Christine Ruane examines the issues of gender and class in the teaching profession of late imperial Russia, at a time when the vocation was becoming increasingly feminized in a zealously patriarchal society. Teaching was the first profession open to women in the 1870s, and by the end of the century almost half of all Russian teachers were female. Yet the notion that mothers had a natural affinity for teaching was paradoxically matched by formal and informal bans against married women in the classroom. Ruane reveals not only the patriarchal rationale but also how women teachers viewed their public roles and worked to reverse the marriage ban.Ruane's research and insightful analysis broadens our knowledge of an emerging professional class, especially newly educated and emancipated women, during Russia's transition to a more modern society.

This collection compares Russian and Soviet medical workers – physicians, psychiatrists and nurses, and examines them within an international framework that challenges traditional Western conceptions of professionalism and professionalization through exploring how these ideas developed amongst medical workers in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ideology and everyday life are examined through analyses of medical practice while gender is assessed through the experience of women medical professionals and patients. Cross national and entangled history is explored through the prism of health care, with medical professionals crossing borders for a number of reasons: to promote the principles and advancements of science and medicine internationally; to serve altruistic purposes and support international health care initiatives; and to escape persecution. Chapters in this volume highlight the diversity of experiences of health care, but also draw attention to the shared concerns and issues that make science and medicine the subject of international discussion.

A History of Education in Modern Russia is the first book to trace the significance of education in Russia from Peter the Great's reign all the way through to Vladimir Putin and the present day. Individual chapters open with an overview of the political, social, diplomatic and cultural environment of the period in order to orient the reader. Dowler then goes on to analyse the aims of education initiatives in each era before considering the ways in which Russians experienced education, both as students and as teachers. Each chapter concludes with an assessment of the outcomes and consequences of education policies in the period, both the successes and failures as well as the impact of education on the cultural, social, economic and ultimately political environments. The chronologically arranged book also traces and then summarises underlying key themes like the tension between an open system of education and an estate-based system; the push and pull between utility and the broader goal of human development; and the effects of centralized, authoritarian control that for much of the period limited local initiative and starved the regions of adequate resources.

This is the first book of its kind to draw together information on the major events in Russian history from 1695 to 1917 - covering the eventful period from the accession of Peter the Great to the fall of Nicholas II. Not only is a vast amount of material on key events and topics brought together, but the book also contains fascinating background material to convey the reality of life in the period.

The nineteenth century, a time of far-reaching cultural, political, and socio-economic transformation in Europe, brought about fundamental changes in the role of women. Women achieved this by fighting for their rights in the legal, economic, and political spheres. In the various parts of Europe, this process went forward at a different pace and followed different patterns. Most historical research up to now has ignored this diversity, preferring to focus on women’s emancipation movements in major western European countries such as Britain and France. The present volume provides a broader context to the movement by including countries both large and small from all regions of Europe. Fourteen historians, all of them specialists in women’s history, examine the origins and development of women’s emancipation movements in their respective areas of expertise. By exploring the cultural and political diversity of nineteenth-century Europe and at the same time pointing out connections to questions explored by conventional scholarship, the essays shed new light on common developments and problems.

This book explores the professional, civic, and personal roles of women teachers throughout American history. Its themes and findings build from the mostly unpublished writings of many women. Clifford studied personal history manuscripts in archives and consulted printed autobiographies, diaries, correspondence, oral histories, interviews to probe the multifaceted imagery that has surrounded teaching. This work surveys a long past where schoolteaching was essentially men's work, with women relegated to restricted niches such as teaching rudiments of the vernacular language to young children and socializing girls for traditional gender roles.

This is the first biography in any language of 'Comrade Prince' D. S. Mirsky (1890-1939), who uniquely participated in three distinctive episodes of modern European culture. In late imperial St Petersburg he was a poet, a student of Oriental languages and ancient history, and also a Guardsofficer. After fighting in World War I and the Russian Civil War, Mirsky emigrated, taught at London University, and became a literary critic and historian, writing prolifically in English, and also in Russian for the Paris-centred emigration, especially as a leading member of the Eurasian movement.His closest literary relationships were with Marina Tsvetaeva and Aleksei Remizov, and later with Maksim Gorky. In 1926-7 he published A History of Russian Literature, written in English, which remains the standard introduction to the subject. While in London he lived in Bloomsbury and knew theWoolfs; he also knew T. S. Eliot, and was the first Russian critic to write about him. Mirsky became a Communist in 1931 and returned to Stalin's Moscow the following year, becoming a prominent Soviet critic, and in particular championing Boris Pasternak. In 1937 he was arrested, and died in theGulag. This biography draws on much unpublished material, including Mirsky's NKVD files.

"This collection of essays examines the lives of women across Russia--from wealthy noblewomen in St Petersburg to desperately poor peasants in Siberia--discussing their interaction with the Church and the law, and their rich contribution to music, art, literature and theatre. It shows how women struggled for greater autonomy and, both individually and collectively, developed a dynamic presence in Russia's culture and society"--Publisher's description.

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, including in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Those who claimed children as special objects of investigation were initially spread across a network of imperfectly professionalized scholarly and occupational groups based mostly in the fields of medicine, education, and psychology. From their various perspectives, they made ambitious claims about the contributions that their emergent expertise made to the understanding of, and intervention in, human bio-psycho-social development. The international movement that arose out of this catalyzed the institutionalization of new domains of knowledge, including developmental and educational psychology, special needs education, and child psychiatry. Science of the Child charts the evolution of the child science movement in Russia from the Crimean War to the Second World War. It is the first comprehensive history in English of the rise and fall of this multidisciplinary field across the late Imperial and Soviet periods. Drawing on ideas and concepts emanating from a variety of theoretical domains, the study provides new insights into the concerns of Russia's professional intelligentsia with matters of biosocial reproduction and investigates the incorporation of scientific knowledge and professional expertise focused on child development into the making of the welfare/warfare state in the rapidly changing political landscape of the early Soviet era.

The history of ideas has played a central role in Russia's political and social history. Understanding its intellectual tradition and the way the intelligentsia have shaped the nation is crucial to understanding the Russia of today. This history examines important intellectual and cultural currents (the Enlightenment, nationalism, nihilism, and religious revival) and key themes (conceptions of the West and East, the common people, and attitudes to capitalism and natural science) in Russian intellectual history. Concentrating on the Golden Age of Russian thought in the mid-nineteenth century, the contributors also look back to its eighteenth-century origins in the flowering of culture following the reign of Peter the Great, and forward to the continuing vitality of Russia's classical intellectual tradition in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. With brief biographical details of over fifty key thinkers and an extensive bibliography, this book provides a fresh, comprehensive overview of Russian intellectual history.