The Beginnings of Russian Feminism

Disasters have a way of forcing people to re‑evaluate the status quo. For the Russian nobility and intelligentsia, the Crimean War was such a disaster. In 1853 Emperor Nicholas I blundered into war with the Ottoman Empire; in March 1854 Britain and France came in to support their Turkish ally. After victories in the Balkans, Russian troops withdrew to the Crimean peninsula and there dug in for months of nasty siege warfare. The army, made up of noble officers and peasant draftees, was poorly led and even more poorly equipped and supplied. Filthy conditions and the resulting diseases killed more men than did combat. In a showdown with the Great Powers, in whose ranks the Russian leadership wanted to be included, Russia had come up painfully short.

As the casualties mounted, Russia’s female philanthropists gathered to help. Grand Duchess Elena organized and funded the Community of Sisters of Mercy of the Exaltation of the Cross, a group of 163 nurses, mostly young noblewomen, led by a physician named Nikolai Pirogov. Empress Alexandra sponsored another group of volunteer nurses, all widows. The women made the long journey to the Crimea, and there performed heroically, even when under fire. Their devoted service was widely publicized at home, a Russian answer to the praise being heaped on Florence Nightingale in the British press.

Nicholas died in 1855. His son Alexander, who had been involved in discussions of reforming Russia during the 1840s, assumed the throne and soon declared that he intended to make major changes, chief among them the emancipation of the serfs. To rally public support, the new emperor invited the intelligentsia to discuss what needed to be done. While most writers were concentrating on serfdom, a few brought up the inequalities that plagued women. Doctor Pirogov, who had returned from the Crimea impressed with the work of the nurses there, weighed in with articles calling for women’s education to be improved so that they could contribute more to society. Soon afterward, Maria Vernadskaia, a magazine editor, moved beyond Pirogov’s argument: “A woman can feel, can think, can crave education, can understand the desire to be useful in some way. Finally a woman can work and toil for her own benefit as well as for the benefit of the public. No one would repudiate this, but then is it necessary to devise separate principles of morality and honor for women, to prescribe special duties for them, to restrict their education, and, finally, even to ascribe to them certain special virtues and vices? If woman is the same sort of being as is man, then the principles of honor and morality should be the same for both.”⁵⁵

These were the ideas of liberal feminism, developed in the United States, Great Britain, and France in the 1840s, and publicized widely by the English liberals Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill in the early 1850s. Some Russian intellectuals were well acquainted with the critiques of patriarchy that had led to feminism. They were particularly drawn to the argument that slavery in the western hemisphere and the subordination of women across the European world both derived from Europe’s oppressive patriarchal institutions. Russia had no slaves, but it did have a peasantry in bondage, so it was easy to argue that Russian patriarchy had produced both serfdom and women’s inequality, and that both social ills must be addressed. When Emperor Alexander invited a discussion of reforms, improvements in women’s situation were quickly proposed. A woman should be educated so as “to be useful” (Pirogov’s argument), but also “for her own benefit,” because–and here was the truly new idea–she was “the same sort of being as is a man.” The “woman question,” as the discussion of reforms for women was called across Europe, was now on the agenda of the Russian intelligentsia.

Conclusions

Between 1695 and 1855, Russia’s government opened up new opportunities for elite women that many women welcomed. They bought land, exercised their legal rights, became educated, and joined the intelligentsia. They also participated in the importation and adaptation of the cult of domesticity, thereby elevating women to a central role in their families’ emotional lives even while reaffirming the importance of wifely submission.

All these changes enriched the lives of noblewomen. They did little to improve the situation of the peasants or of poor women in the cities and the conquered territories. As the reign of Nicholas ended, a few educated women and men had come to believe that much more needed to be done for all the women of the empire. They would work for solutions to the woman question in the decades that followed, even as emancipation of the serfs, industrialization, and urbanization challenged traditional understandings and made finding solutions more pressing.