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.}