Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917

Chapter1

1 The Meaning of Equality Without the Participation of Women, Suffrage Is Not Universal. —March , , demonstration banner M , , was a pleasant late-winter day in Petrograd.₁ The writer Zinaida Gippius looked out from her apartment in the center of revolutionary Petrograd, watching thousands of women march below, “a countless number; an unprecedented procession (never before in history . . . ). Three [women], very beautiful, rode by on horseback.”² The journalist Liubov Gurevich similarly described “an endless orderly column, with red banners unfurled and placards: thousands , tens of thousands of women, . . . factory workers and women doctors, medics and writers, maids and students, telegraph operators and nurses.” At the head, in an open car, rode the revolutionary heroine Vera Figner and the feminist leader Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, flanked by “Amazons” on white horses. Two brass bands played “La Marseillaise.” An estimated forty thousand people marched. Many carried banners and placards with such slogans as “Hail Women-Fighters for Freedom,” “A Place for Women in the Constituent Assembly,” “Women Workers Demand a Voice in the Constituent Assembly,” “Raise the Allowance for 1 Soldiers’ Wives,” and “Without the Participation of Women, Suffrage Is Not Universal .” To Gurevich, like Gippius, the march was unforgettable, “an unprecedented , unparalleled sight” for the people of Petrograd.³ Yet this foray by women into the revolutionary public space has been almost completely forgotten, or, if remembered, ascribed to the wrong date or considered to have had “a disappointing, if not wholly unsuccessful, outcome.”⁴ In fact, the marchers won their chief demand that very evening. To cement their achievement , two days later, leading feminist activists met with the head of the revolutionary Provisional Government, Prime Minister G. E. L’vov. The prime minister reaffirmed the commitment to women’s suffrage he had made to the demonstrators on March . On July , , with the publication of its new election statute, Russia, the largest country in the world, became the first major power to grant women the vote.₅ The March events in Petrograd marked the second time that a significant women’s suffrage victory had taken place in lands controlled by the Russian government. Eleven years earlier, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then a part of the Russian Empire, women had won both universal suffrage and the right to hold elective office.₆ These major achievements have been largely ignored. Historians of global feminism generally portray the first women’s suffrage victories as happening in or connected to the West. Women’s suffrage history has mostly focused on the English-speaking countries, more precisely Britain and its former colonies. From this vantage point, early suffrage gains were won “in nations most similar to England .” Those preferring a more global context largely argue that women’s suffrage first came to states and nations on the periphery, far from the centers of Western power, but with strong connections to the West, such as New Zealand, Australia, or Finland.⁷ As part of the West or as part of the rest, Russia is rarely discussed. Yet the history of women’s suffrage in the Russian Empire provides a model for a different form of struggle for women’s rights. Women’s suffrage in this case was not won through a long struggle within an evolving democratic structure, but through a much shorter process ignited and facilitated by popular revolution within a decidedly undemocratic multinational state. Historians of Russia and the Soviet Union have also paid little attention to the early attainment of Russian women’s suffrage. The reasons for this are varied, from failure to incorporate gender into notions of what is historically significant to the remarkable staying power of the orthodox Marxist argument that women’s suffrage was meaningless to peasant and working women, since feminism was ostensibly a “bourgeois” movement with only “liberal” goals. If acknowledged at all, 2 THE MEANING OF EQUALITY the Provisional Government’s  law on female suffrage is mentioned in passing without reference to the global context. Russia’s women’s rights movement is portrayed as narrow for devoting most of its energies to suffrage, “weak” and lacking militance compared with its Western counterparts.⁸ In this book I challenge both the standard women’s and Russian historical narratives of this movement. The suffrage achievements of women in the Russian Empire do not fit the existing women’s history paradigms. At the turn...