page_title: Women in Russia
section_title: 1850 to 1917
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Russia / 1850 to 1917
caption_attribution_description: Anna Pavlovna Filosovova
context_page_description: Women in Russian society have a rich and varied history during numerous regimes throughout the centuries. It is important to note that since Russia is a multicultural society, the experiences of women in Russia vary significantly across ethnic, racial, religious, and social lines. The life of an ethnic Russian woman can be dramatically different from the life of a Bashkir, Chechen, or Yakuts woman; just as the life of a woman from a lower-class rural family can be different from the life of a woman from an upper-middle-class urban family. Nevertheless, a common historical and political context provides a room for speaking about women in Russia in general.
context_section_description: By the mid-nineteenth century, European notions of equality were starting to take hold in Russia. In 1859 St. Petersburg University allowed women to audit its courses, but the policy was revoked just four years later. In the 1860s a feminist movement began to coalesce in St. Petersburg. It was led by Anna Filosofova, Nadezhda Stasova, and Mariia Trubnikova, who together were known as the "triumvirate." Along with members of the St Petersburg literati, such as Evgenia Konradi, they petitioned universities to educate women and wrote to prominent male figures to support their cause. This group also founded organizations to help unattached women become financially self-sufficient, and in 1878 they created the Bestuzhev Courses, which for the first time gave Russia's women reliable access to higher education. By the early 1900s Russia boasted more female doctors, lawyers, and teachers than almost any country in Europe—a fact noted with admiration by many foreign visitors. However, most of these educational benefits were being reaped by urban women from the middle and upper classes. While literacy rates were slowly spreading throughout the country, educational and other opportunities for peasant women were still relatively few.
  In 1910, Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, the first female gynecologist in Russia, became president of the Russian League for Women's Rights. The League made universal women's suffrage its primary goal, and under Shishkina-Iavein's leadership the women's suffrage movement gained a great deal of popular support, both in Russia and abroad. In March 1917, the Provisional Government, which had replaced Nicholas II's autocracy, granted Russia's women the right to vote and hold political office. It was the first such reform enacted by a major political power.
caption: Anna Filosofova
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