Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy

**Tyler** (0:04)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very happy to be chatting with, in person, Julia Ioffe. Most of all, we'll be talking about her recent book coming out in paperback. It is called Motherland, A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy. I enjoyed it very much. Julia is also a Washington correspondent for Puck, has written just about everywhere else, and appears on TV and radio frequently. Julia, welcome.

**Julia Ioffe** (0:55)
Thanks for having me, Tyler.

**Tyler** (0:56)
Now, if I think about feminism in Russian or Soviet history, it's striking to me how many of the top constructivist painters are women.
So you have Natalia Gontrova, you have Alexandra Exter, Popova, others. That must predate the Bolsheviks. What's going on there? What's behind that?

**Julia Ioffe** (1:14)
Well, the Russian intelligentsia, the Russian Empire was a bit different from the Victorian intelligentsia or the Belopok intelligentsia of the West. On one hand, the law in the Russian Empire was quite stringent. Women weren't allowed to do much of anything without their husbands' permission. If you were a peasant woman, your lot in life was just to work and be a draft horse essentially, and to give birth as many times as possible, and sometimes maybe satisfy your father-in-law.
If you were part of the intelligentsia or the upper bourgeoisie or the artistically inclined aristocracy, you often traveled to the West, were exposed to Western culture, but also you were very much engaged in the wrestling with the question that they called the woman question and how to emancipate women. There were various directions of thought in the late 19th, early 20th century, and some of them were quite radical. One of the main masterminds of the plot to kill Tsar Alexander II, for instance, was a woman, Sofia Perovskaya, the daughter of a well-known Russian general. A lot of the revolutionaries were women. There were so many, in fact, so many political radicals that were women, that the Tsars had to build a separate, a second women's prison just to hold all the female radicals. And so when the Bolsheviks took power, and before that, when the Tsar abdicated in February of 1917, women were ready to go. But the women artists you mentioned fit into this tradition because there was so much intellectual ferment around the time, and women were at the forefront of that, and they were the subjects of the theorizing around that. What is the proper role of a woman?
Can a woman work the way a man does? Can a woman parent the way a man does? Can a woman opt out of being a parent altogether?

**Tyler** (3:24)
But even before the Revolution, as you know, there were many more women doctors in Russia than in Western Europe. Your own sister is a fourth generation female doctor.
Women could own and inherit property, which was unusual for the time. Where does that come from? What's the longer tradition? Because one thinks of the East as being worse with respect to women's rights, but in some ways, it's not. What's the correct mental model?

**Julia Ioffe** (3:48)
It's just different. But in some ways, it was worse than the Western model. In some ways, it was better. It was just very different.
Like I said, this grew out of, again, a 19th century grappling with what they called the women question. There were people pushing for legalizing abortion in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, police and various detectives and their equivalent of social workers issued a report recommending it and they were going to legalize abortion in Tsarist Russia well before the revolution. But the Tsar overruled it because he was obviously hand in glove with the Russian Orthodox Church, which was quite reactionary. So there was this push and pull constantly in Russia. In some ways, yes, they could inherit property. Well, the medical piece is very interesting actually. For my family, that medical tradition started after the revolution. It was made possible by the revolution. Without the revolution, it could not have happened. But the tradition of Russian women or women from the Russian Empire more accurately going into medicine is also intertwined with the radical tradition.
Women who were inclined politically toward socialism, toward revolutionary activity were banned from these institutions, but they were also drawn to what is the thing I can do to help people. They could go into nursing, they could go into medicine, and they were lobbying constantly to be allowed into the medical institutes of the Russian Empire instead. They were toggled back and forth between allowing them, not allowing them, allowing them to audit classes, not allowing them to audit classes. And a lot of women actually went to Switzerland, who had the means, obviously. The women who had the means went to Switzerland to study medicine.