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.