URBAN WOMEN OF THE MIDDLE RANKS AND THE NOBILITY

THE URBAN MIDDLE

The people who benefited most from industrialization were those in the middle of urban society. Enterprising individuals and families built factories, invested in mining and smelting, and developed Russia’s stock exchanges. Others joined the professions and became leaders of municipal governments. The women of these successful capitalist families lived much as did wealthy noblewomen. Varvara Armand, the wife of a textile magnate, was typical. She managed the household staffs and budgets of the family’s city residence and country estates, supervised her children’s French governess, supported charities, attended church and the theater regularly, and entertained often at home. The growing presence of such people within Russia’s elite was yet another sign of the weakening hold of the nobility on economic and political power.

There were also middle‑class women who headed their own businesses. A few inherited large companies: Marfa Morozova ran textile mills built by her deceased husband. More typically, women owned small businesses. Catriona Kelly has found that 8 to 15 percent of the members of the merchant guilds in the second half of the nineteenth century were women, most widows with children. They came from all the various nationalities of Russia; Jews were particularly well represented. Here too the gendering of the Russian economy was quite similar to that of other European countries, that is, women owned businesses in the fashion and hospitality sectors. They ran dry‑goods stores, dress and millinery shops, boarding houses, and hotels. Some also sold other women, or rather their services, for many brothel keepers were women of the lower middle class. Women from more prosperous families owned and managed rental property, particularly in the major cities. In Moscow at the turn of the century, 60 to 75 percent of those listing their occupation as “rental landlord” were women; in Warsaw the figure was 57 percent.⁵¹

The majority of women in Russia’s middling ranks were housewives. By the later nineteenth century, some of these women belonged to prosperous, conservative merchant families. They avoided the cosmopolitan circles frequented by Varvara Armand, preferring to live quietly within their large houses. Most housewives from the middle ranks of urban society were far poorer people who devoted themselves to caring for their families. Cooking alone was arduous, for middle‑class women prepared more elaborate meals than did working‑class women. They bought some necessities, such as bread, but most dishes had to be made from scratch. Meat was sold in chunks; chickens came with feathers attached. Soups were made daily, cakes required long beating (two hours for gingerbread, according to a popular cookbook) and careful oven preparation. If the family owned a small business, such as a tavern or workshop, the wife of the owner might also keep accounts and cook for the employees. Life in the middle was precarious, and an injury to the breadwinner or a downturn in the economy forced many a middle‑class woman into the paid‑labor force.

THE NOBILITY

The last decades of the nineteenth century brought substantial change to some noblewomen, while barely touching others. Those in remote rural areas were the least affected. They, like the wives of some merchants and most peasants, continued living as their mothers and grandmothers had. More changed were the lives of those noble families that spent much of their time in the cities. Wealthy noblewomen managed their urban homes in the winter and summered on great country estates. Poorer ones did their own housework, with the help of one or two servants. Some, by 1900, were also working outside the home, and this movement of privileged women into the paid‑labor force was one of the most important developments in late imperial Russia.

THE PROFESSIONS

Russia maintained its position as a European leader in education for elite women in the late nineteenth century. The number of secondary schools increased, and in the 1890s the higher courses were permitted to reopen. The Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg and the Guerrier Courses in Moscow were the main programs before 1905; after that year programs were established in Dorpat, Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev, Novocherkassk, Odessa, Tbilisi, Tomsk, and Warsaw. All offered a liberal‑arts curriculum. By 1910, the Bestuzhev, Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw courses had law schools (women could practice criminal, but not civil, law). Kiev and Odessa gave medical training, and Kazan and Moscow offered theology programs. Russia also had a private engineering college for women founded in 1906 by Praskovia Ariian, a feminist journalist. All this expansion increased the enrollment of women in higher education to twenty‑three thousand in 1911. By contrast, Oxford and Cambridge, the premier universities of Great Britain, permitted only a thousand women to audit classes in 1910; none was allowed to take exams or receive degrees.⁵² Thousands of Russia’s educated women went on to professional work between 1871 and 1914, some because they had to support themselves until they married, others to make careers.

EDUCATION

Most found jobs in teaching, as did most educated women across Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Close to 90 percent of Russia’s teachers by the turn of the century came from the middling ranks, from the daughters of the clergy, and from the nobility; far more male teachers were of peasant origins, reflecting the greater availability of education to peasant boys. Most of the female teachers in Russia, as elsewhere, worked in elementary schools, because of their supposed natural affinity for children. Proponents also argued that teaching would prepare young women for motherhood. For its part, Russian officialdom believed that female teachers were less likely to be infected with seditious ideas than were males. Consequently the government legalized the hiring of female teachers in 1870, included pedagogical training in the curricula of the secondary schools, and granted teacher certification to graduates.

As the school system expanded, so did the number of female teachers. In 1880, 4,900 women were employed in rural elementary schools; by 1911 their numbers had risen to 65,101. By that latter date 62 percent of the teachers in peasant schools were women, and women were a substantial percentage of elementary‑and secondary‑school teachers in city schools. Women with teacher certification also worked as governesses; in 1902 there were thousands of such private teachers in Moscow alone. Closely allied to teaching was working in libraries; by the end of the nineteenth century, most librarians in Russia were women.⁵³

Because teaching was seen as a preparation for motherhood, female teachers were required to quit their jobs after they married in order to devote themselves to their own children. Such rules were common across Europe and in the United States as well. Therefore most female teachers–73 percent of elementary‑school ones in Moscow in 1911–were single, compared to 22 percent of male teachers. There was a fairly high dropout rate as well, because pay was low and hours long. Many of the women who stayed on in the schools into midlife did so because they enjoyed their work and saw it as a service to the poor.⁵⁴

MEDICINE

Medicine employed the second largest number of educated women in Russia, and in this Russia was unusual. The medical courses for women, closed by Alexander III in the 1880s, were reopened in 1897. The St. Petersburg Medical Institute for Women became the premier institution, and in 1904 its graduates were granted all rights possessed by male physicians except appointment to the higher‑ranking administrative or academic positions. The number of female physicians expanded most rapidly after 1905, growing by 113 percent between 1905 and 1910. By 1910 6 percent of physicians in Russia were female, one of the highest such percentages in the European world. Seventy‑five percent of Russia’s female physicians practiced in the cities, where they managed to earn almost what men did. The few who worked among the peasants struggled with pitiful resources, village resistance, and lower salaries than male physicians.⁵⁵

Still greater numbers of women trained to be feldshers and midwives. Feldshers delivered basic medical care, much as paramedics and physicians’ assistants do today. In Moscow in 1902, 64 percent of the feldshers were women. They were paid about the same as teachers and skilled factory workers. An even greater number of women were midwives. By 1905, four thousand students were studying in the more than fifty public and private schools of midwifery in the Russian Empire and more than ten thousand midwives were practicing, mostly in cities. Twenty‑five percent of midwifery students in 1910 were Jewish, which testifies to the fact that becoming a midwife enabled a young woman to move outside the Pale of Settlement in western Russia to which Jews were restricted. Jews were also strongly represented among female physicians: 24 percent in 1889 were Jewish.⁵⁶

Other women worked as nurses, pharmacists, and dentists. Nursing as a profession grew out of the “Sisters of Mercy” societies set up in the reign of Nicholas I. Over the following decades, newly created groups, funded by philanthropists and influenced by the work of Florence Nightingale in England, improved training programs. By the 1890s, nursing was emerging as a female profession in the major cities of Russia. Pharmacy was growing as well; the government had opened training to women in 1889. Perhaps because setting up a small business was difficult for a woman, pharmacy was an overwhelmingly male profession. Even in Moscow, a city with high levels of women’s employment, only 5 percent of pharmacists in 1902 were female.⁵⁷ Dentistry was a similarly small, primarily urban occupation, to which women were admitted from the 1880s onward.

OTHER WHITE‑COLLAR EMPLOYMENT

Additional white‑collar jobs opened to women because the growing economy was increasing the demand for educated workers, even as the realization spread that women were good employees. They could be paid less than men, they were perceived as more docile, and they were both able and willing to learn new skills. Most of the hires were in clerical and service work, fields that were becoming feminized throughout Europe. When telephone systems were installed in Russia’s major cities, women were hired as switchboard operators. Accounting was also a growing field for women: 5 percent of bookkeepers in Moscow in 1902 were women, 21 percent in 1912.⁵⁸

Women also worked as writers, editors, and independent scholars. Twenty percent of those identifying their profession as “writer” or “scientist” in Moscow in 1902 were women; by 1912 that percentage had increased to 37 percent.⁵⁹ There were also more female novelists and poets than ever before, and more female performers in theater, opera, and ballet. Women figured prominently as well among the artists who created the Russian avant garde.