WOMEN IN RUSSIAN HISTORY

By Maria Kotovskaya, Center for Ethnographic Research in the Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences

This translation is a somewhat abriged version of a very long article

In the l8th century the Russian Empress Catherine II [Great] had the nerve to assert that women in Russia possessed more freedom than women in other European countries. Was it really so? On the other hand a French abbot who lived in Russia said outright in his book that in his opinion Russian women were slaves of their husbands. If this was the case, then when did this slavery begin? Russian peasant life acknowledged the equality and high value of women. There the wife was called a man's "companion and friend for life." Family was the basis for material and moral wellbeing - according to the old saying, "God helps a bachelor and the wife helps her husband." Working together was what sustained the peasant family: the work a woman did was highly valued and indeed it was thought that family prosperity to a very large extent depended on how skillfully she managed the household. What qualities were appreciated in a woman? First of all, she should be physically healthy. She did a full day of housework and in summer many women helped their husbands in the fields. In the opinions of historians, Russian peasant women had every bit as much strength and endurance as men did. The family division of labor had existed for centuries. As they used to say, the husband threshes the wheat and the wife bakes the bread. The men did all the basic farming work, and tended the horses and did the carpentry and cut up the firewood and brought in the hay. It was considered shameful for a man to do women's work. Even a boy who fetched water might be made fun of. � Women's responsibility was the home: preparing food, cleaning and ironing, looking after children, and bringing in buckets of water. They also tended the family's vegetable garden and the smaller livestock. In extended families living together under one roof, relations were strictly regulated in a hierarchy of submission and and division of labor which even into the 20th century, especially in Siberia, preserved patriarchal values. In these large undivided families there was collective ownership of property and money, and both work and consumption were shared. The oldest man (father or oldest brother) was head of household - the "bolshak" governing the whole of family life. He represented the family in the commune, controlled all household spending, and exercised patriarchal authority over all family members. Family property was distributed according to his wishes, hence the sons, fearing to lost their shares, obeyed their father. Inside the home the woman was in charge, the "bolshukha," who managed the family funds and supplies, and kept order and assigned tasks to the women and taught the youngest daughter-in-law to cook. In the absence of a male head of household, the woman replaced him and the sons submitted to their mother. But on the father's death, his rights and responsibilities passed to his eldest son, and less often to a brother. In the home, the oldest son was second to the "bolshak" in authority and his wife was first assistant to her mother-in-law and first among the other daughters-in-law. Women's tasks in the home were assigned according to their place in the hierarchy. The mother-in-law taught the young bride to cook and if she was a mean mother-in-law, she made fun of her. The actual meal preparation was done only by the "bolshukha" while the young brides worked outside in the garden and tended the animals. At times of festivities the woman spun and wove, so to speak, for her family and washed their things, and the youngest bride also had to bathe the old folks. In these big families in general, life was hard on the youngest daughter-in-law, and this is reflected in peasant lore, in the pre-wedding songs that girls sang, with anxiety and tears at giving up their childhood homes for an unfamiliar and even alien one where the young bride was often looked on as a servant-gift to do the work. At a young age girls learned to do the various jobs of the household - to wash dishes and floors (at age six or seven) and tend poultry and other family animals. At eight or nine she was taught to weave. Girls watered gardens and helped fetch water and milk the cows, and they looked after the little children. Yet, even with these chores, before marriage they were relatively free of responsibility. In spring and summer they were outdoors with friends, they sang and went dancing and on excursions. Relations among young people were rather free and unconstrained, but girls tried to avoid sexual relations with boys since a girl's fate, especially in marriage, largely depended on her reputation. Rubbing tar on her gate was enough to tarnish it. If the tarring culprit was caught and turned out to be a slanderer, he himself was tarred and led naked through the village. It is largely from folklore that we recreate the typical peasant woman. Far better known to us was the fate of women of the privileged class. Their high social status continued for a considerable time after the Christianization of Russia [in the l0th century]. The Russian historian Karamzin wrote that the circumscribing of women's freedom bagan among the Slavs even before the Tatar-Mongol invasions, but based on the texts of the chronicles, we assert something closer to the contrary. Russian princesses and boyar women took some part in managing their husbands' principalities and the chronicles offer numerous examples of their direct or indirect involvement in the political battles of the time. There are examples from feudal Russia of women in power who initiated major reforms. Princess Olga when she was ruler, carried out the first financial reforms in Russia, setting a fixed sum for tribute to be payed and a system for collecting it. She was the first to demonstrate that you could conclude agreements between states that benefited both sides equally without resorting to war: during her rule Russia did not fight with any of its neighbors. Written accounts of the l2th-l4th centuries testify to the high educational level of women of the ruling class. They were knowledgeable not only in sacred literature, but also in mathematics and the philosophy of their time. A few princesses had substantial libraries. A number of researchers note that as Christianity strengthened in Russia, women gradually got excluded from male society, and there began a period in the history of Russian women known as the "chamber seclusion." Some authors think it came in following the Byzantine model of asceticism. The Russian historian Shulgin writes that the seclusion of women came not from Byzantine influence but had to do with the overall general status of women in society. The historian Zhelobovsky considers important the fact that in the cities women took little part in the work of their husbands, whether he was a merchant or an artisan, and having lost her value as an active working family member, the woman lost her value in general. Most researchers think it was in the mid-l3th-l4th centuries, under the Tatar-Mongol yoke, that conditions led to the full seclusion of women in society. Very indicative of this is that the Russian chronicles of the l3th century say nothing about active women; the wives and daughters of Russian princes are referred to only as "suffering persons, as objects of seizure and violence." It was the Tatar yoke on Russia that strengthened norms of behavior humiliating for woman, sharply lowering her social status. The "Domostroi" became the moral-ethical code governing relations between spouses - very reactionary compared to earlier times. Prosperous family women and daughters lived in seclusion and were not allowed to go out and visit other people except when necessary and with permission. Most city women spent their lives within the family circle. If rich, they were relegated to total inactivity. The mass of Russian women were illiterate at that time. Still, one has to agree with V. Mikhnevich that even in that obscure time of the "Domostroi" outlook on women and of semi-Asiatic modes of behavior, there appeared some remarkable female personalities. In his History of the Russian State, Karamzin describes one such women, the widow of the former governor of a Russian city-state who conceived a plan to free Novgorod from the rule of Ivan III. Women of princely families often had direct influence on domestic and foreign policy; as guardians of child tsars, they ran the government. � A few were active in scientific and literary realms, for example, the sister of Peter the Great, Natalia Alekseevna, who wrote several plays. Such women however were exceptions rather than the rule, and for the most part they were drawn more to power and politics than to art and literature. According to the apt remarks of historian Zabelin, the women's tower-chamber, because it was remote from the life of society, "began to stir up trouble in the kingdom and revolution at court." The closed nature of Russian society as a whole and the seclusion of women in particular became in the l7th century a substantial brake on the country's development. The society's xenophobia was the number one challenge, which in turn was a condition for Russian women gaining a new place and role in society. A sharp qualitative change for women came under Peter I [the Great]. The historian V. Shulgin characterized this in an interesting way, considering that it was precisely in this period that woman regained her place in society and her rights, in a higher and more developed form. In culture, the secular predominated over the religious and Russian society gradually joined in the achievements of world culture. By cruel and often violent measures, Peter I broke the old patriarchal structure of society. There was an end to the century of women's confinement. The new tsar, with no tolerance for obstinacy, ordered his courtiers to bring their wives and daughters to social gatherings and events. The history of the l8th century is full of stories of unsuccessful marriages and family tragedies. Marriage was often considered an empty formality that didn't carry any obligations. Husband and wife usually each had several liaisons on the side and didn't hesitate to talk openly about them. The Church did not sanction divorce; it was virtually impossible to get one. The custom developed of "unauthorized divorce," which was recognized even by the authorities. There are some well known cases where marriages took place after unauthorized divorces. Usually however the spouses simply separated, giving each other full freedom, and the wife was able to share in the property. Researchers have noted that there existed in Russia the principle of dividing spouses' property, which to a certain degree guaranteed the material independence of wives. If she was a very young wife, legally a minor, she could on her own, without asking the permission of her husband, take charge of her share which included the dowry and some personal property. At a time when women in the West were usually receiving a dowry in the form of money, Russian women from well-to-do families were getting property in addition to their dowries. According to Russian law, the dowry could not be appropriated by the husband, and if the wife died, it went to the children, and if there weren't any, it returned to the wife's parents. Russian law permitted husband and wife to enter into different kinds of transactions: mutually endow each other, sell, but neither could without authorization take over the property of the other. Moreover � the husband, obliged by law to defend the honor of his wife, did not have the right without her authorization to defend her property interests. Nonetheless, most scholars agree that the wife's juridical independence was limited by the customary norms of family relations which had developed in Russian society. As one researcher pointed out, women essentially could not exercise the right to share in the property of their spouses because the law put them in full subordination to their husbands. Article l07 of the law code of the Russian empire said that a wife is obliged to submit to her husband as the head of the family, to submit in love, respect and unlimited obedience, and in every way to oblige and please him as the host of the home. Article 79 speaks of the complete power of the spouse and the parents over the wife and daughter. In spite of all this, the everyday life situation of woman gradually begins to change and women are at that time gaining more rights and possibilities. Leading Russian historians consider that the main characteristic of Russian l8th century culture was movement and change, affecting the whole stagnant closed-up daily life of society, from hairdos and dress and lifestyles to the reassessment of values. The l8th century had women empresses, a woman president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, women writers and artists, and fashionable women in whom, as an English diplomat put it, there was not an iota of "nun-like flesh." The century had other women who astonished society with their great spirituality and high morality and their sacrifices. Some of them, not finding their place in the society, became nuns by choice. We won't go into detail on life of those at the very top � Their tastes reflected the "chaotic, strange, and sometimes monstrous façade of that epoch," in the words of K. Vishnevsky. The empresses and their courts enjoyed and amused themselves to excess, beginning with Catherine I, a girl taken by Peter I from "the dregs of society," as Dmitri Golitsyn said of her after her death, to Catherine II [the Great], who declared herself a pupil of Voltaire and assumed the role of the "northern Semiramid." Catherine II truly is associated with many reforms. Important to us is that she initiated women's education in Russia. In the Smolny Institute, the first school for girls of the nobility was opened, under the direction of Ekaterina Dashkova, the first women president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Academy issued the first etymological dictionary. Dashkova gave the Academy her own marvelous library and financed the publication of the best journal of that time, "The Companion of Those Who Love the Russian Word." Her own memoirs are among the best of l9th century memoir literature. While Dashkova far exceeded the average level of society's fashionable women, she was not such a rare exception: rather common in the last quarter of that century was the type of fashionable woman who devoted her leisure to literature and art. And here's something interesting. Although in the l8th century there were quite a few women writers, and even scholars who explored their creativity in the theater and in science, they usually did it as amateurs and dilettantes. For most of the well-to-do ladies, well educated and often vain, involvement in literature and the arts was an amusing fancy and nothing more. They left almost no traces, not in literature or in art or science. Nonetheless a grandiose step forward had been made in the education of women and in the structure of their lives, reflecting the necessity that customs should conform to the new culture of the l8th century. In order to shine in society, woman had to be a bit of a musician, a singer, a dancer, and an artist, and to know foreign languages. Girls' upbringing was totally oriented toward their reigning in society, since without knowledge of the salon arts, not even the most beautiful girl could count on success, that is to say on an advantageous match in marriage. This upbringing began early, at age four or five and by twelve or thirteen, girls were already considered marriageable. Most of these girls studied at home and usually with foreign teachers. Ekaterina Dashkova writes that what they learned were several foreign languages and skills in music and dancing. She considered that with such a focus, there could be no serious intellectual development in girls of the l8th century. Of course there were rare exceptions. Contemporaries said of Dashkova herself that she was born a woman by mistake, since in all respects she was more like a man. She loved to dress like one, and she had acquired the knowledge that a colonel in the Guards would have. Several prominent women wore male dress and adored hunting and rough male leisure pursuits. Among these women were the empresses themselves, Anna Iovannovna, Elizaveta Petrovna, and Ekaterina II [Catherine the Great]. Thus the l8th century had on the one hand the ideal of the shining society woman, and on the other the ideal of ambitious mannishness, of an unconscious striving for independence which in a few women, as the literature of the time observed, took ridiculous and distorted forms. Such was that century. But it also gave birth to a new type of woman who was to play a major role in the next century, the l9th, when there appeared in Russia women with some kind of profession. At first, they were mainly governesses and actresses. The theater became a sort of school for the development in law of women's independence. Professional actresses were mainly women of the unprivileged classes and their earnings gave them the possibility of at least some independence. We know that in some instances the average salary of an actress surpassed that of actors and government officials. Actresses working in state theaters, not in the private ones of the nobility, enjoyed equal working rights with men and received only slightly lower pay. This was a very important gain for women, a first step to freedom in society. A few actresses � thanks to their marriages, rose into the aristocracy - for example, Semyonova, who became the Princess Gagarina. Of course, for most actresses, fame was hard to win, and many had to cope with crudeness, oppression and violence, and sometimes outright slavery. At that time many actresses were legally serfs: in Catherine the Great's period, landowners loved to create their own "house theaters" where the acting ensemble consisted of serfs. Society's need for women's professions, in the arts and teaching, brought reforms under Catherine II in women's education. Catherine perceived that Russian pedagogy quickly had to develop a "new breed of people." Those who carried out the educational reforms were looking to the rebirth of a "sacred morality" as the basis of social upbringing. They created secluded educational institutions that took in children at a very early age. Catherine herself, as the historian Karamzin wrote, founded a home for the upbringing of some 200 girls of the nobility, to turn them into models of womanly virtue. Voltaire, Grim, and Diderot were delighted at her plans, but the Russian nobility remained on the whole indifferent. The girls entered this "society" home at age six and stayed for twelve years. They studied Russian and several foreign languages, the Holy Scriptures, arithmetics, drawing, dance and crafts, and also history, geography, literature, architecture, and home-making. One of the directors there saw the main task as "changing human nature from the bad to the good," but not by harshly breaking it. Physical punishment was forbidden, the girls were to be treated gently and in a just and human way. This "Society of Girls of the Nobility," in the Smolny monastery was opened in l765. In the same year and also in the monastery, there was founded a similar school for girls from other than noble families where the school leadership was no less involved in shaping their future, undertaking to get them favorably married and with the empress appropriating an overall sum of l00,000 rubles for the girls' dowries. The first graduating class of "Smolnys" was in l773, and Karamzin observed that they stood out in society by their elegance, graceful manners and refinement. However many of these young ladies, who could converse in several foreign languages, were neglectful mothers and wives and inexperienced homemakers. These women, who had absorbed the principles of morality and love on a philosophical level, did not know how to struggle with their own felt passions. Marriage and family was for them an empty formality that did not obligate them to anything. Still, even this particular education and enlightenment of theirs was a step forward in the intellectual development of woman, significantly strengthening her influence on society. In the first decades of the l9th century there appeared in Russia a new woman's image - girls inclined to mysticism, refined romantic feelings and thoughts. They were raised in the humanistic traditions of the l8th century. They read Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and at the same time they had pure Christian ideas of love, faithfulness, sacrifice and suffering on behalf of woman's duty to her husband and family. Such was Pushkin's herone, Tatiana Larina, whom Dostoyevsky characterized as a national-literary type of woman. � The best representative women of this type were the wives of the Decembrists. The Russian Supreme Court convicted l2l men and sentences them to various measures of punishment depending on the degree of their participation in the plot again the Emperor Nicholas I [in l825]. He allowed the wives of the Decembrists to divorce their husbands, but only three out of 23 women availed themselves of this permission. Eleven wives went to Siberia with their husbands. They were all voluntary exiles and from different social strata. Maria Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya were titular nobility; the others could not boast of high origins. They were of different ages, but their common destiny was family, and they had known nothing about their husband's involvement in secret societies. For them, the arrest of their husbands was a heavy burden - many of these women were not much older than 20. Some of them had been raised in refined luxury, and they defied parents and tsar to follow their husbands going into penal servitude in Siberia, which was then seen as "frozen hell from which there is no return," in order to share with their men the hard lot of exile-prisoners without rights. There, alongside the prison mines, the women created an everyday life. They shopped and prepared supper for the prisoners and sewed for them. Several Decembrists, depressed and on the verge of suicide, were saved by the kindness and sensitivity and educated intelligence of these women. The local population was at first reserved and distrustful, but the women's friendliness to the locals, their sharing of medicines and money, and the free healing and literacy work they did, brought them great respect. � The Decembrist wives had a colossal influence on shaping the Russian woman's character in accenting aspects of heroism and self-sacrifice. Vera Figner, the revolutionary of the end of the l9th century, regarded the Decembrist wives as her sisters in suffering. The recognition by educated Russian society of these women's heroic deeds stimulated the birth in the society of a new idea - emancipation. The struggle for women's emancipation in the beginning and middle of the l9th century was all the more complicated in that the dominant stereotype saw woman only as faithful friend to man, and as mother and upbringer of children. Anything women did outside the customary framework of the family met with sharp social displeasure. The intelligentsia distrusted women professional writers, poets, and translators. Even such a progressive critic and publicist as Belinsky considered that while women should be educated and should follow developments in literature and science, they should not themselves become writers, but use their education for the good of the family. The beginning of the l860's saw a turning point in society's awareness of the so-called "woman question." In l860 the journal "Sovremmenik" [Contemporary] published an article by Mikhailov entitled "Women, their Upbringing and Significance in the Family and Society." For the first time in Russia, it publicly broached the subject of equal rights for women. At about the same time the Russian publicist Pisarov also addressed the question of women's equal rights. His pithy phrase, "women are not to blame for anything" became a motto in several strata of enlightened Russian society. Quite often, women's freedom was seen as freedom from marital ties, and the extreme expression of this idea was the complete rejection of family and marriage, articulated by Nechaev in his "Catechism of a Revolutionary." Some women did in fact sever family ties to protest the debauchery of men. Alexander Herzen observed that some of these women became unruly rather than truly liberated. There developed a whole stratum of women who viewed marriage as an amusing pastime of idle people. A few became hardened, unfeeling "blue stockings" who despised those in love, for which they felt no need. The reasonable intelligent reformist idea of spouses equal rights was most clearly expressed in the writings of Dmitri Pisarev and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. They saw woman as in all ways equal to man: she was a comrade in work, and a friend, and mother and upbringer of children. Chernyshevsky went further, recognizing woman's right to free love. In the l9th century quite a few young women who wanted to study but did not have the consent of parents, made fictitious marriages, a measure of desperation. Such marriages became rather widespread and led to an erosion of the family on the one hand, and on the other to a lowering of the very ideal of the family, and thirdly, to a lowering of the principles of morality in society itself. For this reason, the great Russian writers, Nikolai Leskov, Fedor Dostoveysky and Lev Tolstoy, spoke out against fictitious marriages, and the Russian Orthodox Church actively fought against them. The problems of family and marriage became in the l9th century a subject of sharp arguments, wherein even some wellknown Russian philosophers participated. The discussion was initiated by Tolstoy, who was considered an apologist for the family and childbirth, and indeed this theme runs through his novels and stories. Hence the great resonance of his "Kreutzer Sonata"[written at the end of his life] which is in essence a rejection of the sanctity of marriage, sexual relations, and childbirth. � In his introduction to the story, Tolstoy declares that Christian marriage does not exist and never has existed - that there is nothing in the Bible about it. Church marriage was invented by churchmen and has nothing Christian about it, he said. The only true Christian ideal is complete chastity, especially in marriage. If a man does get married, he should strive toward the ideal and live with his wife as he would with a sister. This is the essence of Tolstoy's final reflections on marriage, which later became a whole doctrine attracting numerous followers. It is interesting that even today some young people are trying, unsuccessfully, to resurrect Tolstoy's teaching and above all his views on family and marriage. There were sharp polemics between such prominent philosophers and publicists as Rozanov and Berdyaev. Rozanov was then considered the "leading light" of the whole marriage question, on which he had written a lot. For him, sex was not an organ and not a function, but something at once spiritual and physical. It was a gift from God and should be treasured. Conception was the culminating moment of sex and its "radiance" is at once the essence of marriage and its basis. There were ongoing wide-ranging discussions in the press on family and marriage that drew in virtually all strata of the Russian intelligentsia of that time. And passionate arguments went on in the religious-philosophical gatherings that took place in St. Petersburg. The idea of holding these gatherings (an open association of people getting together to discuss questions of culture and religion) originated with Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius, and several other people. As one of them put it, from the very start these discussions were mainly concerned with three gender-related problems: that of the sacred flesh, of social justice and how to implement it in Christian society. These gatherings discussed the question of the place and role of women in society. The group saw her primary place as in the family, a Christian family raising children in a spirit of love and actively doing good. A woman saves herself and her husband by selflessly serving those closest to her, meaning God as well. This position of selfless heroic service was supported by quite a few of the Russian intelligentsia women of the late l9th century. For many of them faith was a purely personal and secret matter of one's soul and conscience, and their milieu brought forth heroines of devotion and nurses, all guided by love and compassion for fellow human beings. They tended the sick and wounded, set up homes for the aged and orphaned. Their communities formed all over Russia in the l9th century, with many of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I won't dwell on their history, this is for future researchers to do. I will say only a few words. The nurses of the community associated with the Pokrov Cathedral in Rubtsov worked in the toughest wards of several city hospitals for the poor. They continuously looked after the patients in the Moscow Troitsky home for the incurable. Free of charge they treated the sick in the nearby working class quarters of the city. Their community lasted until l923 when the sisters were evicted from the cloister, their food ration cards and all citizen rights taken away from them, and they were obliged to beg outside their cathedral. No less tragic a fate befell some of the sisters of charity of the Iver community, dating back to l869 and associated with the Russian Red Cross. They were a model of bravery both on the warfront and in civilian life, fighting terrible cholera and plague epidemics in remote regions of Russia at the end of the l9th century. � In l920 their community was also closed down. The Iver hospital-church of the Holy Virgin was given over to the local city hospital and only after many years returned to the church. Now a golden cross once again chines on its cupola. The Marfo-Marinsky cloister was the last sisters-of-mercy community established in Moscow before the l9l7 revolution, and its history is especially interesting. It was founded by the Princess Elizaveta Fedorovna, widow of the governor-general of Moscow, Grand Prince Sergei Alexandrovich, who was assassinated by the Social Revolutionary Party member, Kaliaev. Deeply religious, Elizaveta Fedorovna asked that her beloved husband's murderer not be punished, and she spent the rest of her life fervently serving those who were down and out. She and her fellow sisters worked in the poorest slum districts of Moscow and founded one of the best hospitals of that time, and a shelter for orphans, and they also worked on the battlefronts. Their community existed until l928 when some went to prison and others were sent to Soviet Central Asia, where many died of emaciation or ended in Stalin's torture chambers. Elizaveta Fedorovna herself and two other sisters were first exiled to Perm and then to a small Urals village. In July l9l8 she was executed along with five members of the extended Romanov family and a lay sister, Varvara Yekovlevna. In l990 the Russian Orthodox Church and people in the Moscow community dedicated to Elizaveta Fedorovna a monument in white marble which recalls for us the hundreds of simple selfless Russian women who died for their faith and convictions. I also want to note that many young women of gentry families, following the example of those sisters of charity, went into nunneries rather than have families and children. To return to the problems of women's emancipation in Russia, the peculiar aspect was that at first the idea of emancipation was discussed by men supporters and opponents, while women themselves hardly took part in these arguments. The women's movement in Russia at that time had not taken shape ideologically and had no common platform or program of action. Women fought for the possibility of working on an equal basis with men to get financial independence and for the right to get a higher education. On the city streets there appeared young women with books and notebooks under their arms who had broken away from the surveillance of family and guardians. Besides the ideological, was there another underlying cause to stimulate the women's movement? The middle l860's saw the collapse of many small gentry estates and the mass ruin of the lower gentry, forcing it out of the countryside into the city. I.V. Stasova brilliantly characterized this social stratum as the "landowner-proletariat." Young women of this intelligentsia were obliged to help support the family, as they did not want to be in the position of dependent parasites. By the second half of the l9th century, the idea of "liberating women through work" was on the whole supported by society. What made for the zeal of women's struggle at that time? Foremost, it was in the freedom to earn her bread by the work of her own hands, and not to be despised and humiliated by society. For some women, a job was the only way to feed themselves and their families. A peculiar competition developed among them, but since women did not then have sufficient qualifications, skills, and couldn't compete with men, the main form of organizing women's work was through all kinds of labor associations. After the publication of Chernyshevsky's novel, What is to Be Done?, which describes the work of a sewing artel organized as a commune, dozens of young women tried to form similar communes, many of which failed even before they really started to function. Instructive is the history of the "Znamenskaya commune" created by the passionate advocate of women's emancipation, V.A. Sleptsova. Nihilist women predominated there. The majority of them discovered in themselves an aversion to housekeeping and simple chores, and they were openly disgusted by Sleptsova's efforts to adorn their everyday life by, for example, buying attractive furniture. Sometimes girls from well-off families were given jobs. Some came to work in rather distinctive original dress and agreed to do any kind of work, even the least interesting and low-paid, which of course did not suit them. Freedom for a segment of women turned out to be freedom from moral ideals and from duty to one's relatives, which gave grounds for statements about the corrupting effects of jobs on women and its destructive influence on the family. By the end of the l9th century, getting specialized education for women became an urgent social mission and an important signpost in the process of emancipation. The women's movement made the struggle for higher education a basic goal. A congress in l868 stimulated broad discussion of this question, and a letter with 400 signatures was addressed to the Minister of Education, Count Tolstoy. In the autumn of l869 evening courses open to both sexes started in St. Petersburg with lectures by professors of the university. Women strove to study in universities. Beginning in the l820's they had attended some lectures in Moscow University, but it wasn't until l860 that a Russian woman studied in St. Petersburg University on equal conditions with men students. The rector allowed women to attend lectures on law and most of the lectures in the natural sciences and historical-philosophical faculties. The faculty reaction ranged from openly hostile to sympathetic, which was the predominant one. The men students were friendly and monitored the behavior of their colleagues, such that there were no grounds for censure. S. Svatnikov, who studies the history of women's education, has defined two stages in its development in Russia: the first stage when society saw nothing reprehensible in women's higher education, and the second marking a reaction. A government ruling of May 3l, l86l, denied women access to the universities, and a university statute of l863 categorically forbade women's admittance. � Even in appearance, women striving for independence were different from society women. They wore round Garibaldi hats, simple straight skirts and modest jackets; some smoked, others cut their hair short and wore glasses, all of which was ridiculed by society. � and led to accusations of socialism and nihilism. Some professors suggested to the women students that they go study in Switzerland. The first to go, Suslova, received in l868 a diploma from Zurich as a doctor of surgery and obstetrics. In l868 there were four Russian women students abroad, and by the l870's there were many more. They did well. The university in Zurich noted their serious attitude to science and scholarship, their genuine desire to study and their irreproachable moral behavior. The Russian government, troubled by the women going abroad to study, warmed that those continuing to attend lectures in Zurich would not be permitted to resume studies in Russia requiring government permission or to take exams. In l873 in the "government bulletin" there was a notice expressing the government's concern that young women were being drawn into politics and coming under the influence of immigrant-leaders. After l880 the flow of Russian women to Western Europe greatly increased, and in Russia itself democratic trends insisting on the right to higher education prevailed, and in l870 the Defense Minister Miliutin permitted the creation in the Academy of Medicine and Surgery of a special four-year course to prepared educated midwives - some 959 women over ten years. Every possible comment was made about these women, that they cut up corpses at night and carried around human bones in their pockets. The women students were held to higher standards than the men. � Then beginning in the l870's the government permitted the start of courses for women in the major city universities, but in the l880's again there was a reaction and many of these courses were closed, to be opened once more in the first decade of the 20th century when the reaction had died down. By then women had gained the right to take government and diploma exams and get degrees. � After l905 the number of women students was not in the hundreds but the thousands, and they came even from remote provinces to study in Moscow and St. Petersburg. An essential aspect of the women's movement in Russia in the second half of the l9th century was the active participation of women in revolutionary activity. � In the l870's, 95 women were found guilty and sentenced. In the l860's women chose between family and their desire to study and work on an equal basis with men, to serve society and the nation, through teaching and enlightenment and healing. By contrast, Vera Figner and those revolutionaries like her had first of all to choose between getting a diploma and fostering revolution. It was hard and painful to renounce the eternal woman's need to do good in society, and instead to take up the dagger, the gun, and dynamite. These women gained equal rights with men to be exiled and executed.