Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Russian intelligentsia of the Russian Empire was a bit different from the Victorian intelligentsia or the Belle Époque 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 wrestling with a 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, Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a well-known Russian general. A lot of the revolutionaries were women. There were, in fact, so many political radicals that were women that the Tsars had to build a second women’s prison just to hold all the female radicals. When the Bolsheviks took power, and before that, when the Tsar abdicated in February of 1917, women were ready to go. 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? 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? It’s just different. 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, the police and various detectives and their equivalent of social workers issued a report recommending it. 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. There was this push and pull constantly in Russia. In some ways, yes, they could inherit property. 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. 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. They toggled back and forth between allowing them, not allowing them, allowing them to audit classes, not allowing them to audit classes. The women who had the means went to Switzerland to study medicine. They were often women who were politically radical. Because of that, the Tsar’s secret police noticed that there were all these women who were radically inclined, going to Switzerland to study medicine, and they said, “Wait a minute, no, no, no, we need to keep a closer eye on them. Let’s force them back to the Russian Empire, open a medical institute for them, and keep a close eye on them here.” That’s how that started. Once the revolution came in 1917, free higher education was allowed for everybody, including women, including Jews, which affected my family doubly because we were Jewish. Institutions were legally mandated to take any kind of gendered terms out of their names. They couldn’t be the Women’s Institute of something something or the Gentleman’s Institute of this or that. For my family, it started with the revolution, but the groundwork had been laid beforehand through this radical tradition.…

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