In many ways, the new emphasis on culture and education increased differences between elites and others. Only a tiny minority of non-elite women enjoyed access to education. Attached to Smolnyi institute was a school that admitted daughters of townsmen, although by 1791 nobles so inundated it that they outnumbered commoners. In 1786 Catherine established state primary and high schools that admitted girls and educated them for free. Alexander I extended her work, establishing parish schools at the base of the educational system. Some non-elite parents came to value education for daughters. During his childhood, recalled the clergyman Dmitrii Rostislavov, born in a provincial town in 1809, 'many clergymen, townspeople, and even rich peasants saw a need to teach reading... to their daughters'.[168] A few were even willing to pay: in Anna Virt's private school in Moscow, daughters of townsmen and a priest studied together with the offspring of officials, military officers and foreigners in 1818-20. Some merchants sent their daughters to school; Old Believers encouraged the literacy of daughters as well as sons. The overall number of women students remained tiny, however. Altogether, there were 1,178 female pupils in Russia by 1792, and 2,007 by 1802 (of a total of 24,064 pupils). In 1824, it was calculated that there were 338 girls in district schools and 3,420 in private schools; most female students undoubtedly derived from the nobility.[169]Literacy rates for Russia's population remained very low: in I834, only I of208 Russians could read and write; in 1856,1 of 143, the overwhelming majority of them male. In response to clerical concerns about lagging behind educated society and complaints about uneducated wives, in 1843 the Russian Orthodox Church opened a special school for daughters of the clergy, with the goal of preparing them for marriage.[170] While accessible to only a few, education and culture had become another measure of elite status for women as well as men.
The reform era
Women's subordinate social status became a burning issue in the middle of the nineteenth century, as educated Russians began to subject every traditional institution to re-evaluation, the patriarchal family included.[171] In the opinion of those on the left of Russia's emergent political spectrum, authoritarian family relations reproduced and reinforced the social and political hierarchy. In order to foster the democratisation of society, family relations would have to be democratised, too. Social critics intended women to play a vital role in creating a new social order, but they disagreed about the character of that role. Was women's primary responsibility to devote themselves to the family and to appropriate mothering of future citizens? Or did the broader society need women's energies, too? As substantial numbers of women and men sought to answer these questions for themselves and others, the 'woman question' emerged as one of the central issues of the day.
The debate unfolded in 1856, when Nikolai Pirogov (1810-81), the surgeon and educator, published an essay entitled 'Questions of Life' that posed explicitly the question of women's social role. Pirogov had just returned from the Crimean War (1854-6), where he had supervised some one hundred and sixty women who had volunteered as nurses. The women had served without pay and working right at the front, faced many of the same dangers and hardships as soldiers. To Pirogov, the women's exemplary work demonstrated that 'up to now, we have completely ignored the marvelous gifts of our women'.[172] To his mind, those gifts were mainly applicable in the family. To prepare women better to perform the role of mother to future male citizens and true companion to their husbands, capable of sharing fully in men's concerns and struggles, Pirogov advocated improvements in women's education.[173]
This was a goal that the new tsar could also embrace. In 1858 Alexander II approved a proposal for secondary schools for girls. The purpose: to improve the quality of public life by providing that 'religious, moral and mental education which is required of every woman, and especially, of future mothers'.[174]The new schools, called gimnaziia, were to be day schools, offering a six- year course of study that included Russian language, religion, arithmetic and a smattering of science. Progimnazia were opened the same year, offering a three-year course of training and a similar curriculum, exclusive of science. The schools were only partially subsidised; to cover the remaining costs, they depended on public support, which emerged only slowly. By 1865 there were 29 gimnazia and 75 progimnaziia in all of Russia; by 1883, there were 100 and 185 of each respectively, with an enrolment of roughly 50,000 students. Open to girls of all estates, gimnaziia and progimnaziia helped to encourage a blurring of social boundaries: over the next forty years, the proportion of well-born female students diminished, while that of peasants and townspeople grew.[175]In 1876 a supplementary year of pedagogical training became available to gim- nazia students, qualifying graduates for employment as a domestic teacher or tutor, and as a teacher in elementary schools and the first four classes of girls' secondary schools.
Some social critics adopted a more radical approach to the 'woman question'. For the critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, writing in 1856, the family was a 'Realm of Darkness', in which 'despotism' bore most heavily on women. Although his essay by that title focused on the merchant milieu as depicted by the playwright Alexander Ostrovskii, in Dobroliubov's view family despotism was more widespread. Almost everywhere, he contended, 'women have about as much value as parasites'.[176] A new concern with women's rights in the family prompted critiques of the patriarchal character of family law. There can be no true Christian love or hatred of vice in a family where despotism, arbitrariness and coercion reign and 'wives are given over in slavery to their husband' contended the liberal jurist Mikhail Filippov in 1861.[177] The emancipation of the serfs added an economic dimension to the woman question, depriving many nobles of their livelihood and forcing their daughters to support themselves. Equally important, young people of this era who espoused 'new ideas' rejected the elite culture that they associated with serfdom - a life of idleness and luxury, supported by the toil of others. For some women, even dependence on a husband became unacceptable. The more radical were convinced that whether married or single, a woman must never 'hang on the neck of a man'.[178]
Encouraged by the attention of the press, elite women began to express their shared interest and identity as women. In 1859 noblewomen in the province of Vologda established separate meetings at gatherings of the provincial nobility. To minimise distinctions of wealth, they required participants to wear simple dress.[179] That same year, Russia's first woman-oriented association emerged, the Society for Inexpensive Lodgings, with the goal of providing decent housing and otherwise assisting needy gentlewomen. Three well-educated women from elite backgrounds took the lead: Anna Filosofova (1837-1912), the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat; Nadezhda Stasova (1822-?), the daughter of a court architect and godchild of Alexander I, and Maria Trubnikova, (1835-97), the daughter of an exiled Decembrist (Vasilii Ivashev). To the charitable activities that had long comprised part of propertied women's role, the three brought the democratic spirit of the new era, providing employment for the residents of their housing, daycare for the children and a communal kitchen to prepare meals. Thus began a movement for expanding the rights of women.
168
D. I. Rostislavov,
169
Janet Hartley,
170
Quoted in G. L. Freeze,
171
R. Stites,
172
Quoted in John S. Curtiss, 'Russian Sisters of Mercy in the Crimea, 1854-55', SR 25, 1 (March 1966): 106.
173
Barbara Alpern Engel,
175
C. Johanson,
176
Quoted in Barbara Alpern Engel, 'Women as Revolutionaries: The Case of the Russian Populists', in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds.),