Women’s education and career development in agriculture in Russia in the early twentieth century

Abstract

In 1903, a female student named Zhozefina Kossko-Sudakevich was officially accepted into the Moscow Agricultural Institute, marking the first instance of such admission in the history of the Russian Empire. In 1909, she achieved another historic milestone by becoming the first Russian woman to graduate in agronomy.

Since the late nineteenth century, there have been many within Russian society who have advocated for increased opportunities in higher agricultural education for women. Nonetheless, breaking the stereotype of agronomy as an exclusively male occupation was a formidable challenge. To seek a degree in agriculture, Russian women had to go to Western Europe where agricultural education was more frequently extended to female students.

This paper focuses on the motivations and obstacles facing women entering the fields of agriculture and horticulture in Russia. Despite the prevailing model of higher education in the Russian Empire being a predominantly state-led institution, broader public initiatives aimed at providing higher education to women proved to be of no lesser value. In this context, I review the impact of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Agricultural Education (1899) on actualizing the discourse of female education and launching a chain of non-governmental schools for women. As an example of such an initiative, I analyze the Golitsyn Higher Agricultural Women’s Courses (1908) in terms of this institution’s ideology and curriculum, and its students’ social composition and professional development after graduation.