Abstract
In 1897, more than 100 years after the first girls’ schools opened in Russia, just 1 percent of the total female population had a completed general secondary education. Seven decades later, 62 percent of the female population aged 16 to 60 had at least an eighth-grade level of education. Over the course of 200 years, from the first girls’ secondary schools in the eighteenth century through the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century and following the mass enrollment campaigns of the twentieth century, the number of women earning secondary education increased in absolute numbers, but especially as a proportion of the total female population. A level of educational attainment that began in the eighteenth century as an exclusive privilege of a tiny elite had become, in just 200 years, an achievement not only available to, but expected of and indeed legally obligated from, every girl in this society3
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Notes
William Johnson, Russia’s Educational Heritage (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press, 1950), 285.
For women’s rights and educational expansion as markers of modernity, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–;1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 62–71
LI. Betskoi, “General’noe ucherezhdenie o vospitanii oboego pola iunoshestva,” in Khrestomatiia po istorii shkoly ipedagogiki Rossii, ed. S.F. Egorov and Sholom Izrailevich Ganelin (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1974), 66–69
Patrick Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), 203
S. Kropotkin, “The Higher Education of Women in Russia,” The Nineteenth Century, 43, 251 (1898): 118.
Praskovia Ivanovskaia, in Five Sisters. Women Against the Tsar, ed. Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford N. Rosenthal (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 98–99
Filippova, “Iz istorii,” 214; A. Gorchakov and I. Komarov, “Sovmestnoe obuchenie,” Shkola i zhizn 10 (1927): 45.
George Z.F. Bereday, et al., eds., The Changing Soviet School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), 186–187.
Vera Ivanovna Malakhova, “Four Years as a Frontline Physician,” in A Revolution of Their Own. Voices of Women in Soviet History, ed. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (Boulder: Westview, 1998), 184.
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© 2010 James C. Albisetti, Joyce Goodman, and Rebecca Rogers
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Ewing, E.T. (2010). From an Exclusive Privilege to a Right and an Obligation: Modern Russia. In: Albisetti, J.C., Goodman, J., Rogers, R. (eds) Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106710_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106710_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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