Beginning with the year 1860, women began to appear in the lecture rooms of Russian universities. The attitude of universities to the presence of women within their walls was not always the same, but their attendance was generally discouraged. Finally, a lack of social and political discretion and tact on the part of some women legally closed the university doors to all, and Russian women were forced to seek higher education abroad. A movement was started at home in favor of establishing schools of higher learning for women, and resulted in the so-called "higher courses for women" in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kasan, Kief, and Odessa, which were conducted by the university professors of those cities. The "courses" were not uniformly successful. Those of Saint Petersburg have shown the greatest strength and vitality, having been conducted with skill and having met with strong moral and financial support on the part of Russian society. Professional schools for women, medical schools, normal schools, and the like, have had a more uniformly successful career. The status of education for woman is not so advanced in Russia as it is in some countries, but the future is promising.
About the time of the emancipation of Russian peasants by Alexander II. (1855-1881), Marko-Vovchok (Maria Alexandrovna Markovich) attracted much attention by her stories picturing Russian life and advocating the liberation of the serfs. Among the large number of Russian women who have acquired reputation in Russian literature, special mention should be made of Khvoshchinskaya. She received a fine preparatory training at home; then in 1867 she began to study law in German universities, and took her doctor's diploma in Leipzig. She spent several years studying the Common Law of the Southern Slavs, and made several original contributions to legal literature. In 1885 she began to publish a magazine, Severnyi Vestnih (The Northern Messenger), which had many women among its contributors. It remained five years under her editorial management.
During the nineteenth century many Russian women distinguished themselves in the field of arts and science. Madame Kochetova may be mentioned as one of the many gifted actresses. Madame Esipova has acquired a world-wide reputation as a pianist. Marie Bashkirtseva found her way to the French Salon, and left to the public a diary vividly picturing her striking individuality. Born in Southern Russia, Mademoiselle Bashkirtseva, when ten years old, settled with her family in Nice. She began at an early age to show her gifted nature, her love of knowledge and her lofty ambition. When only thirteen, she made out a programme of her studies, in which were included mathematics, physics, chemistry, Greek, and Latin. She spoke English, German, and Italian from her childhood days. French was the language in which she did her thinking and writing. She, too, was an enthusiastic student of music. In 1877, Mademoiselle Bashkirtseva settled in Paris and began to study painting. After eleven months' work she received, at a general competition in her school, a gold medal awarded by Robert-Fleury, Bouguereau, Lefevre, and others. In 1880, when twenty years of age, her first picture, A Young Woman Reading 'La Question du Divorce' by Alexandre Dumas, was admitted to the Salon. Her next picture in the Salon, Julian's Studies, was spoken of by the Parisian press as a work full of life, with firm touch and warm coloring. Two years later her Jean et Jacques, representing two little schoolboys from the poorer class of the Parisian population, attracted general attention and was very highly praised by the press: the picture showed the artist's power, boldness, and fine insight into the realities of life. In 1884 the Meeting of Mademoiselle Bashkirtseva occupied the leading place in the Salon, owing to its excellent delineation of figures, fine presentation of types, and correctness of detail. That same year the young artist died of consumption. An exhibition of her pictures made by the society of French woman artists exhibited the great variety and productiveness of her talent. Mademoiselle Bashkirtseva left about one hundred and fifty pictures, sketches, and drawings. Some unfinished studies in sculpture showed her great talent in that direction also. Her numerous sketches manifest her warm love of humanity and the great depth of her powerful talent. The French government purchased the best of Mademoiselle Bashkirtseva's pictures for a national collection, while the public throughout the civilized world have read in an abridgment of the artist's diary the story of her life and of her struggle with worldly temptations and vanities.
The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the death of a prominent Russian mathematician, Sofia Vasilievna Kovalevskaya. She, too, received her preparatory training at home, from foreign governesses and private tutors, and early showed a taste for mathematics. Her conservative parents would not allow her to continue her studies away from home, and in order to obtain her freedom, she married early and went abroad to study her favorite subject. For two years she attended lectures on mathematical subjects in Heidelberg, studied in Berlin under Weierstrass, and, in 1874, at twenty-four years of age, took her doctor's degree at Gottingen. Seven years later, Madame Kovalevskaya was elected a member of the Moscow mathematical society. In 1884, after her husband's death, she received the chair of mathematics at the University of Stockholm. She soon mastered the Swedish language, and began to publish her mathematical works and contributions to literature in that language. In 1888, the Paris Academy of Science awarded to Madame Kovalevskaya a prize of five thousand francs for her work on the rotation of a solid body around a stationary point. In the following year she won fifteen hundred crowns from the Academy of Stockholm by a similar work. In 1889, two years before her death, she was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Saint Petersburg.
But mathematics was not the only accomplishment of Madame Kovalevskaya. She was a woman of great depth of feeling and of keen observation, and possessed, in a high degree, the ability to picture her inner life in literary and artistic form. Her personal life did not give her all she expected from it, and in her Struggle for Happiness: Two Parallel Dramas, she tried to present the fate of a person from two opposite points of view, how it was and how it might have been. She was a strong believer in predestination, but at the same time she admitted in human life the existence of moments when alternatives are presented, the choice of which will shape human life in accordance with the path taken: she saw a parallel to her theory in Poincare's work on differential equations. Madame Kovalevskaya's literary career had just begun to develop and her contributions to magazines to be universally admired when pneumonia put an end to her work and to her abundant promise.
The field of the Russian woman's activity is as wide as it is in western Europe or in America. In some respects there is in Russia less prejudice against woman's adopting a professional career than is found in more civilized countries. Women compose the ranks of the teachers in the public schools throughout Russia. There are many women physicians and registered minor medical practitioners and trained nurses whose services are particularly valuable to the Mohammedan female population. Many a Russian woman wears the uniform of the government telegraph operator. She has legal right to practise law. She takes part in local government on the same level as men when there is no one to represent her interests. She has won her position by her energy and talents as well as by her moderation, tact, deep earnestness, unselfishness, and readiness to sacrifice herself for the welfare of her fellow men and women.
In Russia there are several business firms conducted wholly by women. They once startled the former famous minister of finance, Witte, by sending him a petition requesting him to allow them to do business on their own account in the stock exchange instead of employing brokers. The minister asked for time to consider the petition.
The change which has taken place in the condition of the woman of the well-to-do classes during the last two hundred years has not affected the most numerous class of the Russian population, the peasant woman. For years, while special schools were being founded for the daughters of the noble, the merchant, and the burgher families, she bore with her husband and family the yoke of servitude, at times degrading and intolerable, was the lord's property, body and soul, was worked like a domestic animal, sometimes sold away from her family and otherwise abused. When the emancipation came with the imperial decree of February 19, 1861, she began to breathe more freely. Now the elementary education, at least, is accessible to her, and when means allow there is nothing to keep her from obtaining the highest education to be had in the country. Even in her modest station throughout the centuries the peasant woman has not remained intellectually inactive. When students of Russian literature became interested in the national folklore and began to collect it, they found a large number of peasant women in the northern provinces of Russia who possessed astonishing memories and who dictated one long epic poem after another to the collectors. These female Homers took pride in their accomplishment and were highly respected for it in their neighborhoods. While the chief merit of these poem singers lies in their highly retentive memory, women singers of another type, the professional mourners at funerals, display creative genius in composing and improvising songs. The names of peasant women who composed some of the most popular Russian songs are known, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century one of them was living in a western province of Russia. In vocalization Russian women have few equals among their class, both in civilized and uncivilized countries, this owing to the richness and vigor of their voices, to the characteristic fondness for music, and to the beauty of the national music. Women sing their babies to sleep, sing at social gatherings in and out of doors, sing while spinning and weaving, going to work and returning from it.
