From an Exclusive Privilege to a Right and an Obligation: Modern Russia

Abstract

In 1897, more than 100 years after the first girls’ schools opened in Russia, just 1 percent of the total female population had a completed general secondary education. Seven decades later, 62 percent of the female population aged 16 to 60 had at least an eighth-grade level of education. Over the course of 200 years, from the first girls’ secondary schools in the eighteenth century through the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century and following the mass enrollment campaigns of the twentieth century, the number of women earning secondary education increased in absolute numbers, but especially as a proportion of the total female population. A level of educational attainment that began in the eighteenth century as an exclusive privilege of a tiny elite had become, in just 200 years, an achievement not only available to, but expected of and indeed legally obligated from, every girl in this society³