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.”² Vernadskaia 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.