenev and Chernyshevskii argued. And, for both authors, the liberation of their heroines served another, implicitly greater, good, which was the improvement of the situation of the poor. Feminists across Europe made the same arguments, but the Russian intelligentsia were more insistent than intellectuals elsewhere that women who gained independence must use it to promote social justice. It was a credo that several generations of activist women would take to heart.
RUSSIA’S FIRST FEMINIST MOVEMENT
The discussion of the woman question in the 1850s gave rise to campaigns for reform. The “big three” of this first generation of feminist activists were Anna Filosofova, Nadezhda Stasova, and Maria Trubnikova. They came from the elite, as did many other European feminists. Anna Filosofova belonged to an eminent intelligentsia family, the Diaghilevs. Her husband, Vladimir Filosofov, was a political liberal and official in the Ministry of War. Stasova was the daughter of court architect Vasili Stasov, who had sternly impressed on all his children, girls as well as boys, the admonition, “A man [sic] is worthy of the name only when he is useful to himself and others.”4 Stasova never married, choosing rather to devote herself to caring for an ill sister and then, after that sister’s death, to feminist advocacy. Trubnikova was a philanthropist as well as an editor, with her husband, of The Stock Exchange News.
In the 1860s, Filosofova, Stasova, Trubnikova, and thousands of other feminists in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and several provincial cities concentrated on helping poor urban women and improving education for girls. Modeling their organizations on philanthropic societies, which many of them had participated in, the feminists set up governing committees to coordinate projects and collect donations. Bazaars selling foods and handcrafts were particularly popular fund-raisers.
POOR RELIEF
The feminists’ efforts among the urban poor also followed paths laid down by the philanthropists. To help women upgrade their job skills, feminists organized workshops. In 1863 the Women’s Publishing Cooperative in St. Petersburg taught forty women how to print and bind books. Volunteers also established night and Sunday schools that gave lower-class women instruction in basic literacy and numeracy. The Society for Cheap Lodgings, set up in 1859 in St. Petersburg, arranged inexpensive housing for single women. It continued to operate into the twentieth century. Many other projects were short-lived, for they were plagued by the problems that bedeviled all volunteer organizations in Russia. Government officials were often suspicious and unhelpful; fund-raising was difficult; clients drifted away; patrons became discouraged because the immensely time-consuming charities helped few women.
EDUCATION
Russia’s first feminists enjoyed far greater success in their other endeavor, improving the education available to girls from the nobility and the middling ranks of society. There was widespread agreement among the elite by the 1850s that Russia needed more secondary schools for girls. Furthermore, critics, including many in government, argued that the curriculum of the boarding schools was academically weak, with too little attention given to subjects such as history and languages, too much to those perennial staples of women’s education, manners and embroidery. This was true in schools across Europe, for the influence of the cult of domesticity was everywhere producing education that concentrated on preparing girls to be pious, dutiful wives and mothers. The Russian government was one of the first to buck that trend when, in 1858, A. S. Norov, minister of education, ordered the establishment of more rigorous secondary schools for girls. To preserve the class distinctions established by Catherine II, he decreed that new schools for the daughters of merchants and artisans, which came to be called progymnasia, would teach literature, languages, and religion, as well as some vocational courses, while the gymnasia, established for noble girls, would concentrate on the humanities.
It was typical of Alexander II’s reforms that local people were expected to get the projects under way themselves, following government regulations and guidelines, with minimal government funding. As regards educational reform, feminists, philanthropists, and local government officials did just that, working together to raise money, rent buildings, and hire faculty for the new secondary schools. Professors from the universities advised on curriculum design. By 1868, ten years after Norov’s decree, the volunteers had established 125 secondary schools, which enrolled more than ten thousand girls.5 Most were urban day schools, not boarding schools, and most students came from families that could afford to pay the tuition. Also by 1868, the curriculum of the gymnasia had been expanded to include more science and a year of education courses. Graduates who completed the full eight years of study were qualified to work as private tutors or teachers in the first four grades of the gymnasia and progymnasia. The progymnasia continued to offer less science and more vocational courses in their three-year program.
The popularity of the new schools inspired more improvements. The administrators of the much-maligned boarding schools strengthened their curricula and opened secondary day schools. In the 1880s the church established diocesan schools that offered a six-year program emphasizing religious instruction. They proved to be quite popular with daughters of the clergy.
Through the subsequent decades, enrollments in girls’ secondary schools grew; by the 1890s they were educating 79,000 pupils per year. This was a small fraction of the millions of girls in Russia, most of whom were peasants, but it represented substantial progress for the young women lucky enough to be able to attend. The new schools also testified to the progressive attitudes of many of Russia’s parents and educators. Germany, by contrast, although renowned for the quality of its educational system for males, had less than 200 secondary schools for girls in 1871, all offering the watered-down curriculum of the “finishing school.” French public schools did not provide college-preparatory classes to girls until 1924.6
Feminists and their supporters also succeeded in establishing colleges for women. In the 1860s, Russia had universities in Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Vilnius, none of which, in keeping with the European-wide practice, admitted women. The feminists, unable to change that policy, got permission to set up “higher women’s courses,” private colleges staffed by volunteer professors and funded by donations and tuition. The most prestigious of these were the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg, named after their first director, history professor K. N. Bestuzhev-Riumin. Founded in 1878, the Bestuzhev Courses enrolled more than seven hundred students annually for the first eight years of their existence.7 The women studied at night in a boys’ school. At first the faculty concentrated on the liberal arts, then added science and mathematics. The four-year program became the equivalent of a university’s course of study, with the important qualification that Bestuzhev graduates were prohibited from receiving degrees. The minister of education in the late 1870s, D. A. Tolstoi, took a dim view of women in higher education and had only grudgingly approved the creation of the courses. He refused all requests to give them degree-granting authority.
By the early 1880s higher women’s courses had also been founded in Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, and Moscow. Christine Johanson has found that 60 to 70 percent of the students in the Bestuzhev Courses in the early years were of noble rank; by the 1880s the daughters of merchant families had increased their enrollment to a third of the student body. In Kiev, women from the middling orders made up a still larger percentage of students.8 The life of a kursistka, as the students were called, was not easy: the courses were demanding and tuition was high. Female students, unlike males, were not eligible for government scholarships, and there were few jobs available to help them augment their incomes. Girls whose parents could not afford to support them struggled to find patrons who would pay their tuition and endured bad housing and food. That thousands persevered until they completed the courses testifies to their thirst for higher education.
The feminists scored successes as well in their campaign to open admission to medical schools to women. Across Europe, socially conscious women were trying to become physicians, because they saw healing the sick as a high calling particularly suited to women. These were feelings that Chernyshevskii expressed in his fictional Vera, who studied medicine.
The resistance to women becoming physicians was strong, however. Male physicians anxious to raise the status of their profession denigrated traditional medicine, much of which had been practiced by women, and lauded the superiority of university-trained physicians. Women could not become such physicians, these promoters of “scientific medicine” argued, because of their inferior intellects. Such attitudes, prevalent all over the European world, led Russian government officials in the late 1860s to deny feminist petitions to admit women to medical schools.
Turned down at home, several hundred women from Russia journeyed west to study medicine at Zurich University, which had opened its doors to women in 1865. Soon government spies were sending back reports that the Russian students were picking up radical political ideas, which was true. Alarmed, the government ordered them to return home in May 1873. Most left Switzerland, but as many as one-third soon enrolled in other European universities. For the rest of the century, Russian medical students would make up the majority of female students at the university in Zurich.9
Russian feminists were quick to point out to government officials that this problem would not have arisen had women been permitted to study medicine in Russia. Minister of Education Tolstoi responded in typical foot-dragging fashion: he ordered a study of the feasibility of including medical training in the higher courses. Then the feminists turned to Dmitri Miliutin, the minister of war and a supporter of women’s education. They knew that he would be receptive because he had said as much to leading feminist Anna Filosofova’s husband Vladimir, who worked for him. On receipt of the feminists’ petition, Miliutin agreed to the establishment of a separate curriculum for women at the army’s medical school in St. Petersburg. This curriculum evolved over the 1870s into a five-year program as rigorous as the male one. Female graduates received a degree and the title “Woman Doctor” (Zhenskii Vrach). By 1882, less than ten years later, more than two hundred students had completed the training. Again, Russian women were ahead of those elsewhere. In that same year there were only twenty-six female physicians in England.10
VARVARA KASHEVAROVA-RUDNEVA (1844–99)
Russia’s first female physician, Varvara Kashevarova-Rudneva, received her medical degree in 1868, several years before the establishment of the women’s medical courses. Kashevarova’s origins were humble and her early life would have defeated many other girls; that she became one of the first female physicians in Europe was a testament to her intelligence and persistence, and to the support available to such women from some members of the intelligentsia.
Kashevarova was a Jewish orphan from the Belarusian region who spent her childhood in the temporary custody of various families, some friendly, some abusive. Along the way she managed to learn to read and write. At twelve she ran away to St. Petersburg, hoping to find work there. An army officer and his wife adopted her, but before long she perceived that her new father was grooming her to be his mistress. She escaped when she was fifteen by marrying Nikolai Kashevarov, a merchant much older than she. Three years later, Kashevarova left her husband and enrolled in a school for midwives.
Despite the fact that she had never attended school before, Kashevarova sailed through the midwifery courses. She also earned the support of Veniamin Tarnovskii, a prominent professor and specialist in venereal diseases. Soon Kashevarova was complaining to Tarnovskii that her classes were too rudimentary. She wanted to learn more. “I thought,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that even if I were not as able as I had so often been told I was, I was at least confident of my capacity for hard work and my eagerness to learn. Nor had God stinted in giving me a strong will and great determination.”11
With the support of Tarnovskii and other professors, Kashevarova found a way. In Orenberg province, far to the southeast of Moscow, there was an army garrison plagued by venereal disease. The soldiers and the local Bashkir people were infecting one another, but the Bashkirs would not let the male military doctors have contact with their women. Kashevarova and her supporters persuaded army administrators to admit her to the army medical school in St. Petersburg so that she could become a physician to Bashkir women. Even with that authorization, she fought resistance from some faculty and bureaucrats throughout her five years of study. Permission to take the final examinations had to come from Minister of War Miliutin himself. When Kashevarova received her diploma in 1868, her fellow students celebrated by carrying her around the hall. People agitating for women to be admitted to the medical schools, including her mentor Tarnovskii, cited her as an example of what women could achieve if they were given the opportunity.
Kashevarova’s accomplishments were extraordinary for any woman, let alone a Jewish orphan with no connections in St. Petersburg save those she made for herself. The appointment to Orenberg never came through, so she continued her studies and in 1876 received the degree of medical doctor, the equivalent of a Ph.D. She also wrote scholarly papers and enjoyed a second, happy marriage with one of her professors, Mikhail Rudnev, who died in 1878. Unfortunately the sexist abuse that had always plagued her continued and the conservative press caricatured her as a freak. In the 1880s Kashevarova wearied of battling her persecutors and moved to the countryside. She opened a clinic for the poor and wrote her memoirs and a book, The Hygiene of the Female Organism, that was published in multiple editions. Kashevarova was living outside St. Petersburg when she died in 1899.12
Belarusian peasants posing in the fields, circa 1900. Peasants much like these came to Varvara Kashevarova-Rudneva’s rural clinic. Picture Collection of the New York Public Library.
VARVARA KASHEVAROVA-RUDNEVA
In her memoirs, Kashevarova-Rudneva remembered her years as a country doctor:
“In 1881 I acquired a small plot of land (343 acres) in the Valuisky district of the Voronezh province. There in the steppe, far from any village (the nearest hamlet was almost a mile from my farm), I built a house, opened a dispensary, and began to treat the rural population. Before long I acquired a reputation for tens of miles around, and patients came to see me from far and wide. I lived in the countryside for about eight years. I wanted to repay my stipend [at medical school] with service to the people… in my native land.
While I was living in the countryside I wrote and published: 1) a review of Professor Lazarevich’s book The Works of Women…; 2) a popular account of the female organism (1884); 3) my autobiography…; 4) an article entitled ‘Toward the History of Women’s Medical Education in Russia’…; 5) two articles entitled ‘Country Notes’…; 6) in 1892 the second edition of my book The Hygiene of the Female Organism.…
In March 1886 my rural home burned down because of a servant’s carelessness; by some miracle I escaped death. Although I later built another small house for myself, I was then afraid of living alone in the steppe, and two years after that disastrous fire I sold my farm to the peasants through a bank and left the countryside for good.”
SOURCE: TOBY CLYMAN AND JUDITH VOWLES, ED., RUSSIA THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES FROM TSARIST RUSSIA (NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996), 184–85.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF FEMINIST ACTIVISM
The strengths and the weaknesses of Russia’s feminist activism derived from the nation’s politics. The autocratic government was an enormous obstacle. Russian feminists worked for years to get permission to set up the higher women’s courses; they could not persuade the authorities to award degrees to graduates. Feminists in the United States, on the other hand, did not require government permission to establish dozens of independent, degree-granting, private women’s colleges in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s these institutions enrolled eighty thousand women, and by 1890 women were 36 percent of American undergraduates.13 First Amendment freedoms allowed American feminists to publish journals and newspapers and hold meetings and marches—all activities that were strictly prohibited to social activists in Russia. American and British feminists also managed to ease legal restrictions on divorce, a reform Russian feminists did not even attempt, because they realized they could not overcome the resistance of church authorities. Established churches were an obstacle to reform across Europe, it should be noted.
Autocracy did have one advantage over democracy: it could be a powerful patron to those with access to its top leaders. The federated structure of American government enabled feminists to achieve reforms in progressive municipalities and states, but made nationwide successes extremely difficult. By contrast, Russian feminists who had the backing of important government officials could achieve much in a very short time. The medical schools for women and the expansion of secondary education for girls are cases in point. The problem was that what the tsarist government gave, it could also take away. Alexander II’s successor, Alexander III, was an archconservative who did not approve of higher education for women. In 1888, he shut down most of the higher courses and closed the women’s medical school. He permitted the Bestuzhev Courses to continue, probably because they had powerful sponsors. Higher education for women only expanded again a decade later when Alexander’s son Nicholas II permitted it.
More reliable, indeed crucial to the feminists’ successes, was the support of the intelligentsia. In On the Eve and What Is to Be Done? Turgenev and Chernyshevskii defined the moral man as one who renounced his masculine prerogatives and supported women in their efforts to escape patriarchy. Many reform-minded men took that principle to heart, propagating the argument for women’s emancipation, assisting the feminists in their projects, and teaching in the women’s courses. Among the instructors at the Bestuzhev Courses was D. I. Mendeleev, the chemist famous for creating the periodic table of the elements. Hundreds of male teachers, writers, zemstvo officials, and other professionals organized schools for girls, provided grants to students, and helped graduates obtain white-collar jobs.
Their support should not be exaggerated. We have already discussed the prejudice against female writers during the reign of Nicholas. Resistance to reform benefiting women persisted within the intelligentsia throughout the late imperial period. These qualifications notwithstanding, the support that many educated people gave to those reforms and the priority many of them accorded to women’s issues were extraordinary in late nineteenth-century Europe.
THE ORIGINS OF RADICALISM
Members of the intelligentsia had been criticizing patriarchy and autocracy since the reign of Nicholas I. Indeed, many well-educated people believed that intellectuals were morally obligated to criticize social injustice. Alexander II raised their hopes when he committed himself to freeing the serfs, but by the mid-1860s, disillusionment with the Tsar Reformer had set in. Emancipation had not given the peasants as much land as many had hoped it would, and Alexander had brutally repressed an uprising in Polish territories in 1863–64. A few educated people decided that Russia would only be a just society when autocracy itself was overthrown. For them, reformism turned into radicalism.
The first radicals of the 1860s were the nihilists, so named by Turgenev because some of them professed to believe in “nothing” (nihil is the Latin word for “nothing”). The nihilists actually had quite a few beliefs, most of which involved rejection of the status quo. This collection of several thousand privileged young people, most of them living in St. Petersburg, declared that the first step toward progressive social change was self-transformation. The individual must reject the parasitical, indolent lifestyle of the nobility and become honest and socially responsible. This meant dedicating oneself to work benefiting poor people, such as medicine or teaching. It also meant that men and women should live together as equals, which required men to treat women as comrades rather than sexual objects. A few nihilists acted on these principles by organizing communes in the cities; the one founded by writer Vasili Sleptsov in 1863 included women. The nihilist movement in general and the communes in particular were the inspiration for Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?
Sleptsov’s commune was tiny, only seven people, and notorious, for Russians considered it scandalous for unrelated, unmarried women and men to live together. The nihilists were quite happy shocking people; they wanted to be publicly outrageous. Like the hippies and stoners of twentieth-century America, the nihilists, particularly the female ones, paraded their rejection of the establishment through the streets. The women cut their hair short, wore blue-tinted spectacles, and smoked cigarettes. They proclaimed their devotion to reason and science and scorned tradition, sentimentality, and religion. Romantics in their public display, rationalists in their pronouncements, the nihilists achieved their main objective, which was to challenge the complacency of the comfortable.
Their rebellion was short-lived. By 1865 nihilism had become a fad among elite young people, many of whom adopted the dress code but not the commitment to reform. Serious nihilists were embarrassed and annoyed by their own disciples. They were also frustrated by the fact that their self-transformations had had no effect on Russia’s great injustices. Nihilism was already losing popularity in 1866, therefore, when a radical student attempted to assassinate the tsar. Thereafter the police cracked down, driving most nihilists into quiescence and a few into revolutionary socialism.
These revolutionaries—often referred to as “the Populists” in English-language histories—were young people from the middle and upper ranks of Russian society who dreamed of a popular revolution in Russia that would abolish the old order and establish in its stead an egalitarian society. Vera Zasulich, one of the medical students in Zurich in the early 1870s, remembered her friend Sophia Bardina telling her, “We should direct all our resources not toward ameliorating the plight of isolated individuals, not toward doctoring individual cases, but rather toward the struggle to subvert the social institutions that are the source of all evil. We must struggle against man’s exploitation of man, against private property, against inheritance rights. All of these must be abolished.”14
In this quotation we see both a key difference between Russian feminism and radicalism and the ease with which an impassioned young woman might move from one to the other. Feminists and revolutionaries had a lot in common: most were well-educated people from the nobility and many favored sweeping political and economic change. Russia’s first feminists sought to improve women’s situation through mobilizing the support of government officials and propertied people. Populists such as Bardina and Zasulich sought to remedy the problems of all of Russia’s people by rousing those people to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with democratic institutions modeled on the village commune. These were the ideas of utopian socialism, first formulated in France, now shaped by the Populists into a prescription for peasant revolution.
Having formulated their socialist credo, the Populists attempted to teach it to the poor. Members of the Chaikovskii Circle in St. Petersburg proselytized workers. In 1874, several thousand Populists spent the summer in the countryside spreading their ideas among the peasants. These campaigns roused little popular support, for villagers and workers scoffed at vague appeals from privileged young people. The police were better listeners. They began rounding up Populists in large numbers, and in the late 1870s put several dozen of them on trial.
Suppression discouraged many Populists and drove on a hardened few. In the late 1870s a group called People’s Will began planning the assassination of Alexander II. Among the leaders of this group was Sophia Perovskaia, the daughter of a general. She and her comrades argued that a direct strike at the heart of imperial power would show the Russian people that the tsar was an ordinary mortal, not, as they had been taught, a demigod. When the people saw that he was as killable as anybody else, they would rise up against the repressive regime. On March 1, 1881, Perovskaia and her comrades succeeded in killing the emperor, but no great revolt followed. Instead, most people reacted with horror and the police quickly caught the assassins. Perovskaia became the first female revolutionary executed in Russia.
To any student of the “Victorian Age” in Europe—a time when most privileged women lived highly sheltered and conventional lives—it must come as a surprise to learn that women were highly visible members of the Populist movement throughout the 1870s: fully 20 percent of those arrested for “going to the people” in 1874 were women, and women made up as much as one-third of the leadership of Land and Liberty, the organization from which People’s Will sprang.15 This was a prime indicator of the Russian intelligentsia’s receptivity to women’s emancipation; radical groups in the rest of Europe had far fewer female members.
Still more surprisingly, many Russian liberals, that is, those who favored incremental reform achieved by non-violent means, saw the female Populists as heroic martyrs. They did so because the line between reformers and revolutionaries was a fine one, easily crossed, Russia’s injustices being so great and its government so recalcitrant. That government inadvertently promoted sympathy for Populist women by putting some of them on trial in 1877 and 1878. Surrounded by police and prosecutors, the women seemed frail, yet defiant. Perhaps the most eloquent was Sophia Bardina, who declared that she had become a revolutionary to help the poor and who warned, prophetically, that one day “even our sleepy and lazy society” would avenge itself on its oppressors.16 Her testimony was published abroad and circulated in manuscript throughout Russia. Poets later celebrated the female revolutionaries and art dealers sold portraits of the executed Perovskaia.
This admiration was rooted in traditional notions about noblewomen sacrificing themselves for the unfortunate. Barbara Alpern Engel has shown that many female Populists felt a religious obligation to fight for social justice, even if it cost them their lives. “There are times,” wrote Vera Zasulich, “there are entire ages, when there is nothing more beautiful and desirable than a crown of thorns.” Zasulich also professed a more modern, more feminist motivation. “And then the distant specter of revolution appeared, making me equal to a boy,” she wrote. “I, too, could dream of ‘action,’ of ‘exploits,’ and of the ‘great struggle.’”17 Chernyshevskii’s Vera had made the same connection between improving Russia and emancipating herself. Future generations of women would do so as well.
The formulation of the woman question in the reign of Alexander II and the projects launched to change patriarchal institutions set the pattern for the rest of the imperial period. Feminists would struggle for reforms while socialists would seek to inspire the poor to revolt. Individual women would move back and forth between the two perspectives or keep a foot in each camp. Traditionalists would excoriate everyone seeking to alter woman’s God-given roles as wife and mother. Meanwhile the government would pursue policies that destabilized traditional gender ideas and practices.