The only bright point which I saw in the life of St. Petersburg was the
movement which was going on amongst the youth of both sexes. Various
currents joined to produce the mighty agitation which soon took an
underground and revolutionary character, and engrossed the attention of
Russia for the next fifteen years. I shall speak of it in a subsequent
chapter; but I must mention in this place the movement which was
carried on, quite openly, by our women for obtaining access to higher
education. St. Petersburg was at that time its main centre.
Every afternoon the young wife of my brother, on her return from the
women’s pedagogical courses which she followed, had something new to
tell us about the animation which prevailed there. Schemes were laid
for opening a medical academy and universities for women; debates
upon schools or upon different methods of education were organized in
connection with the courses, and hundreds of women took a passionate
interest in these questions, discussing them over and over again
in private. Societies of translators, publishers, printers, and
bookbinders were started, in order that work might be provided for the
poorest members of the sisterhood who flocked to St. Petersburg, ready
to do any sort of work, only to live in the hope that they, too, would
some day have their share of higher education. A vigorous, exuberant
life reigned in those feminine centres, in striking contrast to what I
met with elsewhere.
Since the Government had shown its determined intention not to admit
women to the existing universities they had directed all their efforts
toward opening universities of their own. They were told at the
Ministry of Education that the girls who had passed through the girls’
gymnasia (the high schools) were not prepared to follow university
lectures. ‘Very well,’ they replied, ‘permit us to open intermediate
courses, preparatory to the university, and impose upon us any
programme you like. We ask no grants from the State. Only give us the
permission, and it will be done.’ Of course the permission was not
given.
Then they started private courses and drawing-room lectures in all
parts of St. Petersburg. Many university professors, in sympathy with
the new movement, volunteered to give lectures. Poor men themselves,
they warned the organizers that any mention of remuneration would be
taken as a personal offence. Natural science excursions used to be
made every summer in the neighbourhood of St. Petersburg, under the
guidance of university professors, and women constituted the bulk
of the excursionists. In the courses for midwives they forced the
professors to treat each subject in a far more exhaustive way than was
required by the programme, or to open additional courses. They took
advantage of every possibility, of every breach in the fortress, to
storm it. They gained admission to the anatomical laboratory of old
Dr. Gruber, and by their admirable work they won this enthusiast of
anatomy entirely to their side. If they learned that a professor had
no objection to letting them work in his laboratory on Sundays and at
night on week days, they took advantage of the opening, working late on
week days and all day on Sunday.
At last, notwithstanding all the opposition of the Ministry, they
opened the intermediate courses, only giving them the name of
pedagogical courses. Was it possible, indeed, to forbid future mothers
studying the methods of education? But as the methods of teaching
botany or mathematics could not be taught in the abstract, botany,
mathematics, and the rest were soon introduced into the curriculum of
the pedagogical courses, which became preparatory for the university.
Step by step the women thus widened their rights. As soon as it became
known that at some German university a certain professor might open
his lecture-room to a few women, they knocked at his door and were
admitted. They studied law and history at Heidelberg, and mathematics
at Berlin; at Zürich more than a hundred girls and women worked at
the University and the Polytechnicum. There they won something more
valuable than the degree of Doctor of Medicine; they won the esteem of
the most learned professors, who expressed it publicly several times.
When I came to Zürich in 1872, and became acquainted with some of the
students, I was astonished to see quite young girls, who were studying
at the Polytechnicum, solving intricate problems of the theory of heat,
with the aid of the differential calculus, as easily as if they had had
years of mathematical training. One of the Russian girls who studied
mathematics under Weierstrass at Berlin, Sophie Kovalévsky, became a
mathematician of high repute, and was invited to a professorship at
Stockholm; she was, I believe, the first woman in our century to hold a
professorship in a university for men. She was so young that in Sweden
no one wanted to call her anything but by her diminutive name of Sónya.
In spite of the open hatred of Alexander II. for educated women--when
he met in his walks a girl wearing spectacles and a round Garibaldian
cap he began to tremble, thinking that she must be a Nihilist bent on
shooting him--in spite of the bitter opposition of the State police,
who represented every woman student as a revolutionist; in spite of the
thunders and the vile accusations which Katkóff directed against the
whole of the movement in almost every number of his venomous gazette,
the women succeeded, in the teeth of the Government, in opening a
series of educational institutions. When several of them had obtained
medical degrees abroad they forced the Government, in 1872, to let
them open a medical academy with their own private means. And when the
Russian women were recalled by their Government from Zürich, to prevent
their intercourse with the revolutionist refugees, they forced the
Government to let them open in Russia four universities of their own,
which soon had nearly a thousand pupils. It seems almost incredible,
but it is a fact that notwithstanding all the prosecutions which the
Women’s Medical Academy had to live through, and its temporary closure,
there are now in Russia more than six hundred and seventy women
practising as doctors.
* * * * *
It was certainly a grand movement, astounding in its success and
instructive in a high degree. Above all it was through the unlimited
devotion of a mass of women in all possible capacities that they gained
their successes. They had already worked as sisters of charity during
the Crimean war, as organizers of schools later on, as the most devoted
schoolmistresses in the villages, as educated midwives and doctors’
assistants amongst the peasants. They went afterward as nurses and
doctors in the fever-stricken hospitals during the Turkish war of 1878,
and won the admiration of the military commanders and of Alexander II.
himself. I know two ladies, both very eagerly ‘wanted’ by the State
police, who served as nurses during the war, under assumed names which
were guaranteed by false passports; one of them, the greater ‘criminal’
of the two, who had taken a prominent part in my escape, was even
appointed head nurse of a large hospital for wounded soldiers, while
her friend nearly died from typhoid fever. In short, women took any
position, no matter how low in the social scale, and no matter what
privations it involved, if only they could be in any way useful to
the people; not a few of them, but hundreds and thousands. They have
_conquered_ their rights in the true sense of the word.
Another feature of this movement was that in it the chasm between the
two generations--the older and the younger sisters--did not exist; or,
at least, it was bridged over to a great extent. Those who were the
leaders of the movement from its origin never broke the link which
connected them with their younger sisters, even though the latter were
far more advanced in their ideals than the older women were.
They pursued their aims in the higher spheres; they kept strictly aloof
from any political agitation; but they never committed the fault of
forgetting that their true force was in the masses of younger women,
of whom a great number finally joined the radical or revolutionary
circles. These leaders were correctness itself--I considered them
too correct--but they did not break with those younger students who
went about as typical Nihilists, with short-cropped hair, disdaining
crinoline, and betraying their democratic spirit in all their
behaviour. The leaders did not mix with them, and occasionally there
was friction, but they never repudiated them--a great thing, I believe,
in those times of madly raging prosecutions.
They seemed to say to the younger and more democratic people, ‘We
shall wear our velvet dresses and chignons, because we have to deal
with fools who see in a velvet dress and a chignon the tokens of
“political reliability;” but you, girls, remain free in your tastes
and inclinations.’ When the women who studied at Zürich were ordered
by the Russian Government to return, these correct ladies did not turn
against the rebels. They simply said to the Government, ‘You don’t like
it? Well, then, open women’s universities at home; otherwise our girls
will go abroad in still greater numbers, and of course will enter into
relations with the political refugees.’ When they were reproached with
breeding revolutionists, and were menaced with the closing of their
academy and universities, they retorted, ‘Yes, many students become
revolutionists; but is that a reason for closing all universities?’ How
few political leaders have the moral courage not to turn against the
more advanced wing of their own party!
The real secret of their wise and fully successful attitude was
that none of the women who were the soul of that movement were mere
‘feminists,’ desirous to get their share of the privileged positions in
society and the State. Far from that. The sympathies of most of them
went with the masses. I remember the lively part which Miss Stásova,
the veteran leader of the agitation, took in the Sunday schools in
1861, the friendships she and her friends made among the factory girls,
the interest they manifested in the hard life of those girls outside
the school, the fights they fought against their greedy employers. I
recall the keen interest which the women showed, at their pedagogical
courses, in the village schools and in the work of those few who, like
Baron Korff, were permitted for some time to do something in that
direction, and the social spirit which permeated their courses. The
rights they strove for--both the leaders and the great bulk of the
women--were not only the individual right to higher instruction, but
much more, far more, the right to be useful workers among the people,
the masses. This was why they succeeded to such an extent.