Reviews for The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilsm, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930

The average rating for The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilsm, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-02 00:00:00 Robert Richelson 1 - Women and the Russian Tradition In Russia, as in the rest of Europe, the woman question did not emerge from among the ranks of working and peasant women. Except as the distant objects of revolutionary vision, the female masses at the bottom of the social order played almost no role in the women's movement until the beginning of the twentieth century. The impulses of self-emancipation in Russia appeared first among educated gentry women. Until the 1860s, they were almost the sole beneficiaries of the limited facilities for female education. After that, they dominated in numbers and influence both the legal feminist movement and the female sector of the underground revolutionary movement that emerged simultaneously with it. In both cases, the dominance persisted with only minor diminution almost up to the Revolution of 1917. Russian education in the early nineteenth century was status-oriented, as it usually is in traditional societies. For women this meant an education "appropriate" to their future social roles and in accordance with their station, a view deeply rooted in European culture. p.13 - It would be wrong to date the beginning of a "woman question" from the time of Peter the Great's reforms. But it is undeniable that its emergence was impossible without the social bases laid down by him. In this case the foundation was imported European culture and custom. However superficial and eclectic the borrowing, and however narrow the base, upon it was built a very thin stratum of educated and cultivated Russian men and women. The subsequent development of women's self-awareness and of man's image of woman was to be conditioned closely by the kind, the volume, and the origin of the "culture" imported into Russian from Europe. In less than a century, the isolated and inferior sexual chattel of the boyars was transmuted into the sociable, well-mannered, respected - even exalted - Russian lady, and in another half-century, even the cloying notion of inferiority-in-all-but-morals was being assaulted. p.15 - The early nineteenth century witnessed a conscious attempt by Russia to reject "French" values. With the rejection came a romantic idealization of the Russian woman as the embodiment of Virtue and Maternity. Fidelity rather than intrigue became her hallmark. Pushkin's heroine, Tatyana, in the poem Eugene Onegin, has often been cited by critics as the purest example of this ideal. "To another husband I am tied / And stand forever by his side" are her last words in rejecting the tardy attentions of Onegin whom she still loves. 2 - The Birth of the Woman Question p.30 - The man who initiated the debate on women's education was Nikolai Pirogov (1810-1881), the noted surgeon and educator. His dual career in education and medicine revealed to him both the gross inadequacies of the philosophy of vocational education - with its stress on preparing for a fixed career rather than on the development of one's peculiar capacities - and the acute shortage of medical skills in Russia. At the beginning of the Crimean War he was asked by Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law of the tsar, about the possibility of sending female nurses to the front. Elena Pavlovna, a court "liberal" and a friend of the reformers, had two goals in forming a female auxiliary corps: marshalling needed personnel for the aid of Russia; and calling attention to the capabilities of women and promoting a greater role for her sex in public life. p.47 - The years 1860-61 were a turning point: an end of incubation and a beginning of application. What of women's consciousness at this critical moment in the history of Russian woman? The so-called strong woman of Russian belles lettres was going through a psychic change. Pushkin's Tatyana (Eugene Onegin) and Turgenev's Natasha (Rudin) had already established the type of resolute woman as foil to the superfluous man. Three heroines of works that appeared at the end of the 1850scontinued this tradition, but displayed a stage of consciousness not shared by earlier ones: Olga in Goncharov's Oblomov, Elena in Turgenev's On the Eve, and Lolenka in Krestovky's The Boarding-School Girl. Olga, constantly striving toward something not quite defined, was the least developed of these fictional women. But the critics noted that she was in advance not only of Oblomov, the quintessential superfluous anti-hero but also of the energetic Stolz whom she finally married after failing to mobilize Oblomov. Turgenev's Elena was more clearly defined. Her early strivings, so lovingly described by the author, strongly resembled those felt by real-life women revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s: "the reading alone did not satisfy Elena; she had longed for action, for good deeds ever since her childhood." Her budding consciousness found girlhood expression in her emotional sympathy for sufferers, and particularly for suffering animals. 3 - The Feminist Response p.66 - The Russian feminist leaders were well educated members of the privileged classes, past their first youth when they began their work (all of them were around twenty-five except Stasova who was thirty-eight in 1860.) This may help explain their preference for caution and their refusal to break completely with the past, their traditions, and their families, as the nihilists were to do. But some of the most prominent nihilists and revolutionary women were also from very wealthy and highly placed families, and some were even mature wives and mothers when they took up a new life. Maria Vasilievna Trubnikova (1835-97) was the first on the scene as well as the first to leave it. Daughter of the Decembrist exile V.P. Ivashov and his mistress Camille Ledentu, she was born in Chita and raised in an atmosphere of pious reverence for the defeated rebels. He education, at the hands of her aunt, was superb, embracing European languages, literatures, and history as well as Russian culture. p.67 - The Stasov family hardly needs an introduction, its most famous member was V.V. Stasov, Russia's leading music critic in the nineteenth century. His two nieces were the biographer of George Sand, Wladimir Karenine, and the Bolshevik Elena Stasova. His sister, Nadezhda Stasova, was the second in what was called "the triumvirate" of Russian feminism. Older than her two colleagues (born 1822), she was reared in the cultivated atmosphere of Tsarskoe Selo where her father served as court architect. The family of Anna Diaghileva, who later became Anna Folosofova, was hardly less eminent than the Stasovs. To it belonged not only herself, a prominent feminist leader for two generations, but also her son and nephew, Mitia and Serezha, who would revolutionize Russian culture at the turn of the century as Dmitry Folosofov and Serge Diaghilev. Like her contemporary, Shelginova, she received a fine education in a spacious home on Vasilievsky Island in the capital. p.68 - The feminists began with charity, employing the talents of a few women to help large numbers of the poor of both sexes. This added little impetus to a women's movement as such, but it did provide experience in leadership, nurtured a feeling of self-respect, and aroused a consciousness of women's ability to function in public life. Most important, these efforts brought together many women of similar backgrounds in new situations that transcended the salons and the other established forms of social intercourse that prevailed among ladies. Philanthropy blended easily into feminism, and in a short time their efforts were pointed in the direction of helping women to live, to study, and to work. Initially, feminists seemed to have had no clearer purpose than to bring women together in a more democratic atmosphere than that of the salons, which were perhaps early responses to the letter so women appearing in the think journals. p.69 - One of the most ambitious of the feminist projects in the 1860s was a Society for Women's Work. Although it never actually got under way, its broader aims and the circumstances of its still birth are of some interest. p.82 - Kazan University was the first to avail itself of the new opportunity and women's courses were founded in 1876, the year of the decree. St. Petersburg and Kiev followed in 1878. p.83 - Having seen their dream of higher education for women come true, Filosofova, Stasova, and their colleagues were determined that it would not perish from lack of financial support. 4 - The Nihilist Response p.89 - In the broadest sense, Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is To Be Done? (1863) was a Bible for all advanced Russian women with aspirations toward independence. To the feminists it reinforced their ideas on education and economic independence and on the moral imperative of helping other women struggle for these things. p.90 - The unfolding of Vera Pavlovna's consciousness as a full human being is the dominant theme of What Is To Be Done? p.92- In the course of her struggle for freedom to love, Vera discovers that love, marriage, and even total erotic fulfillment are not enough to make her a free woman. Like many women in Russian life at that moment, she sensed that economic independence was even more fundamental than sexual freedom and equality. Vera's second dream shows her that work, the social equivalent of motion in nature, is the central force in life. Drawing partly on socialist theory and partly on the practice of Russian artels, Chernyshevsky constructs for her a fictional sewing cooperative, which begins as a limited profit-sharing enterprise and develops into a full-scale residential producers' and consumers' commune in the heart of St. Petersburg. Vera Pavlovna, recalling her dream-given injunction to liberate other women, uses the sewing artel to raise the consciousness of her female employees. She makes partners of them, shares the profits, draws them into the administration, and gradually educates them to self-reliance through carefully programmed readings of progressive literature. She is the fictional predecessor of the Zhenotdel organizers who, sixty years later, were using similar techniques in "consciousness raising" in the Soviet Republic. p.93 - Chernyshevsky's approach to women's liberation has a different style from that of the organized feminists. In education, his stress was on individual effort: books, tutoring by friends, and circles. No scenes in the university halls, no struggling female students, no petitions. p.100 - "The idea of the equality of all people without distinction" was the magnet which drew so many young idealistic women into the nihilist camp. When it became clear that nihilism was the only intellectual movement which emphatically included women in its idea of emancipation, the way was opened for a coalition of the sexes. p.105 - What Is To Be Done? Bequeathed to the woman of the 1860s not only a self-image but also some specific devices for liberation as well, particularly the fictitious marriage as a means of escape, and the artel-commune as a mode of social action. Though both predated the novel, their incidence increased with its publication and with the growth of family discord that formed its social background. The great schism between fathers and sons, which has received much scholarly attention, also affected the daughters. p.111 - Communes and artels became a kind of fad in the 1860s. Ilya Repin lived for a while in a commune of painters; Modest Musorgsky lived in another. p.113 - Nihilist teaching on the woman question, for all its egalitarian and liberationist sweep, did not provide a very solid theoretical or social base for the further emancipation of women. The Chernyshevsky synthesis - brothers liberating sisters (the fictitious marriage), women liberating women, freedom of choice in love and marriage, cooperative work and communal life for both sexes, full development of the mind and the personality of women - was officially adopted by the revolutionary intelligentsia of the 1870s and after, though parts of it were obscured or downplayed by the imperatives of a desperate struggle for power. Indeed, much of it was absorbed into the ethos of the non-radical progressive intelligentsia. But opposition to the nihilist view of sexual equality among the conservative elements of the empire remained very potent; and revolt against the established order in this domain of human relations had to be personal, sporadic, and often traumatic. Nihilism, as a way of life distinct from radicalism, began to dissolve at the end of the 1860s. 5 - The radical Response p.126 - The Russian revolutionary movement of the 1870s was unparalleled elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Western world. Thousands of young men and women streamed into the countryside to make contact with the peasants; hundreds perished in exile, prison, or on the scaffold for their efforts to destroy the administrative core of the Empire though assassinations. […] The woman question as such was practically non-existent in the theoretical formulations of the revolutionaries. The most prominent émigré theorists of the movement, Lavrov, Nakunin, and Tkachov, simply intoned variations of the theme exposed in the proclamation "To Women" present equality of the sexes in revolutionary obligations, future equality in the socialist society. p.127 - Since the major target of revolutionary propaganda was the ignorant, superstitious, and tradition-ridden peasantry, programmatic frankness on matters of sexual equality would certainly have complicated the already enormously difficult job of communicating with the peasants - though in matters of religion, armed uprising, and tsar-hatred propagandists were often willing to risk a violation of the village ethos. 6 - The New Generation p.159 - Tolstoyan anti-feminism. Aside from the lugubrious asceticism that Tolstoy preached in tales like The Kreuzer Sonata, he made his general views on women abundantly clear in an interview given to Repin's wife a few years before his death. He said nothing new, but contented himself with pontification on the weakness and the general inferiority of women. Granting the desirability of an improved legal status for woman, Tolstoy insisted on her moral subordination to man, and rounded off his remarks with the homely advice to hire a laundress. In a sense, the age of the "woman question" was over; it had received so much publicity during the 1860s and 1870s that there was nothing more to say about it as a general problem. (The practice of making irrelevant and half-ironic references to the "woman question" which we find in the novels of the 1870s (Devils, Karamazov, and Karenina) seems to have been abandoned by the writers of this epoch.) The results wrought by all this publicity had been impressive indeed: a gratifying reform of women's education, a bright galaxy of female revolutionaries, and a widespread acceptance of women's equality among the intelligentsia. 7 - The Feminist Movement p.193 - By 1900 almost all of the original feminists of the 1860s had left the scene. p.200 - The Women's Union now set out energetically to win support from the professional and trade unions which were then joining forces in the Union of Unions. p.215 - The suffrage work of the Mutual Philanthropic Society had been somewhat over-shadowed by the energetic campaigns of the Women's Union in 1905-07. The First All-Russian Women's Congress took place in 1908. p.220 - The League for Women's Equality, though the largest feminist organization in Russia, could not (at least before 1917) claim more than a thousand members, about one-tenth the size of the Union, even if we accept the more optimistic estimates. p.221 - The St. Petersburg League became the leading suffrage group in pre-revolutionary Russia, attracting by its moderation the support of the Mutual Philanthropic Society, and by its tact the cooperation of the Women's progressive Party. p.222 - Most feminists, especially after 1908, never claimed to be socialists. p.227 - In comparison with the feminist movement of the West, the sharpest difference is in size. A tiny European state like Denmark, had some 80,000 members in its National Women's Council as early as 1899. In the United States, the major (but not the only) women's suffrage organization, The National American Women's Suffrage Association, grew from 17,000 in 1905 to 100,000 in 1915. The Russians possessed neither a National Women's Council now any other body that spoke for all women's organizations. The Union for Women's Equality, by far the largest suffrage association of the whole period, reached its peak in 1905 with some eighty branches claiming, at the most generous estimate, only a membership of 8,000, and these numbers diminished drastically and rapidly after 1905. The Moscow Branch of the League had less than 500 members in 1911. The Mutual Philanthropic Society and the Women's Progressive Party were even smaller. The smaller scale of Russian feminism can hardly be a surprise, given the relative per capita number of cities, businesses, and schools in Russia and the West. 8 - The Socialist Women's Movement p.233 - The Russian feminists, taken as a whole, did not possess a binding comprehensive ideology. Aside from a widely shared belief in the solidarity of all women, their ideas about emancipation were molded out of varied, often ad hoc, and sometimes even conflicting responses to discrete aspects of the woman question. p.254 - Inessa Armand, known in Western historiography almost exclusively as a close friend of Lenin, was to become the first director of Zhenotdel, the Party apparatus for work among women in the Soviet period and was thus, with Kollotai, the major pioneer of women's emancipation in the new state. 9 - Women against Women p.283 - Until the February Revolution, the feminists had to be content with gains in educational and employment opportunities. 10 - Bolshevik Liberation p.325 - As Lenin's wife, Krupskaya had been a key organizational figure of the early Bolshevik movement in emigration because of her network of correspondence with agents in Russia. But after Lenin and Krupskaya arrived in revolutionary Russia, Stasova, not she, was appointed to head up the Secretariat of the Party. Krupskaya's main work and her abiding concern both before and after Lenin's death was propaganda and education. p.345 - Without missing a historical beat, Bolshevik women, having assisted in the establishment of Soviet power, had gone on to defend it in the Civil War. During it, and for a few years afterwards, some of these women had participated in the high councils of the Party and exercised some influence in the new regime, while others had devoted their energies to the task of liberating and mobilizing their less conscious sisters among the workers and peasants. By 1930 the woman-run machinery for liberation - the Zhenotdel - had been dismantled and the woman question was officially considered "resolved." 12 - The Revolution and Women p.392 - Revolutions, after detonating the fiercest explosions, have a way of settling down and yielding up moderate regimes led by men (seldom by women) who are moderate, fearful of extremism and violence, and exhausted by reigns of terror, permanent purges, or cultural revolutions. The Russian revolution, though describing an arc of political terror and repression unparalleled in human annals, was no exception. p.393 - It ought to be noted at once that many Soviet women for nothing whatsoever from the Russian Revolution - and, in all too many cases, nothing but grief, pain, and a terrible death. The Revolution could devour its offspring as readily as it could unshackle them. p.417 - Winning the vote turned out to be a hollow victory for the Western feminists. It did not bring in its wake any large-scale benefits in terms of women's work or professional and educational opportunity, or even much of importance in the way of legal and sexual equality.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-25 00:00:00 Mary Rafe Turns out Russian feminism is just as boring and weak as American feminism. There's little in here that I found useful to my life, which isn't to say that it's bad, but I'm also not any sort of Russian or "feminism" historiographer. It's possibly a good resource for those who are. The one part that did interest me (and I wish there was more of - though it's also beyond the scope of the book) is the shifting narrative around sex and sexuality. Definitely a lot of conservativism by Communism around sex that highlights some key distinctions between big and little c communism.