A Russian Feminist

Anna Filosofova, 1837-1912 

In the 19th century, women’s movements were active in many countries. In Paris, George Sand was strutting about like a dandy in men’s clothing, shocking even the literary elite with her independent behavior. In England and America, suffragettes were beginning to demand the impossible – that women be given the vote. 

All of this was unexpected and shocking. Suffice it to recall the passage in Gone with the Wind, where the doctor felt he did not need to warn Scarlett about drinking when she was pregnant: “Of course, there were unfortunate women who drank, to the eternal disgrace of their families, just as there were women who were insane or divorced or who believed, with Miss Susan B. Anthony, that women should have the vote.  But as much as the doctor disapproved of Scarlett, he never suspected her of drinking.”

Things were no different in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. “The short-haired nihilist girl,” her fingers stained with ink, became a frightening symbol of moral decline. It was staggering, the number of women in terrorist organizations, fomenting peasant rebellions, among wild-eyed revolutionary emigrants and political exiles. It seemed as if it was women – very young women – who wanted more than anyone to turn the world upside down. They would leave their families and enter into fictitious marriages, the only purpose of which was to free them from the authority of their father. They would smear ink on their dresses or throw themselves into the study of the natural sciences, enthusiastically dissecting frogs. They founded communes or refused out of principle to pour tea or extend their hands to be kissed. And they would throw bombs in the name of the coming revolution. 

These scandalous images often obscure our view of other women, who actually did much more for the women’s movement than the shrill hoydens who considered it demeaning to serve tea. 

Anna Pavlovna Filosofova, born 1837, was not ashamed to serve tea, dressed elegantly, and far from cutting off her hair, wore it in an exquisite hairstyle. She did not break with her family – the wealthy noble Diaghilev line, renowned for its erudition, hospitality, extravagant lifestyle, and its warm relations between parents and children. She did not feel that marriage was the enslavement of women and did not advocate for “ménages à trois,” like some of her contemporaries. She proclaimed her husband – a high-level government official by the name of Vladimir Filosofov – to be the finest man on earth. 

Yet none of this prevented Anna Pavlovna from devoting her life to improving the situation of women in Russia. She simply felt that it was more important to begin not by hurling bombs and subverting the foundations of society, but by providing women with the opportunity to earn a living and receive health care and to pursue education that would later allow them to provide health care and an education to others. 

During the 1860s, Filosofova, with her friends Maria Trubnikova and Nadezhda Stasova, founded the Society for Inexpensive Apartments for Working Women. It would seem a small thing, affordable housing, but without it life could be a living hell. The society at first simply found inexpensive apartments for women who were trying to live on what they earned. Later, they built their own house and added a school, a kindergarten, and a dining facility. Filosofova, Trubnikova and Stasova built workshops where they provided jobs to large numbers of women. As a result, many were able to free themselves of family dependencies through simple “economic” means. 

Filosofova’s husband also ran a school for peasants and oversaw the distribution of free books and medicines in villages. And there was a Society to Support Fallen Women and an Artel for Translators and Publishers. 

Later, Filosofova would become a leader in the fight for women’s education – another shocking idea in her time. Conventional wisdom was that young ladies of the upper classes should be able to read and write, speak foreign languages, play an instrument, draw, dance, and manage a household – a “good wife and mother” needed nothing else. But for women who wanted to achieve something, this was not enough; real world knowledge was essential. Yet the idea that young ladies be allowed to attend university lectures was scandalous. Hundreds of men angrily pledged that they would never permit their daughters or sisters – not to mention their wives – to sit on auditorium benches next to strange men and listen to lectures on such subjects as (heaven forbid) anatomy. 

Women who had the means to do so – an elect few – left to study abroad. For the rest, there were few opportunities. So, in 1878 the Bestuzhev Women’s Courses were organized. Anna Filosofova had a hand in this; she fought long and hard for the creation of the courses and followed up by founding the Society for Providing the Means for Women’s Higher Education.

But in parallel with Filosofova’s work, women terrorists continued making their bombs and women propagandists went out into the countryside, ever hopeful of convincing the peasants to rebel and bring tsarism to its knees. Some young women who had gone to Geneva to study medicine left university to study Marx or Bakunin and became proselytizers of socialism. Filosofova, Trubnikova and Stasova published books, founded libraries, and organized artels. Their young protégés, however, increasingly argued for revolution.

So much effort was expended on making women’s education available – why was it that more and more of those who took advantage of it were winding up in forced labor in Siberia, instead of working in schools and hospitals? Filosofova had a hard time understanding this. Another thing she could not grasp was why the authorities (and, alas, not only the authorities) viewed any effort to help women as suspicious and even treasonous. 

In 1908, Vladimir Purishkevich, an infamous member of the Duma (who, eight years later, would take part in the murder of Rasputin), wrote a letter to Filosofova in which he called the recently-concluded First All-Russian Women’s Congress a house of prostitution. Anna Pavlovna, by this time 70 years old, took her accuser to court. He was sentenced to a month in jail. Purishkevich asked Filosofova to forgive him. Anna Pavlovna, who had spent her entire life defending and forgiving people, would not give in on this occasion. After all, the insult had not just been directed against her, but against the entire women’s movement. In the end, the tsar forgave Purishkevich on Filosofova’s behalf – such a slap in the face to thousands of women was evidently not really such a terrible thing.

Anna Pavlovna Filosofova died in 1912 in St. Petersburg. Her funeral did not turn into a demonstration and was in no way politicized. Without fanfare, her relatives lowered the remains of this good woman into the family crypt, to lie next to those of her husband.