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344 MIROVICH, pseudonym for Zinaida Sergeevna Ivanova (1865–1913) Russian feminist activist, historian, critic, writer and translator; one of the founders (February 1905) of the Soiuz Ravnopraviia Zhenshchin (Women’s Equal Rights Union). Participated in International Council of Women (ICW) and International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) Congresses. Used the pseudonyms ‘N. Mirovich’ and ‘Zinaida Mirovich.’ Zinaida Ivanova, who was born in 1865, grew up in Moscow, the daughter of a Moscow Superintendent of Schools. Further information about her parents is not available. Like many other feminist activists, she was part of the newly emerging but small female intelligentsia. She took advantage of newly available higher education opportunities for women, graduating from Moscow’s Guerrier Higher Courses for Women (which provided women with a liberal education) in 1897. Soon after graduation, she married and began to participate in the activities of the Moskovskaia Kommissiia po Organizatsii Domashnego Chteniia (Moscow Commission on the Organization of Home Reading), also working as a freelance writer and translator (which were among the few career opportunities for educated women in this period). Sometimes using the male pseudonym ‘N. Mirovich,’ or at times ‘Zinaida Mirovich,’ she wrote on topics related to the zhenskii vopros or ‘the woman question,’ especially with reference to the French Revolution. She wrote about Madame Roland and St. Just. Her interest in the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen led her to translate his best known plays. At the end of the nineteenth century, when she was unable to publish articles about the French Revolution, she turned to publicist writing and lecturing, speaking for example in Moscow and in several provincial towns on British feminism. Fluent in six languages (English, French, German, Norwegian, Finnish and Russian) and a seasoned world traveler, she attended several international women’s gatherings, including the 1899 Congress of the International Council of Women (ICW) in London. She also reported on the Russian women’s movement to the congresses of the more militant International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) (Berlin, 1904; Copenhagen, 1906). An Anglophile, she spent a great deal of time in England, spoke on several occasions at suffrage rallies in Hyde Park and translated John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women into Russian. 345 When the granting of women’s political rights became a possibility during the 1905 Revolution, Mirovich was among the founders (in February 1905) of the Soiuz Ravnopraviia Zhenshchin (Women’s Equal Rights Union) in Moscow. She spoke at the Soiuz’s First Organizational Congress in Moscow (May 1905), attended subsequent Soiuz congresses, lectured, wrote in favor of equal rights and suffrage and continued to publish—translating a message from newly enfranchised white Australian women into Russian at the IWSA Congress in Copenhagen (1906). In 1908, she compiled an invaluable overview of historical sources for the Russian feminist movement, Iz Istorii Zhenskogo Dvizheniia v Rossii (From the history of the women’s movement in Russia). At the 1908 Women’s Congress in St Petersburg, the largest such gathering in prerevolutionary Russia, Mirovich was among the more militant feminists, advocating tactics similar to those of English suffragists (like her close friends the Pankhursts) and arguing for women’s unity across party lines. Mirovich continued her feminist activity in the years of repression after the 1905 Revolution and, after the Soiuz dissolved in 1908, joined other activists such as Mariia Chekhova and Olga Bervi-Kaidanova in the Liga Ravnopraviia Zhenshchin (League for Women’s Equal Rights). She spoke at the Liga’s 1912 Congress on Women’s Education and continued to attend international feminist congresses, such as the IWSA Congress in Stockholm in 1911. She also continued her translation work and, in 1912, published the memoirs of Countess Shauzel-Guff’e, which described the court of Tsar Alexander I. Her last years were marred by a dispute with Mariia Raikh who was, along with Mirovich, a delegate to the 1911 Stockholm Congress. Raikh charged Mirovich with anti-Semitism, an accusation backed by the Board of the Moscow Liga. Mirovich hotly disputed Raikh’s charge and resigned from the Liga, causing a split which seriously weakened the organization. Mirovich never regained her standing among Russian feminists in Russia, although she continued to maintain close contacts with British feminists until her death on 24 August 1913. She died in Vladykino, near Moscow. In his tribute to her, A. A. Kizevetter praised Mirovich for her integrity, her courage in expressing her beliefs, her idealism, her commitment to democratizing education and for strengthening the connections between the Russian women’s movement...

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