Women’s Activism, 1890–1914

Female activists in the run‑up to the Revolution included academics, actors, artists, factory workers, feminists, journalists, nuns, peasants, physicians, socialists, and teachers. They ranged in their political opinions from monarchists to revolutionaries. Collectively, they entered terrain dominated by men and established a presence for women that would endure long past the Revolution. They also changed the places they entered, enlarging women’s role in the churches, expanding philanthropy, and broadening the aesthetic of the avant garde. The feminists and socialists among them put the woman question on the political agenda of those seeking to reform and of those seeking to overthrow the tsarist system.

THE NEW NUNS

We begin with Orthodox nuns who revitalized monastic life in late nineteenth‑century Russia and in the process “feminized” it. Religiosity, particularly among women, is often associated with political conservatism, and nuns with subordination to male authority, so it may seem mistaken to include the surge of women into the church in a discussion of social activism. But how else can one classify the existence of dozens of all‑female communities, created by women despite resistance from church leaders, and practicing a new kind of philanthropy in Russia?

Across the continent, many women were feeling a religious vocation in the nineteenth century, and so they flocked to new Protestant sects and to new Catholic religious orders. When similar urges to a more pious life struck women in Russia, there were few convents for them to join, because Catherine the Great had limited the number of monastics in an effort to cut the costs of maintaining them. Devout women had to improvise, and so, beginning in the late eighteenth century, they organized their own “women’s communities,” wherein they could pray together and support themselves by raising food and selling handcrafts. For decades the church took a dim view of this effort to get around the limitations on convents. Then, in the mid‑nineteenth century, energetic lobbying by a few supportive bishops and abbots gained official recognition for the communities and permission to open more convents. There followed a huge increase in the number of women religious, most of it occurring after 1890. By 1914, there were seventy‑three thousand Orthodox nuns and novices in Russia; they constituted an astonishing 77 percent of all Orthodox monastics.¹

The nuns of the late nineteenth century and the communities they established broke with traditions in important ways. Most of these nuns were single women from the peasantry, not the widows of noblemen, as nuns had been through the centuries. In part this was because Emancipation enabled rural people to leave their villages and male out‑migration made it harder for women to find marriage partners. Furthermore, convents no longer charged admission fees, nor did they require sisters to pay for their room and board, as they had in Muscovite times.²

Those enabling conditions alone do not explain the prodigious expansion of convents and communities in the late nineteenth century. That growth occurred because tens of thousands of women in Russia who wanted to be nuns took the initiative. They established communities run according to communal principles that gave no privileges to noblewomen, grew their own food, found ways to raise money, and spent years petitioning for recognition by church authorities. Many of the women’s communities eventually became convents through this process. The most enterprising of these convents administered farms, maintained chapels for visitors and pilgrims, and sold embroidery, icons, and holy bread. The women religious also expanded the social mission of convents. They performed the traditional charity of providing shelter to pilgrims and the destitute, and they also practiced modern philanthropy, establishing almshouses, hospitals, and schools for girls.³

In Polish lands, a large religious movement also developed among women. When the tsarist government closed most Catholic convents in the aftermath of the Polish uprising of 1863–64, women’s communities modeled on the Russian ones sprang up in their stead. They lived a quasi‑illegal life for decades, supported by the laity and by Catholic authorities. Out of these communities came the Mariavite movement, an organization of thousands of urban nuns who ran soup kitchens, cooperative workshops, and daycare centers.⁴