In I895 the new tsar Nicholas II approved the St Petersburg Women's Medical Institute. Enrolment in the Bestuzhev courses expanded and the Moscow Higher Women's Courses (the Guerrier courses) re-opened in 1900-1. In 1903 a special pedagogical institute for women opened in Odessa, enrolling 600 hundred students in the first two years. Over time, the social background of students in higher educational institutions grew more diverse. Although impoverished students were far the less likely to complete the courses, in lecture halls and reading rooms, young women from clerical, merchant and artisan, even peasant backgrounds took their places beside the daughters of privileged elites.[184]
Economic developments in the post-reform period had somewhat broader repercussions forpeasant women. The expansion ofthe cash economy affected their consumption patterns. Manufactured clothing and urban-style fashion increasingly became a mark of prestige in the countryside. But long-standing peasant practices often mediated women's interaction with the marketplace. Frequently, men rather than women took advantage of opportunities to earn money elsewhere, leaving women and the aged to tend the land. If a household needed the cash, women were more likely to labour at home. Offering a limitless reserve of inexpensive labour, in the hinterlands of Moscow tens of thousands wound cotton thread on bobbins for a factory or sewed kid gloves or rolled hollow tubes for cigarettes from materials distributed by an entrepreneur, who paid them for their work and sold the finished product. Their modest financial contributions did little to enhance women's status at home.[185] Connected to the market by virtue of their income-producing activities, women nevertheless worked within the traditional patriarchal household. Many of the tens of thousands of peasant women who earned wages in nearby factories likewise acted as members of a family economy rather than as independent labourers. Women moved in and out of the labour force in response to their household's needs.
Other circumstances narrowed the horizons of the growing numbers of women who laboured far from home. As industrialisation proceeded, women's proportion in the burgeoning factory labour force grew: from about one in every five workers in 1885 to about one in every three by 1914. Still larger numbers of migrant women found positions in domestic service. Although spinsters and widows, the first to migrate, often left for good, marriageable women usually migrated temporarily, in order to feed themselves, assemble a trousseau and, if possible, contribute to their family economy. Most migrant women experienced demoralising working and living conditions. They lived in factory dormitories, where dozens crowded together in a single large room, or they rented a corner just big enough for their bed in an apartment shared with others. Domestic servants often lacked even the modest room of their own available to their servant sisters to the West. The servant's wage was low, her position generally insecure and work never-ending. Women factory workers had lower rates of literacy than men and received a fraction of men's wages. Earning barely enough for subsistence, many survived on a diet of bread and cucumbers. Their gender barred women from the drinking establishments where men socialised and exchanged ideas. Domestic servants, who enjoyed little or no free time, were even more isolated and vulnerable than the woman worker. Perhaps as a result, domestic servants were disproportionately represented among both registered prostitutes and the 8-9,000 women who abandoned their illegitimate children to foundling homes every year in Moscow and St Petersburg.[186]
Even so, cities offered opportunities to women migrants. Wage in hand, women could extend their horizons and alter their fates in a manner unthinkable in the village. Aspiring to emulate the appearance of their social betters, single women workers sometimes spent their wages on urban-style fashions, skimping on food in order to afford a pair of boots or an attractive dress. In their free time, they found inexpensive entertainments at urban fairs and pleasure gardens or in the amateur workers' theatres, all of which proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century. By enabling migrant women to dress and amuse themselves in ways similar to women of other classes, city life could erode social boundaries and make social distinctions seem both less relevant and more burdensome.
The burgeoning marketplace also fostered such trends, by encouraging the desire for individual pleasure and gratification. Advertising enticed women of all classes to consume the items displayed in department store windows and on the pages ofpopular magazines and to employ beauty aides to decorate the self. Advicebooks on appropriate dress and deportment proliferated. Newpastimes such as bicycling enhanced women's mobility and personal independence. Consumer culture tended to promote individual indulgence over family values.
Anastasia Vial'tseva vividly personified the new trend. Born a peasant in 1871, at the turn of the century Vial'tseva sang bitter-sweet romances about sexual desire, attracting hordes of worshipping fans and earning fabulous sums of money, which she spent lavishly and conspicuously on herself.[187]
As the century drew to a close, women assumed more visible roles in public life. Particularly in rural areas, women's religious communities provided charity to the poor, education to the young and care to the sick even during the worst of the reaction, and the number of such communities expanded dramatically towards the end of the century, part of a broader religious revival.[188]As restrictions eased in the early 1890s, unprecedented opportunities became available for women to contribute to and define the public welfare. In 1894 Municipal Guardianships for the poor, a form of welfare organisation, were established in all major cities. Private charitable organisations proliferated, offering a broad range of services. Women directed charitable organisations, served on governing and advisory boards, and worked for charitable establishments either as volunteers or as salaried employees, influencing their goals and orientation. Interestingly, Russia's charitable organisations eschewed the maternalist and domestic-oriented discourse that dominated such endeavours in the West, emphasising instead the importance of childcare institutions such as nurseries and asylums, and the role of women as workers.[189]
Women's new opportunities and enhanced sense of self left many dissatisfied with the limitations on their lives. When in a decree of 1897, the St Petersburg city government forbade women teachers to marry, women teachers protested. The marriage ban limited their personal freedom, argued Nadezhda Rumiantseva at a conference of teachers.[190] Responding to condescending treatment by university officials and male students, at the turn of the century women students increasingly framed their demands for change 'in terms of the individual right to self-expression and self-determination'.[191] By 1904 roughly a thousand working women had joined the separate women's section of Gapon's Assembly of Russian Factory Workers that Vera Karelina organised in St Petersburg. Karelina's most effective organising tool was a story that she read aloud, describing the humiliating body searches by male personnel that women workers were forced to undergo.[192]
184
Johanson,
185
R. Glickman,
186
Barbara Alpern Engel,
187
Louise McReynolds, 'The "Incomparable" Vial'steva and the Culture of Personality', in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (eds.),
188
Adele Lindenmeyr, 'Public Life, Private Virtues: Women in Russian Charity, 1762-1914',
189
A. Lindenmeyr, 'Maternalism and Child Welfare in Late Imperial Russia',
190
C. Ruane,