5
The Russian Revolution began in February 1917 with a demonstration by poor women in Petrograd, Russia’s newly renamed capital city. On February 23, textile workers took to the streets to protest food shortages and the war that had cost so many of them their husbands and brothers. They were answering the call of socialists and feminists to mark International Women’s Day with meetings and marches. Dozens, then hundreds of women came out of their tenements and factories. The swelling crowds marched through the streets, they yelled for bread and an end to the war, and they defied the police that tried to keep them out of the city center. Crowds milled around shouting their discontents until sunset and were back again the next morning. Ten days of demonstrations followed, during which troops sent to disperse the people joined them instead and committees of Duma delegates met to form a new government. On March 3, under pressure from his generals, Nicholas II abdicated.
In 1910, the Socialist International had named February 23 (March 8 on the Western calendar) Women’s Day, meaning it should be a time to demonstrate for women’s rights, and so the protests that swept Russia’s capital on that day in 1917 are known as the Women’s Day March. It became a much-celebrated milestone in an era of female activism that began in late nineteenth-century Russia and continued into the Soviet period. “Activism” is defined here as participation in such public institutions as the church, government, political parties, professions, trade unions, and voluntary organizations, particularly participation aimed at achieving social, political, or cultural change. The late nineteenth century was a time of rising female activism throughout the European world. Nowhere was that activism more consequential than in Russia. There women broadened the discussion of the woman question, expanded the feminist movement, made major contributions to the arts and sciences, helped to build public education and social services, energized the churches, and strengthened the labor movement and revolutionary parties. This activism led directly to the February 23 uprising.
The 1917 revolution promised still more, because it brought so many women into politics, spread the message of women’s equality, and empowered the Communist Party, which was committed to major reforms in gender values and practices. A heady, wide-ranging discussion of what equality was and how it could be achieved followed. Professional women went to work in the ministries of the new government and scholars documented the obstacles hindering poor women’s participation in the public world. Operatives from the women’s organization of the Communist Party (the Zhenotdel) fanned out across the country to inform lower-class women of their new rights, teach them to read and write, and engage them in building social services that would ease their burdens. The scale of the changes undertaken and the participation of women in them were unprecedented in Russia and throughout the European world.
The communist activists, who belonged to a party that was as autocratic as the monarchy it had overthrown, found, as their predecessors had, that autocracy was a powerful and demanding patron. Communist leaders, although willing to do much more than any other government of the time, believed that their main emphasis had to be on economic reconstruction. And so in 1930, when they undertook a massive program of industrialization, they declared the emancipation of women complete, closed the Zhenotdel, and summoned women to the factories. Female activism continued thereafter, but within limits set by the dictatorship.
Female activists in the run-up to the Revolution included academics, actors, artists, factory workers, feminists, journalists, nuns, peasants, physicians, socialists, and teachers. They ranged in their political opinions from monarchists to revolutionaries. Collectively, they entered terrain dominated by men and established a presence for women that would endure long past the Revolution. They also changed the places they entered, enlarging women’s role in the churches, expanding philanthropy, and broadening the aesthetic of the avant garde. The feminists and socialists among them put the woman question on the political agenda of those seeking to reform and of those seeking to overthrow the tsarist system.
THE NEW NUNS
We begin with Orthodox nuns who revitalized monastic life in late nineteenth-century Russia and in the process “feminized” it. Religiosity, particularly among women, is often associated with political conservatism, and nuns with subordination to male authority, so it may seem mistaken to include the surge of women into the church in a discussion of social activism. But how else can one classify the existence of dozens of all-female communities, created by women despite resistance from church leaders, and practicing a new kind of philanthropy in Russia?
Across the continent, many women were feeling a religious vocation in the nineteenth century, and so they flocked to new Protestant sects and to new Catholic religious orders. When similar urges to a more pious life struck women in Russia, there were few convents for them to join, because Catherine the Great had limited the number of monastics in an effort to cut the costs of maintaining them. Devout women had to improvise, and so, beginning in the late eighteenth century, they organized their own “women’s communities,” wherein they could pray together and support themselves by raising food and selling handcrafts. For decades the church took a dim view of this effort to get around the limitations on convents. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, energetic lobbying by a few supportive bishops and abbots gained official recognition for the communities and permission to open more convents. There followed a huge increase in the number of women religious, most of it occurring after 1890. By 1914, there were seventy-three thousand Orthodox nuns and novices in Russia; they constituted an astonishing 77 percent of all Orthodox monastics.1
The nuns of the late nineteenth century and the communities they established broke with traditions in important ways. Most of these nuns were single women from the peasantry, not the widows of noblemen, as nuns had been through the centuries. In part this was because Emancipation enabled rural people to leave their villages and male out-migration made it harder for women to find marriage partners. Furthermore, convents no longer charged admission fees, nor did they require sisters to pay for their room and board, as they had in Muscovite times.2
Those enabling conditions alone do not explain the prodigious expansion of convents and communities in the late nineteenth century. That growth occurred because tens of thousands of women in Russia who wanted to be nuns took the initiative. They established communities run according to communal principles that gave no privileges to noblewomen, grew their own food, found ways to raise money, and spent years petitioning for recognition by church authorities. Many of the women’s communities eventually became convents through this process. The most enterprising of these convents administered farms, maintained chapels for visitors and pilgrims, and sold embroidery, icons, and holy bread. The women religious also expanded the social mission of convents. They performed the traditional charity of providing shelter to pilgrims and the destitute, and they also practiced modern philanthropy, establishing almshouses, hospitals, and schools for girls.3
In Polish lands, a large religious movement also developed among women. When the tsarist government closed most Catholic convents in the aftermath of the Polish uprising of 1863–64, women’s communities modeled on the Russian ones sprang up in their stead. They lived a quasi-illegal life for decades, supported by the laity and by Catholic authorities. Out of these communities came the Mariavite movement, an organization of thousands of urban nuns who ran soup kitchens, cooperative workshops, and daycare centers.4
THE NEW PHILANTHROPISTS
Laywomen were important contributors as well to the expansion of philanthropy in the late imperial decades. This was a time when philanthropy across Europe was ceasing to be the purview of privileged volunteers and becoming professionalized. In the early 1890s, the municipal government of Moscow took an important step in that direction by creating “guardianships of the poor,” staffed mainly by volunteers who got to know needy families, provided assistance and referrals to social services, stayed in touch to see how the people were getting on, and reported to the government on slum conditions. These were Russia’s first social workers; two-thirds of them were women. Within a few years, the national government established the National Guardianship to set up workhouses and workshops that provided lodging and job training to the needy. Wealthy women raised money to support the workhouses and found markets for the goods manufactured by the residents. The Guardianship’s employees also fanned out to rural areas, bringing food, organizing public-works projects that provided employment, and running daycare centers for peasant children. Teachers and female landowners enlisted in all these efforts; they were particularly valuable in the daycare programs.5
Female philanthropists also continued to work in private organizations. The Russian Society for the Protection of Women provided low-cost housing, medical care, and job training and publicized the problems of poor women, particularly prostitutes. The Red Cross, staffed by many female volunteers, set up nursing courses. Local charitable societies across the empire supported free clinics and libraries, midwifery and nursing schools, night and Sunday schools, and public lectures. In working-class neighborhoods, they also founded “people’s houses” similar to the settlement houses of Great Britain and the United States.
SOPHIA PANINA (1871–1956)
One of the most famous of the people’s houses was run by Sophia Panina in St. Petersburg. A noblewoman, Panina had inherited an enormous fortune; after a brief, unhappy marriage, she turned to full-time philanthropy. “My interests,” she wrote many years later, “were concentrated on questions of general education and culture, which alone, I was deeply convinced, could provide a solid basis for a free political order.” In 1903 Panina took over leadership of a people’s house in the working-class Ligovskii district of St. Petersburg and began building it into an energetic presence in the neighborhood. The institution provided activities for children, a cafeteria, elementary education and vocational training, a medical clinic, meeting rooms, public lectures, a reading room, a savings bank, temporary housing, and a theater. Counselors were available to give advice on legal problems.6
Panina saw herself as a no-nonsense, hands-on manager who was offering poor people opportunities to improve their lives. She was demanding and bossy and, like so many of the assertive noblewomen in Russia’s past, she expected to get her own way. Often she did. Her dedication to the neighborhood, her generosity, and her effectiveness earned the respect and gratitude of her clients. They called her center “Panina’s House.” It became a model for similar institutions across the empire.7
THE ARTISTS
Women substantially expanded their participation in Russia’s arts and letters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by so doing overcame much of the misogynistic prejudice against them. This was the Silver Age of Russian high culture, created by innovative poets, playwrights, theater directors, actors, dancers, and artists whose work drew international attention. A significant few of these innovators were women.
WRITERS
Some female writers of the late imperial period continued to talk about the situation of women under patriarchy, while others explored new styles in fiction and poetry. The so-called “realists” wrote about the difficulties that female professionals experienced in the work world and also considered the lives of women in the urban middle and lower classes, as well as the peasantry. Female poets developed innovative ways of exploring women’s feelings about love and the spiritual world. Marina Tsvetaeva and Sophia Parnok were the most daring; they wrote love poetry to one another.
Women worked as journalists, editors, and publishers too. Scholars have recovered the names of 447 female journalists; undoubtedly there were many more whose articles were published without a byline.8 They wrote for all the various types of periodicals—women’s magazines, the so-called “thick journals” read by the liberal intelligentsia, and newspapers. The situation of female journalists was similar to that of women in the other professions, that is, most held the lowest paying, least secure jobs, but there were exceptions. Alexandra Davydova edited the journal Severnyi vestnik(Northern Herald) and founded the children’s magazine Mir bozhii (God’s World). Ekaterina Kuskova and Ariadna Tyrkova were among the founders of the socialist journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), which they both wrote for and helped smuggle into Russia. After 1905, feminists also produced a series of periodicals.
DANCERS, SINGERS, AND ACTORS
More women than ever before were in the performing arts, and a few became international stars. Anna Pavlova is widely regarded as the greatest ballerina of the early twentieth century because of her technical skills and consummate artistry. Russia’s most popular singer was Anastasia Vialtseva, a peasant who started out in provincial theaters. “The Incomparable One” did not have a first-class voice, but she was such a terrific performer that theater owners around the country had to hire extra security for her concerts, to prevent her fans from rioting.9
Stardom was somewhat harder for actresses to achieve, even though the Russian theater flourished in the last decades of imperial Russia. Maria Andreeva and Olga Knipper were members of the repertory company at the Moscow Art Theater, a group that invented a naturalistic style that revolutionized acting across Europe. They were well paid, while most female actors struggled to make a living. All women performers were also plagued by the public’s continuing belief that going on the stage testified to a woman’s lack of modesty and therefore probably also meant that she was sexually promiscuous. Some were; finding a well-heeled lover was one way to survive.10
PAINTERS
It was more difficult for women to become painters, for they were not admitted to the government’s art academies. They could study at schools that trained drawing teachers and at two institutions, the Stroganov School in Moscow and the Stieglitz School in St. Petersburg, that taught the applied arts of embroidery, lace-making, porcelain painting, jewelry-making, and engraving. Some of the graduates of these programs then found an opening to painting careers when a rebellion against Russia’s stuffy art establishment began in the 1890s. Female painters contributed works to exhibitions sponsored by private organizations such as the Moscow Society for the Lovers of Art. They studied with the prominent painter Ilia Repin. Consequently, when the Russian avant garde developed in the 1900s, it included five women—Alexandra Ekster, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova—whose paintings, book illustrations, stage sets, costume designs, and short films broke down boundaries between artistic media and pushed beyond conventional notions of representation. Their works now hang in galleries around the world.
THE ACADEMICIANS
Throughout these decades, the intelligentsia supported women who wanted to work in fields hitherto closed to them. Its members hired female journalists, published women’s poetry, and invited female painters to submit works to art exhibits. They could not, however, alter the rules of Russia’s universities. Government officials, who had only grudgingly permitted the expansion of the higher courses for women, would not admit female graduates of those courses to advanced study or appoint women to professorial rank until after 1907.
So hundreds of women became independent scholars. We have already mentioned The Hygiene of the Female Organism, written by Varvara Kashevarova, which went through multiple editions. So did Intellectual and Moral Development of Children from the First Appearance of Consciousness to School Age, by Elizaveta Vodovozova. Still another physician, Maria Pokrovskaia, crusaded for reform in the treatment of prostitutes, publishing a book in 1902, The Medical-Police Supervision of Prostitution Contributes to the Degeneration of the Nation. Less prominent women also labored away in their communities. In Siberia, physician and teacher Anna Bek headed local education societies and did research on childhood development. Women also joined the scientific expeditions that studied Siberia’s plants, animals, and native peoples.11
SOPHIA KOVALEVSKAIA (1850–91) AND MARIE CURIE (1867–1934)
It is not surprising, in view of all this scholarly activity, that the two most accomplished female academics in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from the Russian Empire. Sophia Kovalevskaia, the daughter of a liberal Polish/Russian family, was the first European woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. In the 1870s, she studied in Berlin with the eminent mathematician Karl Weierstrass, who recognized her talent and persuaded his colleagues to waive the rules and grant her a doctorate. For years thereafter, Kovalevskaia applied for university positions in Russia and was turned down. Finally in 1883 she was appointed to the faculty of the University of Stockholm. Kovalevskaia wrote major papers on differential equations (one theorem still bears her name) and on the revolution of a solid body around a fixed point. By the late 1880s, she was being widely hailed as an intellectual phenomenon—Europe’s only woman professor in one of the most intellectually demanding fields, mathematics. She received the prestigious Prix Bordin in 1888 and was elected by leading academics in Russia to the Russian Academy of Sciences the following year. Still, no Russian university was permitted to hire her. Kovalevskaia was trying again to secure a professorship in her homeland when she died of an upper respiratory infection in February 1891. She is buried in Sweden, under a headstone paid for by the students of the Bestuzhev Courses.12
Marie Curie had to overcome similar obstacles. The daughter of Polish teachers in Warsaw, she enrolled in the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1990s, and within a few years had completed her doctoral degree in physics. In collaboration with her husband Pierre Curie, she had also isolated two elements, polonium (named in tribute to Poland) and radium. Curie’s subsequent research on radium transformed the understanding of the structure of the atom and led to the development of the x-ray as a diagnostic tool in medicine, as well as to radiation treatments for disease. The resistance at the Sorbonne to appointing her to a professorship ebbed after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. Curie became the first woman to teach at that university; in 1911 she received her second Nobel Prize, this one in chemistry. Unlike Kovalevskaia, Curie did not seek to return to the Russian Empire. She became a French citizen.
Sophia Kovalevskaia in 1880. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sofja_Wassiljewna_Kowalewskaja_i.jpg. Accessed June 27, 2011.
SOPHIA KOVALEVSKAIA
Kovalevskaia saw herself as blazing a trail into academe that other women would follow. In 1882 she broke Russian law by lending her passport to the sixteen-year-old sister of a friend. The girl used the passport to leave Russia, over her parents’ objections, and study abroad. Kovalevskaia explained her decision to put herself in legal jeopardy in a letter to another friend:
“Is it really possible not to stretch out one’s hand, to refuse to help someone who is seeking knowledge and cannot help himself reach its source? After all, on woman’s road, when a woman wants to take a path other than the well-trodden one leading to matrimony, so many difficulties pile up. I myself encountered many of these. Therefore I consider it my duty to destroy whatever obstacles I can in the paths of others. According to her brother, this girl has unusual capabilities in the exact sciences. Who knows, maybe she’ll become a prominent scholar!”
Two years later, Kovalevskaia wrote to a friend,
“The new mathematical work I recently began intensely interests me now, and I would hate to die without discovering what I am looking for. If I succeed in solving the problem on which I am now working, my name will be listed among those of the most prominent mathematicians.
According to my calculations, I need another five years to get good results. But I hope that in five years there will be more than one woman capable of taking my place here, and I can devote myself to other urges of my gypsy nature.”
SOURCE: ANN HIBNER KOBLITZ, A CONVERGENCE OF LIVES: SOFIA KOVALEVSKAIA, SCIENTIST, WRITER, REVOLUTIONARY (BOSTON: BIRKHÄUSER, 1983), 166, 186. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF SPRINGER PRESS.
In their talent, ambition, and commitment to their chosen fields, Curie and Kovalevskaia had much in common with the other activist women of late nineteenth-century Russia. Many of them were reared in educated families that encouraged their daughters’ intellectual aspirations. Curie and Kovalevskaia married and had daughters, were widowed early, and continued their work while rearing their children. They were aided by support from their families and the intelligentsia, as were many other activist women, and by the spread of emancipatory ideas from the intelligentsia to the wider urban world. In this changing milieu, such women accomplished extraordinary things. The celebrity of some of them also testified to the emergence of a public happy to applaud talented women.
But the limits were always there. Kovalevskaia was knocking on the doors of Russian universities long after she was a prize-winning academic in Western Europe. The difficulties arose because patriarchal ideas were still powerful in Russia, particularly within the reactionary, obstructionist government. Frustrating also was the enormity of Russia’s problems. Doctors worked themselves to exhaustion, and still diseases carried off half the babies. Teachers toiled in the villages, and still most peasant women could not write their own names. Some concluded that such “small deeds,” as they were derisively labeled, were insufficient.
THE POLITICAL ACTIVISTS
The surge of political activism by women began in the 1890s and continued, with ebbs and flows, right up to the women’s march that set off the Russian Revolution. It was centered in the European region of the empire and was part of the unrest rising across the society. Tens of thousands of women, poor as well as privileged ones, became involved. They were united in their desire to improve the lives of women and the poor, but divided over whether to work in women’s groups or join ones led by men, whether to concentrate on women’s issues or pursue multiple agendas, whether to seek incremental changes or revolution. So their activism was multifarious and their arguments with one another heated.
FEMINISTS AND SOCIAL DEMOCRATS, 1890–1904
The 1890s were an encouraging decade for feminists across the European world. Particularly in the United States and Britain, female philanthropists and professionals from a variety of organizations worked with male allies to persuade governments to institute child-welfare agencies, improve education for girls and women, provide pension plans for widows, and issue protective labor laws and public-health regulations. The feminists among these activists built large organizations that campaigned for women’s suffrage.
These successes encouraged two veteran Russian feminists, Anna Filosofova and Nadezhda Stasova, to join with pediatrician Anna Shabanova to establish the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society in 1895. Sophia Panina was an early board member as well. The society’s charter was modeled on those of the women’s clubs then springing up in the United States, which were dedicated to educating their upper-class members and to philanthropy. Many of the American clubwomen were also feminists who supported the suffrage movement. The Russian society’s members, several thousand women in the capitals and in provincial cities, could not pursue the vote in Russia, for the government would not permit it, so they contented themselves with charities—clothing banks, daycare centers, housing for single women, job training programs, medical clinics—and with expanding higher education for women. This agenda was similar to that of the 1860s, and their accomplishments were comparable to those of that period as well. Their work among the poor helped the small number of people it reached; their greatest successes came in improving higher education.
Another, much smaller group of female activists were also organizing in the 1890s. They were the Social Democrats, Marxists dedicated to leading the workers to revolution. Early in the decade, female Social Democrats in St. Petersburg attempted to spread their message about capitalist and tsarist injustices to working-class women. One of the most energetic of these Social Democrats was Vera Karelina, a textile worker; the presence of women like Karelina was a new development in the socialist movement, which had hitherto attracted women from the middling ranks and the nobility. Karelina and a few like-minded comrades argued that working-class women could become radicalized. Most Social Democrats were skeptical. Women, they believed, were far less likely than men to listen to the revolutionaries, because women were more ignorant and conservative. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that women were usually more reluctant than men to join strikes. Karelina argued that properly trained propagandists could get women to listen. Her argument was strengthened when, in 1895 and 1896, female factory workers did go on strike in St. Petersburg. The government broke up the protests, but the groundwork had been laid among female workers and Social Democrats for future engagements with their bosses and the autocracy.
THE REVOLUTION OF 1905
The political temperature rose at the turn of the century. Worker unrest boiled up in a new round of strikes in 1901, in which women participated. In 1902 and 1903, thousands of university students, male and female, demonstrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, and the liberal press, professional societies, and zemstvo organizations began publicly criticizing the regime. The government attempted to curry favor by letting the liberals talk and by setting up trade unions for the workers, run by the police but permitted to represent the workers to their employers. It also decided to stir up patriotism by going to war with Japan in 1904.
The war went badly, and then the experiment in government-controlled unions blew up. In the fall of 1904, one of these unions, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg, headed by a priest named Georgi Gapon and an executive committee of workers that included Vera Karelina, had thousands of members. A thousand or so were women, organized into chapters based in working-class neighborhoods. As the winter came on, the assembly was growing increasingly critical of the regime’s ineptitude and intransigence.
In December, when strikes spread again through the factories, Gapon drafted a petition calling for improved working conditions, higher wages, the eight-hour day, an end to the war, and universal suffrage. On January 9, 1905, a sunny, cold Sunday, the priest led a huge crowd to the Winter Palace to present the petition to the emperor. “Many male and female workers thought then that the tsar would listen to them and not let the factory owners harm them,” wrote Anna Matveeva, a servant who set out for the palace that morning. But the emperor did not receive them; he was not even there. Instead the marchers were met by soldiers who opened fire. Terrified people fled the Winter Palace Square into the crowded streets beyond, where they were charged by mounted Cossacks and shot at by snipers. Matveeva ran with the rest, forgetting afterward how she got away, but remembering the carnage. “For a long time,” she wrote twenty years later, “the cries and moans stayed in my ears, the horror of death in my eyes, especially the cries of the children, the shots, and the curses.” Hundreds were killed, many more wounded, and the government followed up by arresting demonstrators.13
This massacre, soon christened Bloody Sunday, infuriated and emboldened liberals and radicals alike, and the year that followed was marked by strikes, demonstrations, and violent confrontations between police, soldiers, and angry crowds. Trade unions and political parties organized and the press broke free of censorship. Peasants attacked noble landowners. The fury at the government was fed by humiliating news from the war, which the Japanese were winning. In October, a general strike shut down the major cities. Nicholas II was forced to issue the October Manifesto, promising most of the reforms the Bloody Sunday marchers had called for. Protests then abated, as the nation awaited the establishment of a more democratic government and the government cracked down on revolutionaries.
Working-class women participated in the 1905 revolution by demonstrating and striking. They joined newly formed unions of metalworkers, printers, railroad white-collar workers, shop assistants, textile workers, and tobacco workers. They also organized all-female unions of laundresses in the capital and servants’ unions in Kiev, Nizhni-Novgorod, Rostov-na-Donu, St. Petersburg, and Tbilisi. In the fall, working-class women elected female representatives to the soviets, committees representing workers, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk and St. Petersburg.14 The women who became union members and soviet delegates were few in number, but they and the many female strikers showed that some poor women were far less docile than the government, the factory owners, and the revolutionaries had assumed.
When peasant women joined the turmoil of 1905, their activism was more traditional than that of urban women. Peasants across Russia rose up against their landlords, demanding the renegotiation of leases on the land they farmed and attacking people they perceived as exploiters. Women were in the crowds that marched on landlords’ houses and merchants’ shops, as they had been in peasant uprisings in the past. Indeed, there was a long tradition across Europe of peasant women joining men in such rebellions. Female activists in Russia’s cities were cheered by the willingness of peasant women to protest; conservatives considered it a sign of the end of civilization.
Feminists rose up too in 1905. The Philanthropic Society redoubled its petitioning for improvements in women’s education and employment, but now their methods seemed too cautious to many feminists. Some of these women came together in Moscow in late winter to form the Union of Equal Rights. The leaders included doctor of laws Anna Evreinova, historians Anna Miliukova and Ekaterina Shepkina, journalist Liubov Gurevich, teacher Maria Chekhova, and writer Zinaida Mirovich. Quickly the union set up a national board of directors based in Moscow and St. Petersburg and promoted the establishment of chapters in other cities. By the end of 1905 the organization had eight thousand members, most of them professionals in their twenties and thirties.15
At the founding convention of the Union of Equal Rights in April, delegates approved a platform that declared their general objective to be “the attainment by all women of political and civil rights identical with the rights of Russian male citizens, with the goal of improving the legal and economic situation of women.”16 Specifically, the platform called for universal suffrage, equal opportunities for females in education and employment, equal treatment of women in reform of the peasant commune, protective labor regulations, and an end to government regulation of prostitution. The platform also advocated constitutional monarchy, civil liberties, the right to organize and bargain collectively, improved working conditions, self-government for ethnic minorities, and the abolition of all laws discriminating on the basis of religion or nationality. By including these reforms in its platform, the Union of Equal Rights affiliated itself with the liberal movement, and more particularly with the Union of Unions, a coalition of professional and trade-union organizations. Some feminists doubted the wisdom of working closely with mostly male political groups. They believed that the Union of Equal Rights would be more effective if it maintained its independence. The majority of its members disagreed, arguing that it was both prudent and principled to ally with others.
The politics of 1905 put that argument to the test. Union feminists made the vote a primary objective, as suffragists in Western Europe and the United States were doing. They got support from the socialists and sought the endorsement of liberals as well. To that end they lobbied the zemstva and their municipal counterparts, the dumy (the singular is duma). Although individual members of these organizations were receptive, national conferences of zemstva representatives reacted with indifference or hostility. Some delegates argued that women should stay home and take care of their families. Others accepted the justice of women having the vote, but said that advocating it now was dangerous politically. The countryside was awash in peasant rioting, these men argued; no need to stir up the villages further with talk of women’s rights. Feminists denounced the hypocrisy of espousing Russia’s liberation, then limiting it to one-half of the population.
Lobbying political parties was one element in the union’s strategy for the revolutionary year. Members also reached out to peasant and proletarian women, encouraging them to draft petitions, write letters to newspapers, and hold meetings on the woman question. They helped organize a union for domestic servants in Moscow. During the general strike in October, Union of Equal Rights members collected donations for the strikers and held their banners aloft at protest meetings. All this activity built support among other political groups. By early 1906, Rochelle Ruthchild writes, “as a result of feminist lobbying, representatives of the rural and urban local governments, the professional, trade and peasants unions had included women’s suffrage planks in their platforms.”17
The political fortunes of the feminists waned in 1906. Delegates to the new national legislature, the Duma, refused to endorse women’s suffrage, which, in the end, mattered little, because the government soon reasserted its power. It dismissed the legislature, then rewrote the election law to ensure that future ones would be compliant and powerless. It also arrested opposition leaders. The Union of Equal Rights was one of many organizations that saw its membership shrink dramatically; it disbanded in 1908.
FEMINISM AND TEMPERANCE
Even as feminists struggled to keep going after 1905, the Russian temperance movement flourished. Across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the crusade against alcohol was a major cause for activist women and men. Temperance advocates bemoaned drinking’s negative effects on men’s health, on their work performance, and on their families, who were often abused and impoverished. They also linked drunkenness among women to that other social evil, prostitution, and more generally to what many saw as the moral depravity of the slums. To remedy the situation, proponents of temperance advocated limitations on the sale of alcohol and educational programs to teach the poor about its evils. And they mobilized to promote their agenda. Some female temperance advocates worked with men; others set up all-female groups. In 1910, the largest of these, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in the United States, enrolled 235,000 members in its home country, 157,000 in Britain, and many more in chapters across Europe, South America, and Japan.18
Russia’s temperance societies claimed 100,000 members at the same time, but they contained smaller proportions of women, and very few of them were all-female. The greatest activism was in Finland and the Baltic states, where Protestant women held conferences and conducted petitioning campaigns. There also was activism among peasant women, groups of whom petitioned local, provincial, and national government leaders to shut down liquor stores and taverns in their villages. When they got no satisfactory response, some of these women marched to the offending establishments, drove out the staff, and padlocked the doors.19
Largely absent from the temperance movement in Russia were feminists and other female activists from the intelligentsia. Patricia Herlihy argues that these women stayed away because they chose to concentrate on what they saw as the economic and political causes of excessive drinking. Maria Pokrovskaia, a leading feminist and frequent participant in discussions of alcoholism, was typical. More important than limiting alcohol sales or persuading men to take abstinence oaths, in her view, were improving poor women’s working and living conditions and getting all women political and economic equality.20 This was a common position among Western European and American feminists too, but the alliance formed in the West between feminists and temperance advocates, although uneasy, was effective in promoting the interests of both groups. Russian feminism might have been stronger had it been able to make such an alliance.
FEMINISTS AND SOCIALISTS DEBATE THE WOMAN QUESTION, 1906–11
Feminist organizations labored on after 1906. The Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society continued its work, and in 1908 a new group, the League for Women’s Equal Rights, was organized. There was a small feminist press, and popular magazines ran stories on women’s rights. Meanwhile, professionals and philanthropists applied feminist arguments to deliberations on a range of social issues. In discussions of prostitution, reformers argued that equality for women in education and employment would reduce the poverty that drove girls into the brothels. In debates over abortion, physicians and criminologists made the truly radical argument that women should be able to choose whether or not to have children.
In 1908, Anna Filosofova and Anna Shabanova of the Philanthropic Society won permission to hold the First All-Russian Congress of Women in St. Petersburg. Their goal was to bring feminists and other social activists together to develop a consensus on what needed to be done. One thousand and fifty-three delegates, most of them well-educated women from feminist organizations, philanthropies, professional societies, and women’s clubs, attended. The majority were ethnic Russians; the other Slavic peoples and the Jews were represented. The delegates met for six days, holding sessions on education, philanthropy, the situation of peasant and working-class women, and women’s participation in politics. The meeting generated networking between the activists as well as useful analyses of the topics discussed.
It also bought to the fore ideological and strategic disagreements between liberals and socialists that had existed as early as the 1870s and had caused dissension within the Union of Equal Rights in 1905. The conferees generally agreed on what women’s equality should consist of, but differed sharply on the causes of their inequality and the ways to end it. Socialist delegates to the congress, some of them factory workers, believed that women should work with men to achieve political change, which meant, although they could not say so openly, women should join socialist parties. Feminists argued for an independent feminist movement, while agreeing that the situation of working-class women cried out for redress. The result was a good deal of acrimonious discussion, culminating on the last day of the congress in an argument over a suffrage resolution that provoked a walk-out by some of the socialist delegates.21
One of the most irreconcilable of the socialists was Alexandra Kollontai, a noblewoman who had studied at the Bestuzhev Courses, then become a journalist and a Social Democrat. Kollontai had recruited the worker delegates and helped them put together their speeches. She herself could not appear at the congress, because the police were after her. Instead she fled to Germany, and there, shortly after the congress, published a four-hundred-page polemic, The Social Bases of the Woman Question, that laid out the socialist indictment of feminism and subjected Russian feminism to scathing criticism. This book marked Kollontai’s debut as one of international Marxism’s most important commentators on the woman question.22
At the heart of the Marxist critique of feminism lay a dispute over the origins of women’s inequality. Feminists saw patriarchy as a fundamental evil; Marxists and other socialists considered it to derive from the economic organization of society. Women’s subordination to men, they argued, had begun in the distant past when a male elite had established control over private property. That control enabled the propertied to oppress those who did not own property, which in turn led to the development of patriarchy. Capitalism, by pulling women out of the family and into the paid-labor force, was inadvertently breaking down their subordination, but the process could only be completed after the power of all patriarchs—kings, nobles, priests, capitalists—had been broken and a socialized economy had been constructed. People would then organize a society based on perfect equality and cleansed of all discrimination. To get to this new world, women had to work with men in socialist parties, not pursue their own separate, divisive agendas.
When feminism developed into a mass movement in the late nineteenth century, Marxists began to consider ways to counter its influence among working-class women and progressive intellectuals. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest Marxist party in Europe, took the lead in 1891 by endorsing a sweeping agenda of reforms for women, borrowed from the feminists and from the social-welfare policies of the conservative German government. They included the vote, civil and legal equality, publicly funded maternity care and childcare, and regulations mandating working conditions to protect women’s health. The last are commonly referred to as “protective labor laws.” The German Social Democrats also set up a women’s auxiliary, led by Clara Zetkin, the goal of which was to spread the socialist message among working-class women. Zetkin was an ardent propagandist of the socialist critique of feminism, because she believed it, because she wanted to persuade working-class women to reject feminism, and because she wanted to prove her bona fides to the men of her party.
Kollontai had been inspired by the activism of working women in 1905, and she had seen the feminists’ outreach to poor women as a threat. So she had gone to Germany in 1906 to consult with Zetkin and had returned to Russia convinced of the rightness of the German strategy and tactics. The fact that there were more than ten thousand women in the Social Democratic and Socialist Revolutionary parties in 1907 and perhaps three thousand in the feminist organizations suggests that many political activists shared her doubts about feminism.23
After the Women’s Congress, the League for Women’s Equal Rights and the Philanthropic Society soldiered on. In 1910 they persuaded the Duma to pass a revision of the inheritance law that granted women equal rights to inherit moveable and urban property; they were only permitted a one-seventh share of rural land. Reform in the marriage law, initially requested in a Philanthropic Society petition of 1912, finally emerged from the Duma in 1914. The new law broadened the grounds on which wives could obtain legal separations and permitted them to seek education and employment without first obtaining their husbands’ consent. The law also granted married women the right to carry their own passports, if their husbands agreed. It took four years of lobbying to get these modest reforms out of the Duma, which testifies to the patience, dedication, and energy of the feminists and explains the revolutionaries’ conviction that the obstructionist regime had to be overthrown.
FEMINISTS IN THE BORDERLANDS
Even as feminists in the Russian heartland struggled for minor victories, women in Finland became the first in Europe to gain the vote in national and local elections. Finnish feminists won their suffrage campaign because of the unique political situation of their small country. The Finns had come under the rule of the tsars during the Napoleonic Wars but had never suffered the intrusive oversight imposed upon other borderland peoples. Instead, Alexander I granted them a constitution that permitted considerable political and cultural autonomy. A well-educated people with close ties to Sweden and a strong desire to differentiate themselves from their Russian masters, the Finns developed a very progressive intelligentsia. In 1870, Helsingfors University granted full admission to women; coeducational schools followed in the 1880s. That decade also saw the formation of the first Finnish feminist organization and the extension of the right to vote in municipal elections to women. Finland’s liberal politics raised the hackles of Nicholas II, and in 1899 he abolished the Finnish constitution.
Finns responded with a resistance movement in which significant numbers of women participated. They claimed a place by arguing that women, as mothers, were guardians of the national culture. Polish and Ukrainian nationalists used this proposition to justify women’s staying home; among the Finns and the substantial Swedish minority in Finland it became an argument for women’s participation in politics. Alexandra Gripenberg, a leading feminist, made the case succinctly in a speech to the Finnish legislature in 1897: “Femininity is motherhood in the deepest meaning of the word. That this be given its true value in that greatest of all homes, society, is the primary task of women’s rights work.”24
By 1904 an energetic Finnish Union of Women’s Rights was working closely with Social Democratic and liberal groups to push for the return of Finnish autonomy. The movement grew still stronger in 1905. A successful general strike in October persuaded the tsar to permit Finns more self-rule, and during the politicking that followed, feminists pressed their case for women’s suffrage. In the spring of 1906, a newly elected Finnish assembly drafted a constitution, accepted by Nicholas II in July, which called for the establishment of a unicameral legislature chosen by all citizens over the age of twenty-four.
The tsar accepted the constitution, Rochelle Ruthchild argues, because he wanted to mollify Finland while he worked on suppressing opposition in the imperial heartland. Once the political climate cooled, he tried to bring the new parliament under his sway. He did not repeal the constitution, perhaps because he feared stirring up more trouble. And so Alexandra Gripenberg was elected a delegate to the new legislature. In 1909 that body passed sweeping improvements in women’s property rights and access to education and employment.25
Nationalism also fostered women’s engagement in the public world elsewhere in the borderlands in 1905 and thereafter. In Lithuania, the Lithuanian Women’s Organization took as its goal “equal rights for women and men in an autonomous Lithuania.” This activism caught the attention of the Catholic Church and in 1907 it established the Lithuanian Catholic Women’s League, from which the most liberal feminists were excluded. The editors of the league’s journal advocated improvements in women’s education and employment, as well as legal and civil rights. Ukrainian and Baltic German women’s organizations adopted similar programs. The endorsement of women’s rights by male religious and nationalist leaders indicated how far public opinion in the Baltics had moved on that issue in the early twentieth century.26
The democratic spirit of 1905 had no such outcome in Polish lands. There nationalists and the church responded to feminists’ call for women’s rights by insisting that women’s highest duty was to rear patriotic children. They also denounced feminists as separatists who undermined the cause of Polish independence. In 1907 a group of Polish feminists led by Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit broke with the nationalists and formed a Union for Women’s Equality modeled on the Russian Union for Equal Rights. This union held a women’s congress, published a journal, and publicized a suffrage movement in the southern Polish lands that lay within the more democratic Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Polish press was also full of articles on the woman question between 1905 and 1912. This activism appears to have had an effect on public opinion, for in 1918, when Poland won its independence, women’s suffrage was included in the new constitution.27
MUSLIMS DISCUSS THE WOMAN QUESTION
There was also an energetic discussion of the woman question going on among the Muslim intelligentsia of the Russian Empire, which was centered in Baku in Azerbaijan and in the Tatar communities of the Crimea and of Kazan, a city southeast of Moscow. By the turn of the century, many of these people had accepted the idea that modernity required easing traditional restrictions on women, particularly those regarding education, marriage choice, and social life.
The intellectuals who led this discussion of the woman question called themselves Jadidists, a name taken from the Turkish word for “new.” They were inspired by the efforts of Turkish thinkers to reconcile democratic political ideals and nationalist conceptions of women’s roles in cultural preservation with Islamic law and teaching. Foremost among the Jadidists was a Crimean Tatar named Ismail Ben Gasprali, who called for Muslim women to play an enlightening role in their families and societies. To do so, he argued, they had to be formally educated. His daughter, Shefika Hanim, edited a bimonthly magazine for women, Alem-I-Nisvan (Women’s World), which publicized the philanthropic activities of Muslim women’s organizations and informed its readers about progressive developments among Muslim women elsewhere.
In Baku the husband-and-wife team of Jirza-Jalil Mammed-Qulizadeh and Hamideh Javanshir pushed the argument further by criticizing Muslim patriarchal customs. In their journal Molla Nasreddin, they called for women to be liberated from veiling, seclusion in their homes, polygyny, and physical abuse by the men of their families. More cautious voices spoke up in a journal called Ishigh (Light), published by Mustafa Bey Alioglu and Hadija Hanim Subhankulova-Alibeova. The male and female contributors to this publication muted their criticism of patriarchy, while urging women to organize. Their discretion did not mollify all the Islamic authorities. When he heard about Ishigh, Mullah Muhammad Amin, a prominent Baghdad cleric, declared ominously, “The end [is] truly near, since women not only read newspapers but contribute to them.”28
The mullah might have thought the end had already come if he had flipped through the pages of Suyumbike, the most feminist Muslim periodical in the late imperial period. Suyumbike was published in Kazan, a city with a major university, higher women’s courses, and a lively community of Muslim feminists. Its editors called for women to participate in public life and criticized Islamic patriarchalism. In 1914, a few Muslim women from Kazan who were students in St. Petersburg took their calls for reform to the Muslim delegates to the Duma. They were rebuffed, but the very existence of Muslim feminism in 1914 attested to how far the woman question had come since Vernadskaia wrote her articles in the 1850s.29
FEMINIST ACHIEVEMENTS
Across the empire, feminists scored successes in the last decades of the tsarist regime. They expanded women’s education and improved their legal rights. They re-energized the discussion of the woman question by publicizing the international feminist agenda—suffrage, legal and civil equality, educational and employment opportunities, improvements in maternity care and childcare, protective labor legislation—and by developing their own analysis of the situation of women in Russia. Feminists also spread the call for women’s rights to working-class and peasant women. In all these efforts they worked closely with other progressive people from the intelligentsia, thus continuing the alliance forged in the 1860s. That alliance strengthened after 1905, when governmental intransigence on reforms for women enhanced the appeal of those reforms to progressives.30
The grandest goals—suffrage and civil and legal equality—could only be achieved in tiny Finland, because the government was resolutely opposed to such major change and because feminism remained a small movement that enjoyed limited support. That said, it should be noted that the huge suffrage societies of Great Britain, despite their base in a powerful middle class and their much greater freedom to advocate for their cause, also failed to get the vote in these years, because the resistance to woman’s suffrage was powerful even in democracies. Russia’s feminists kept the woman question at the forefront of reform discussions in the early twentieth century and managed to win some of their battles. They also survived the demoralization that set in after 1905, and when the Revolution came, they would expand their movement with a rapidity that would surprise even themselves.
WORKING-CLASS ACTIVISM AND THE SOCIALIST RESPONSE, 1912–14
After 1905, protests subsided and women workers, along with their menfolk, went back to the daily grind. The newly legalized trade unions admitted, and some even recruited, female members. Most women stayed away, as they were doing across Europe. They did so for long-standing reasons: they were afraid of the price of activism; they could not afford the dues; they were occupied with their children; they thought women did not belong in unions; they did not want to brave hostility from men. Rose Glickman has estimated that this kept female membership in the trade unions at 10 percent, even though women were 30 percent of the industrial labor force. But that 10 percent was important. Female union members got a political education, built their self-confidence, and became leaders among the women with whom they worked. A few also got involved in the revolutionary movement, supporting the socialists by going to meetings and circulating pamphlets. In these years, working-class women among the Social Democrats increased from less than 10 percent of the female membership to roughly one-quarter.31
Some Social Democratic women in Russia and abroad, where many had fled to avoid arrest, were paying close attention to working women’s activism. They noticed that women were once again striking during worker unrest in 1912–14. Some of these strikes were huge: eleven thousand women walked out of a St. Petersburg rubber factory in March 1914 to protest the fact that the toxic chemicals with which they worked were poisoning them.32 This resurgence inspired Social Democratic women, particularly several dozen in the Bolshevik faction of the party, to reach out to working women through organizing clubs for them and publishing articles about their lives. In 1912 Konkordia Samoilova, an editor of the newspaper Pravda, ran a column called “The Life and Labor of Women Workers.” In 1913, she held Russia’s first celebration of International Women’s Day. It was well attended. In 1914, she and several dozen other female Social Democrats, including Kollontai, launched two magazines aimed at working-class women. All these projects reached few women and were shut down quickly by the police. Their greatest significance is that they brought together the people who would formulate and lead the Bolshevik party’s program of women’s emancipation after 1917.