Other women took action on their own behalf. In 1859 womenbegan to audit university lectures, which had just been reopened to the public. Within a year, women's presence during university lectures had become almost commonplace. In 1861 several scientists at the St Peterburg Medical Surgery Academy opened their laboratories to women. Among those who audited medical lectures was Nadezhda Suslova, the daughter of a serf. Suslova completed her medical studies in Zurich, where she earned the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1867, the first woman to receive such a degree from a European university. Her success inspired hundreds of other women to follow her example. In the cities, some young women openly flouted conventional gender expectations. They cropped their hair, dispensed with crinolines and simplified their dress; they smoked in public, went about the streets without an escort, and wore blue-tinted glasses. A few even donned the clothing of men in order to enjoy greater freedom. Young rebels became known to their critics as nihilists (nig- ilistki) because of their rejection of 'the stagnant past and all tradition'. Some came to regard intimate relations and family life as an obstacle to women's freedom and sought to reject them altogether. Their views can be heard in the credo of Lelenka, the heroine of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's novella The Boarding School Girl (published i860). Lelenka proclaims that she 'will never fall in love, never . . . On the contrary, I say to everyone, do as I have done. Liberate yourselves, all you people with hands and a strong will! Live alone. Work, knowledge, freedom - that's what life is all about.'[180]
Nikolai Chernyshevsky's enormously influential novel, What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat'? 1862), offered a different solution to the 'woman question', one that sought to create a balance between public and private life and granted men a central role. Freed from an oppressive family situation by marriage to a medical student, a 'new man', the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, enjoys a room of her own and the freedom to love another, as well as meaningful, socially useful work. She organises a sewing workshop according to collective principles; eventually, she becomes a physician, each stage of her development facilitated by her husband. By depicting the personal and productive relations that would constitute the socialist future, Chernyshevsky's novel linked women's liberation with the more sweeping goals of social transformation and revolution. The book became a key work in shaping the outlook of this and subsequent generations.
Among conservative officials, however, the radical implications of women's liberation aroused concern about threats to the political order. Although few women were involved, conservatives connected women students with the student unrest ofthe early 1860s. InJuly 1863, the Ministry of Education closed university doors to women. A year later, the Medical Surgery Academy expelled women, too. Conservative fears complicated but failed to halt efforts by advocates of women's rights to expand their educational opportunities. Advanced secondary courses for women opened in 1869 (the Alarchinskii courses), as did university preparatory courses (the Liubianskii courses); three years later, courses that prepared women for secondary-school teaching became available (the Guerrier courses). Thanks to the support of Dmitrii Miliutin, minister of war, that same year the government established Courses for Learned Mid- wives in St Petersburg. In 1876 an additional year was added to the four-year programme and the courses renamed Women's Medical Courses, qualifying graduates to work as physicians. That same year, the government sanctioned the opening of 'higher courses' for women, essentially, women's universities that awarded no degree. Kazan University became the first to take advantage of the opportunity; in 1878, Kiev and St Petersburg followed. The St Petersburg courses, known as the Bestuzhev courses, became the most well-known and long-lasting. Graduates of women's courses found employment as midwives, medical assistants (fel'dshery), pharmacists, physicians, journalists and most commonly of all, teachers. The profession of teaching became increasingly feminised: the proportion of women teaching in rural schools in European Russia almost doubled between 1880 and 1894, growing from 20.6 to 38.6 per cent of the total. By 1911 women constituted well over half rural teachers. Initially drawn primarily from among the privileged, by the pre-war period over 40 per cent of women teachers in rural schools derived from the peasantry or were townswomen; indeed, the most striking fact about such teachers was their social diversity.[181]
A minority of educated women, however, viewed Russia's social inequities as far more important than educational or career opportunities. Precisely as conservative officials had feared, some women students came to oppose the social and political order. Hundreds of young women, most of privileged background, became involved in the populist movement of the 1870s and went 'to the people' to educate or rouse them to revolution. Many wound up in prison. In January 1878, Vera Zasulich, the daughter of an impoverished noble family, initiated the terrorist phase of the populist movement by shooting General Trepov, the city governor of St Petersburg, before a room full of witnesses in retaliation for his beating of a radical prisoner. A jury acquitted her. Women played a prominent role in the People's Will, the organisation that emerged when the populist movement divided over the use of violence. On i March 1881, Sofia Perovskaia, the daughter of a former governor-general of St Petersburg, directed the successful assault on Tsar Alexander II, becoming the first Russian woman to be executed for a political crime.
The death of Tsar Alexander II at the hands of populist terrorists and the ascension to the throne of his son, Alexander III (r. 1881-94) brought significant efforts to restore the pre-reform gender order. Blaming higher education for women's political radicalism, conservative officials attempted to render it off limits. In 1882 the Women's Medical Courses ceased to accept new students, and in 1887 ceased operation. Admissions to all other women's courses ended in 1886, while the government pondered its next moves. Although the Bestuzhev courses were permitted to continue, their programmes were narrowed and enrolment was restricted, with a 3 per cent quota for non-Christians (meaning Jews). At the same time, the government sought to reinforce the patriarchal family. Regarding his own family as a 'sacred personal sphere' and himself as the 'guardian of the sanctity and steadfastness of the family principle', Tsar Alexander III strove to secure the inviolability of the marital bond.[182] The efforts of liberal jurists to reform Russia's patriarchal marital laws foundered on the rock of conservative resistance, led by Konstantin Pobedonostsev and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Nevertheless, reactionaries failedto turnbackthe clock, inlargepart because of the modernising changes that the government itself unleashed, which affected even some peasant women, although to a lesser extent than men. Between 1856 and 1896, the number of pupils in primary schools grew from roughly 450,000 to approximately 3.8 million, while the proportion of girls among them increased from 8.2 to 21.3 per cent.[183] While less than 10 per cent of peasant women were considered literate at the close of the nineteenth century according to the minimal standards of tsarist census-takers, even this low rate represented an advance over earlier years, and rates were rising among the younger age groups. Women's access to secondary education grew as well. During the reign of Alexander III, girls' gymnaziia almost doubled in number. Pressures to expand higher education for women intensified after his death.
181
Ben Eklof,
182
Quoted in Richard Wortman,