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section of Gapon’s Assembly of Russian Factory Workers that Vera Karelina organised in St Petersburg. Karelina’s most effective organising tool was a story that she read aloud, describing the humiliating body searches by male personnel that women workers were forced to undergo.46

1905 and after

During the revolution of 1905, women across the social spectrum mobilised in enormous numbers to demand an expansion of political rights and greater social justice. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, pharmacists, professionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autocracy and a representative form of government. Labouring women often participated in the burgeoning strike movement in ways connected to their family roles. In factories where women predominated, the textile industry in particular, strike demands clearly reflected their presence. Factory after factory demanded day care, maternity leave, nursing breaks and protection of women workers. Even as they demonstrated new assertiveness, such demands reinforced a gender division of labour by touching on women’s role as mother and not on their actual working conditions. Peasant women also participated actively in rural unrest primarily in their family roles.47 However, the intense politicisation and pervasive use of a language of rights stimulated other women, primarily the educated, to speak on their own behalf and to claim their place in the expanding public sphere.

Feminist organisations emerged to promote women’s interests. The most significant and the first to try to speak on behalf of all of Russia’s women was the All-Russian Union for Women’s Equality (Women’s Union). The union’s platform, adopted in May 1905, called for the equality of the sexes before the law; equal rights to the land for peasant women; laws providing for the welfare, protection and insurance of women workers; the abolition of regulated prostitution; co-education at all levels of schooling; and women’s suffrage. Although its membership was primarily middle class, the Women’s Union worked to forge alliances across the social divide and encourage lower-class women to speak for themselves, inviting ‘women of the toiling classes’ to

46Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 184–6.

47Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 190–4; Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Women, Men, and the Languages of Peasant Resistance, 1870–1907’, in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 34–53.

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formulate their own demands and pledging to support them.48 Feminists also tried to reach out to peasant women, joining the Peasant Union, and convincing it to adopt the plank of women’s suffrage.49 Feminist efforts to expand their social base bore some fruit. Women domestic servants in Moscow and St Petersburg joined feminist-organised unions; they attended feministsponsored clubs. Women workers added their signatures to petitions favouring women’s suffrage. A number of peasant women’s groups were formed and some petitions signed by peasant men took up the demand for women’s suffrage.

Nevertheless, 1905 brought feminists very little in the way of measurable gains. To be sure, the granting of civil liberties, however limited, allowed more scope for organising. The revolution also marked a watershed in the history of women’s education. The curriculum of women’s higher courses expanded and between 1906 and 1910, new women’s courses opened in many provincial cities. In addition, a number of private co-educational universities were established, offering new curricula and electives. The enrolment of women students increased exponentially: in 1900–1, there were 2,588 women students enrolled in higher education in Russia; by 1915–16, the number was 44,017. Nevertheless, the status of women’s education remained insecure and career options limited, leaving an enormous gap between education and employment opportunities.50

Moreover, the October Manifesto enfranchised only men. The liberal Kadet party divided over the issue of women’s suffrage, while parties to the left, although staunch advocates of women’s rights, were with the exception of the Trudovik party suspicious of and reluctant to support ‘bourgeois feminism’. Further, the evidence suggests that working-class and peasant women felt more affinity with the men of their class than they did with middle-class feminists. Even when feminists succeeded in organising women workers, they had trouble retaining their loyalty. As one feminist lamented, it was relatively easy to establish circles among labouring women, but as soon as their political consciousness was raised, they wanted to work with the men of their class. As a result, the Women’s Union ‘acted as a kind of preparation for party work’.51 The social divisions that weakened opposition to autocracy divided the women’s movement as well. After 1907, membership in the

48GIAgM, Fond 516, op. 1, ed. khr. 5, ll. 45–50.

49L. H. Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1 900–1 91 7 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1984), pp. 38–47.

50Morrissey, Heralds, p. 161.

51GIAgM, Fond 516, op. 1, ed. khr. 5, p. 73. Report of the Third Congress, 22 May 1906.

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women’s movement sharply declined, as it did in radical political parties in general.

In the aftermath of 1905, other issues, especially ‘the sexual question’, absorbed the public’s attention. Commercial culture flourished. Advertisements encouraged women to develop more beautiful busts; they offered cures for sexual troubles; they touted contraceptives. On the back pages of newspapers, ‘models’ boasting ‘attractive bodies’ offered to pose for a fee.52 The ‘new woman’ symbolised the new era. Freed from the constraints of conventional morality, she dominated the imagination of the reading public. The immensely popular boulevard novel, Anastasia Verbitskaia’s The Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi schast’ia, published 1908–13) was one of the bestselling works of the time. The novel addressed women of all classes who felt stifled by societal and professional restraints, and emphasised their right to sexual adventure and professional achievement.53 Non-readers might encounter the ‘new woman’ on the silver screen.

Yet more restrictive ways of regarding women continued, and drew new life from the fears that revolution evoked. This can be seen in the debate over abortion, which Russian law penalised as a form of murder. Supposedly, its incidence had escalated dramatically following the revolution of 1905. Progressive physicians sought, unsuccessfully, to decriminalise the procedure and at professional meetings, women physicians spoke vociferously on behalf of reproductive freedom. Among the most vocal was the feminist physician Maria Pokrovskaia, who denounced Russia’s punitive abortion laws as unwarranted restrictions on female autonomy. Invoking the concept of voluntary motherhood, she claimed that only women were in a position to know their own needs. To proponents of decriminalisation such as she, abortion symbolised women’s autonomy. To others, however, abortion symbolised women’s sexual licence and underscored the dangerous aspects of women’s emancipation. Even those who approved of women’s freedom from legal and career restraints condemned women’s sexual liberation.54

However controversial she might be, by the outbreak of the First World War, the ‘new woman’ had apparently come to stay. She was very much a product of the changes that had swept Russia in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The expansion of women’s education, the growth of the market economy and

52Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-siecle` Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 360.

53Anastasya Verbitskaya, Keys to Happiness, ed. and trans. Beth Holmgren and Helena Goscilo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. xiii.

54Engelstein, Keys, pp. 341–4.

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the increased emphasis on the self and its gratification contributed more to undermining the patriarchal family than had the radical critiques of the 1860s. Significantly, wifehood and motherhood played a minimal role in the womanrelated discourse of the early twentieth century, although those themes gained more prominence following 1905. Yet the ‘new woman’ remained a minority phenomenon, swimming against a conservative tide. Patriarchal relations continued to serve as both metaphor and model for Russia’s political order, upheld by the law and by the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast majority of Russia’s population. Wifehood and motherhood, not the pleasures and freedoms of new womanhood, remained the aspiration of countless numbers of Russia’s women. Although the nature of social divides had changed, they remained almost as unbridgeable on the eve of the First World War as they had been 200 years before.

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