Women first entered Russian universities as early as in 1859. Four university centres, including in St. Petersburg and Kiev, expressed their support for women’s education, allowing them to attend classes as external ‘free students’, i.e. not officially enrolled. While these changes did not lead to equal rights for men and women in the area of education—a right which women activists would continue struggle for throughout subsequent decades—they constituted a first step in the formation of the multi-layered system of women’s education which was in place prior to the 1917 revolution. […]

Russian women became one of the first to achieve full voting rights, and the Soviet Constitution of 1918 fully and finally confirmed women’s rights to study at all levels of the educational system. The Labour Code of 1918 guaranteed women a 16-week maternity leave and a premium for breast- feeding, but most important of all it guaranteed equal wages for equal work. […]

These and other events which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century led Irina Yukina to posit the thesis that the pre-revolutionary activities of women were fully successful. […]

The rebirth of feminism in the conditions of Soviet reality began in 1979. […] This article presents a short history of the origin and creation of the Almanac “Women and Russia,” which began as a samizdat underground publication devoted to the problem of women and childrearing in the USSR. […] The women writers featured in the first edition of the Almanac […] exposed the consequences for women living and functioning in a patriarchal social order, and ironically one where all the questions concerning ‘women’s rights’ were deemed to have been resolved in a progressive fashion much earlier.

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photo { Paul Kwiatkowski }

flashback | October 2nd, 2014