page_title: Institute for Noble Maidens
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Institute for Noble Maidens / History / Origins
caption_attribution_description: Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy (1704–1795), Russian public figure, president of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1763–1794)
context_page_description: An Institute for Noble Maidens was a type of educational institution and finishing school in late Imperial Russia. It was devised by Ivan Betskoy as a female-only institution for girls of noble origin. Those were "Closed female institutes of the Office of the Institutions of Empress Maria". The first and most famous of these was the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens in St. Petersburg.
context_section_description: Secondary education for girls and a path to university education for women was extremely limited in Tsarist Russia. One path of educational training for the daughters of the Russian nobility were the Institutes for Noble Maidens (Instituti blagorodnykh devits), cloistered private academies which housed primary and secondary students and offered basic scholastic and cultural training.
  The idea of the Institute for Noble Maidens dated to 1763, when Ivan Betskoy to Empress Catherine the Great a "Statute for the Education of the Youth of Both Sexes," which proposed the education of both sexes in state boarding schools aimed at creating a "new race of men." Boarding schools were to be preferred to other institutions of education in accordance with Rousseau's idea that "isolating the pupils enabled their tutors to protect them from the vices of society."
caption: Ivan Betskoy (1704-1795), originator of the state boarding school concept which evolved into the Institutes for Noble Maidens.
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