How Mendeleev, his friends and the abolition of serfdom gave Russia many women scientists

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Researchers on the issues of higher education for women are unanimous in their conclusions: young ladies from the Russian Empire have paved a wide path for the women of the world in this area. They came to European universities so well prepared that many professors found it foolish not to let them graduate. But who trained girls at a time when in Russia itself they were not yet admitted to general universities?

Clandestine schools in Poland

In Poland, which in the nineteenth century was part of the Russian Empire, a real network of clandestine schools was organized. A certain number of teachers in it were loving brothers and cousins of the students, and some of the teachers were self-taught young ladies who managed to overcome this or that science from books. These first illegal professors trained yesterday's high school students, preparing them without fail for the best universities in Europe - and the newly trained students, before leaving, helped prepare other girls. She studied at an underground school, for example, Maria Sklodowska, who later became famous under the name of her husband - Curie.

Although we are talking about schools and preparation for universities, in fact, the program of the first or second year was often passed there, so that upon admission it was impossible to overwhelm the applicant honestly or so that she could finish the university as soon as possible, as an external student - life and study abroad were very expensive pleasure. Three clandestine universities, which were preparing to receive a doctorate abroad, were called together the "Flying University".

Externally, thanks to excellent preparation, universities were skipping past, not only students of underground Polish schools. This was done, for example, by Nadezhda Suslova, the first Russian woman doctor. When she was a girl, she asked permission to attend lectures at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. Not all professors were ready to see the girl at their lectures, but the famous doctors Ivan Sechenov, Sergey Botkin and Ventslav Grubber, remembering what Pirogov said about women in medicine (and Pirogov, as you know, organized the training and service of sisters of mercy during the Crimean War), not only allowed Suslova to their classes, but were always ready to explain unclear places to her.

It was because of the precedent with these three professors that the Ministry of Education conducted a survey in 1863: is it possible for a woman to receive a higher education and a diploma on receiving it? Only two universities, Kiev and Kharkov, responded completely positively (Ukraine was also part of the Russian Empire at that time). The rest of the major universities were in varying degrees against, although, as it turned out later, there were progressives there too.

Returning to the underground schools - when in Russia it was finally allowed to open higher courses in several cities, of all the professors who volunteered to open such courses in their city, they strictly refused to the Warsaw and Kharkov ones - most of all, in the face of female students, the Russian government feared terrorists- separatists and, apparently, in these two cities, the girls in their moods seemed especially suspicious. As a result, Poland's underground schools in Warsaw grew into university professors, along with graduate and undergraduate students who already worked there.

Bestuzhevka and all-all-all

When, finally, higher courses for women were allowed and earned in many different cities - in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Kazan, Tomsk - they immediately took the lead not only in the field of women's education in general, but also among other universities, went to teach real luminaries. Since girls were allowed to study, by government decree, only for a fee, and professors also received salaries, one could suspect the luminaries of self-interest, but …

In practice, what the teachers received precisely in the women's courses, they, knowing that, unlike most young students, these girls are not supported by anyone, that they often came to distant lands, that at best their dinner (the only meal !) for many consists of tea and a piece of bread - they gave their salaries from women's courses for the purchase of educational materials, the organization of a cheap cafeteria, scholarships for the most needy and gifted students, even for their treatment. The most active donors were, I must say, the professors in Kazan. And they taught the girls, too, not carelessly. Many graduates of women's courses, starting with the famous Bestuzhevsky, then entered the history of science.

Who were these teachers, whose names should have been inscribed in golden letters in the history of education? We all know them from the history of science. Chemist Dmitry Mendeleev. Physiologist Ivan Sechenov. Poet Inokenty Annensky. Young then linguist Lev Shcherba. Physicist Peter Fan der Fleet. Historian Vladimir Gerje. Mycologist Nikolay Sorokin. Ethnographer Nikolai Firsov. Historian Nikolai Osokin. In the courses taught by these prominent scientists, the girls mastered many purely scientific professions and then went to geologists, physicists, chemists, doctors, astronomers, and ethnographers.

But in Finland (which at that time was also part of the empire) they did much easier: instead of organizing separate courses for women, they were given access to the Imperial Alexander (Helsingfors) University, exactly as they had already done by that time (thanks to the pressure of Russian students) in other universities in Europe. However, at that time, the university did not seem to shine in anything special, so there was no queue of young ladies at it. If hundreds of girls studied in women's universities, here - a couple of dozen girls. Or the young ladies were afraid of male students.

Money question

The problem with graduate courses was that even in the best girls' schools, the situation with the study of basic subjects was deplorable. Konstantin Ushinsky did a lot to break it. He resented the fact that girls were being prepared or served as home decorations, or as walking household utensils, ignoring their minds and personalities. True, he himself also believed in a woman's destiny, only he treated him more romantic: they say, every science and every pedagogy should begin with a woman teacher. Who better than a woman can teach children? However, for his time this was also a revolutionary concept: after all, it was believed that a woman in general could not teach children, only take care of them.

Of course, women were primarily concerned about women's education - men organized it only because at that time only they had the necessary level of knowledge of the sciences, the organization of the process. Among the activists in higher education was Evgenia Konradi, a writer and translator, who raised the issue of opening courses for women wherever possible.

In May 1868, the rector of St. Petersburg University Karl Kessler received applications from 400 women with a request to arrange "lectures or courses for women." About a hundred of these women were of the highest circle, and the main activists were, in addition to Konradi, the well-known public figures of that time Nadezhda Stasova, Maria Trubnikova and Anna Filosofova. They took the chemist Nikolai Beketov as their allies.

While the government was deciding whether to admit women to science, students, graduate students and school teachers lectured at home meetings - not as systematically as the Poles, but with no less enthusiasm, which was later recalled by the famous student of Ushinsky Vodovozov. So, on Sundays, a gymnasium teacher, an old friend of Mendeleev, Kraevich, read physics for girls and women. Mendeleev himself was engaged informally with the girls even before the courses were opened.

It must be said that there was an economic and historical basis under the decisiveness of the Russian students who were storming the strongholds of knowledge. Historically, in the Russian Empire, a woman generally had more rights than in many Catholic countries - for example, her dowry remained her property even after marriage, and even the last peasant woman went to court, discovering that her husband had spent on drink or ruined the dowry. This despite the fact that the Russian peasant woman dutifully endured the most severe beatings and humiliation! The dowry was considered something inviolable.

Economically, in connection with the abolition of serfdom in 1861, many girls and women found themselves in a situation where they were either expelled by their distant relatives who had previously supported them, or the contribution of each adult member was required to support the family. The girls went to the city for decent earnings for their origin (for example, they began to massively replace clerks in fashionable ateliers and large stores) and joined the youth circles, where the issue of women's rights, including education, was constantly discussed.

Some girls went right away for education, and families did not interfere - they say, maybe in the city they will at least find a husband, a student, out of their parents' neck. Some girls, on the contrary, first marched fictitiously for students in order to escape from the house, which no longer promised a carefree life and change life to a more meaningful one. Both of them had to almost from scratch, with only French and etiquette behind them, to catch up with the boys who had finished at the gymnasiums in order to enter new worlds - the world of astronomy, history, mathematics, chemistry, medicine … And they did it.

Non-acidic young ladies: Why Europe and Russia were shaking from Russian students in the 19th century.