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| WOMEN
IN RUSSIAN HISTORY 4 |
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The struggle for women's emancipation in the beginning and middle of the
l9th
century was all the more complicated in that the dominant stereotype saw
woman only as
faithful friend to man, and as mother and upbringer of children. Anything
women did outside the customary framework of the family met with sharp
social
displeasure. The intelligentsia distrusted women professional writers,
poets, and translators. Even such a progressive critic and publicist as
Belinsky considered that while women should be educated and should follow
developments in literature and science, they should not themselves become
writers, but use their education for the good of the family.
The beginning of the l860's saw a turning point in society's awareness
of the so-called "woman question." In l860 the journal "Sovremmenik"
[Contemporary] published an article by Mikhailov entitled "Women, their
Upbringing and Significance in the Family and Society." For the first time
in Russia, it publicly broached the subject of equal rights for women. At
about the same time the Russian publicist Pisarov also addressed the
question
of women's equal rights. His pithy phrase, "women are not to blame for
anything" became a motto in several strata of enlightened Russian society.
Quite often, women's freedom was seen as freedom from
marital ties,
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and the extreme expression of this idea was the complete rejection of family and
marriage, articulated by Nechaev in his "Catechism of a Revolutionary."
Some
women did in fact sever family ties to protest the debauchery of men.
Alexander Herzen observed that some of these women became unruly rather than
truly liberated. There developed a whole stratum of women who viewed
marriage as an amusing pastime of idle people. A few became hardened,
unfeeling "blue stockings" who despised those in love, for which they felt
no
need. The reasonable intelligent reformist idea of spouses equal rights was
most clearly expressed in the writings of Dmitri Pisarev and Nikolai
Chernyshevsky. They saw woman as in all ways equal to man: she was a
comrade
in work, and a friend, and mother and upbringer of children. Chernyshevsky
went further, recognizing woman's right to free love. …
In the l9th century quite a few young women who wanted to study but did
not have the consent of parents, made fictitious marriages, a measure of
desperation. … Such marriages became rather widespread and led to an erosion
of the family on the one hand, and on the other to a lowering of the very
ideal of the family, and thirdly, to a lowering of the principles of
morality
in society itself. For this reason, the great Russian writers, Nikolai
Leskov, Fedor Dostoveysky and Lev Tolstoy, spoke out against fictitious
marriages, and the Russian Orthodox Church actively fought against them.
The problems of family and marriage became in the l9th century a
subject
of sharp arguments, wherein even some wellknown Russian philosophers
participated. The discussion was initiated by Tolstoy, who was considered
an
apologist for the family and childbirth, and indeed this theme runs through
his novels and stories. Hence the great resonance of his "Kreutzer
Sonata"[written at the end of his life] which is in essence a rejection of
the sanctity of marriage, sexual relations, and childbirth. … In his
introduction to the story, Tolstoy declares that Christian marriage does not
exist and never has existed - that there is nothing in the Bible about it.
Church marriage was invented by churchmen and has nothing Christian about
it,
he said. The only true Christian ideal is complete chastity, especially in
marriage. If a man does get married, he should strive toward the ideal and
live with his wife as he would with a sister.
There were sharp polemics between such prominent philosophers and
publicists as Rozanov and Berdyaev. Rozanov was then considered the
"leading
light" of the whole marriage question, on which he had written a lot. For
him, sex was not an organ and not a function, but something at once
spiritual
and physical. It was a gift from God and should be treasured. Conception
was the culminating moment of sex and its "radiance" is at once the essence
of marriage and its basis. … There were ongoing wide-ranging discussions in the press on family and
marriage that drew in virtually all strata of the Russian intelligentsia of
that time. And passionate arguments went on in the religious-philosophical
gatherings that took place in St. Petersburg. These gatherings discussed the question of the place and role of women
in society. The group saw her primary place as in the family, a Christian
family raising children in a spirit of love and actively doing good. A
woman
saves herself and her husband by selflessly serving those closest to her,
meaning God as well.
This position of selfless heroic service was supported by quite a few
of
the Russian intelligentsia women of the late l9th century. For many of them
faith was a purely personal and secret matter of one's soul and conscience,
and their milieu brought forth heroines of devotion and nurses, all guided
by
love and compassion for fellow human beings. They tended the sick and
wounded, set up homes for the aged and orphaned. Their communities formed
all over Russia in the l9th century, with many of them in Moscow and St.
Petersburg.
The nurses of the community associated with the Pokrov Cathedral in
Rubtsov worked in the toughest wards of several city hospitals for the poor.
They continuously looked after the patients in the Moscow Troitsky home for
the incurable. Free of charge they treated the sick in the nearby working
class quarters of the city. Their community lasted until l923 when the
sisters were evicted from the cloister, their food ration cards and all
citizen rights taken away from them, and they were obliged to beg outside
their cathedral. The Marfo-Marinsky cloister was the last sisters-of-mercy community
established in Moscow before the l9l7 revolution, and its history is
especially interesting. It was founded by the Princess Elizaveta Fedorovna,
widow of the governor-general of Moscow, Grand Prince Sergei Alexandrovich,
who was assassinated by the Social Revolutionary Party member, Kaliaev.
Deeply religious, Elizaveta Fedorovna asked that her beloved husband's
murderer not be punished, and she spent the rest of her life fervently
serving those who were down and out. She and her fellow sisters worked in
the poorest slum districts of Moscow and founded one of the best hospitals
of
that time, and a shelter for orphans, and they also worked on the
battlefronts. Their community existed until l928 when some went to prison
and others were sent to Soviet Central Asia, where many died of emaciation
or
ended in Stalin's torture chambers. Elizaveta Fedorovna herself and two
other sisters were first exiled to Perm and then to a small Urals village.
In July l9l8 she was executed along with five members of the extended
Romanov
family . In l990 the Russian Orthodox Church and people dedicated to Elizaveta Fedorovna a
monument in white marble which recalls for us the hundreds of simple
selfless
Russian women who died for their faith and convictions.
Maria Kotovskaya
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