For those of a certain age who remember Chris Tarrant’s Who wants to be a millionaire?’, there was a moment when the contestant had reached the million dollar question which was: What was the composer Borodin’s profession? To me, that was easy. He was a chemist in St Petersburg. Being a composer was very much a part-time occupation, although he wrote some wonderful pieces, ranging from the thumping beat of the Polovstian dances to more reflective music, such as representing a camel train In the Steppes of Central Asia. He met his pianist wife Ekaterina during his studies in Heidelberg, when she was there recovering from tuberculosis. She alerted him to the problematic situation of women’s education in Russia and in due course he followed this up: certain that women would make excellent doctors, Borodin became one of the founders of the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg. To this day, women make up an unusually high proportion of the doctors in Russia.
So, what was the situation for women in mid-late nineteenth century Russia? In the 1860’s there was a spirit of radicalism in the air. Tsar Alexander II enacted the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of domestic serfs. This encouraged the Russian intelligentsia to think the time was ripe for more progress, including for women’s education. Turgenev referred to these people as nihilists. They believed strongly in the natural sciences as relevant to progress and the power of education including for women. Science to these people was a way of improving wider society, pushing back the barriers of religion and superstition.
The Government was aware that, to the radical element, science was equated with progress, but they also knew they had to expand science education since there was a great need for technical experts. Recognizing this, they sent many men abroad to study science in German and Swiss universities, including the chemists Dmitri Mendeleev and Vladimir Markovnikov – and Borodin.
Meanwhile back in St Petersburg in the early 1860s, women were allowed into lectures as ‘unofficial auditors’, welcomed by the professors and tolerated by officialdom. The St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy began to admit women to their courses, unofficially, although they could not obtain degrees. Two key figures were Nadezhda Suslova and Maria Obrucheva (Sechnova upon marriage), who were both closely linked to radical groups. They served to attract other women over the next couple of years, believing the future was opening up for all of them. It was hoped that the ongoing revision of University statutes would formally admit women to all universities in Russia, with the same rights as men. However, the Tsarist Government quashed this plan and by 1864 all universities had clamped down on women’s attendance once more.
As a consequence of this, the most determined women who had sufficient financial resources, left Russia to study abroad, mostly to Zurich, but also Heidelberg and Leipzig, where foreigners could be admitted to the University without formal qualifications (the attestat obtained in the gymnasia). Suslova obtained a medical degree from Zurich in 1867, the first Russian woman to do so and was subsequently allowed to practice in Russia. Many women followed her in obtaining medical qualifications, and by the 1880s Russia had more licensed women physicians than anywhere else in Europe. Another notable first was Sofya Kovalevskya, who studied in Heidelberg and Berlin and, in 1874, was the first nineteenth century woman anywhere to obtain a mathematics doctorate, in this case from Gottingen.
However, the number of women studying in Zurich did not please the authorities back home, and a proclamation was made stating that any women who remained there after New Year 1874 would be barred from ever being hired by the Government, or studying in the future in any Russian institute of higher education or taking qualifying exams there. Some returned home, but others stuck it out and gained degrees and good careers, despite continuing to be harassed.
But the Government could not ignore the pressure to permit women to study medicine, and by 1872 a course in obstetrics for women was initiated in St Petersburg, leading to a qualification as a ‘learned midwife’, and this was where Borodin came in. He was active in the administrative activities of the Medico-Surgical Academy and, together with a number of colleagues, he helped found this first medical course for women. This quickly became a course of higher medical education for women, with Borodin devoting considerable time to both the administration of the school and to teaching.
However, after the then Tsar was killed in a bombing, he was succeeded by the highly reactionary Alexander III. Under Alexander III the Medico-Surgical Academy was renamed the Military Medical Academy and placed under the control of the Ministry of War. This ministry refused to allow the use of the military hospital as an academic base for the women’s medical courses. For the next three years, 1882-1885, Borodin and others were able to restructure the course under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, but thereafter it too was closed by the authorities, greatly affecting Borodin who was said to have burst into tears.
When finally courses for women were reopened, they were mainly steered towards courses in languages or art. The Government clearly felt the association between the natural sciences and medicine and progressive thought was too dangerous to be permitted. Thereafter there was a long period before the situation improved. The short couple of decades when there was a brief flowering of higher education for women in the sciences coincided with a rich period of science for men in Russia too. Borodin was not one of those leaders of science himself, but he was a keen supporter of the women, and for this he was much appreciated. When he died in 1887 his women students had a silver plate inscribed on his burial casket with the words: “To the Founder, Protector and Defender of the School of Medicine for Women.”
Source Material for this post mainly came from:
Ann Hibner Koblitz, Science, Women and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of the 1860s in History of Women in the Sciences, ed Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, University of Chicago Press 1999
And Medicine, molecules and music: Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) – surgeon, scientist, composer, educator, women’s rights advocate, Broadway award winner, Brooklyn Transplant blog by Stephen Keller, September 26 2014
