SOPHIA KOVALEVSKAIA

Kovalevskaia saw herself as blazing a trail into academe that other women would follow. In 1882 she broke Russian law by lending her passport to the sixteen‑year‑old sister of a friend. The girl used the passport to leave Russia, over her parents’ objections, and study abroad. Kovalevskaia explained her decision to put herself in legal jeopardy in a letter to another friend:

“Is it really possible not to stretch out one’s hand, to refuse to help someone who is seeking knowledge and cannot help himself reach its source? After all, on woman’s road, when a woman wants to take a path other than the well‑trodden one leading to matrimony, so many difficulties pile up. I myself encountered many of these. Therefore I consider it my duty to destroy whatever obstacles I can in the paths of others. According to her brother, this girl has unusual capabilities in the exact sciences. Who knows, maybe she’ll become a prominent scholar!”

Two years later, Kovalevskaia wrote to a friend,

“The new mathematical work I recently began intensely interests me now, and I would hate to die without discovering what I am looking for. If I succeed in solving the problem on which I am now working, my name will be listed among those of the most prominent mathematicians.

According to my calculations, I need another five years to get good results. But I hope that in five years there will be more than one woman capable of taking my place here, and I can devote myself to other urges of my gypsy nature.”

SOURCE: ANN HIBNER KOBLITZ, A CONVERGENCE OF LIVES: SOFIA KOVALEVSKAIA, SCIENTIST, WRITER, REVOLUTIONARY (BOSTON: BIRKHÄUSER, 1983), 166, 186. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF SPRINGER PRESS.

In their talent, ambition, and commitment to their chosen fields, Curie and Kovalevskaia had much in common with the other activist women of late nineteenth‑century Russia. Many of them were reared in educated families that encouraged their daughters’ intellectual aspirations. Curie and Kovalevskaia married and had daughters, were widowed early, and continued their work while rearing their children. They were aided by support from their families and the intelligentsia, as were many other activist women, and by the spread of emancipatory ideas from the intelligentsia to the wider urban world. In this changing milieu, such women accomplished extraordinary things. The celebrity of some of them also testified to the emergence of a public happy to applaud talented women.

But the limits were always there. Kovalevskaia was knocking on the doors of Russian universities long after she was a prize‑winning academic in Western Europe. The difficulties arose because patriarchal ideas were still powerful in Russia, particularly within the reactionary, obstructionist government. Frustrating also was the enormity of Russia’s problems. Doctors worked themselves to exhaustion, and still diseases carried off half the babies. Teachers toiled in the villages, and still most peasant women could not write their own names. Some concluded that such “small deeds,” as they were derisively labeled, were insufficient.