God, essential learning [neobkhodimye nauki], useful handiwork and
home economics [domashnee khoziaistvo]” (Likhacheva, Materialy dlia is-
torii zhenskogo obrazovaniia v Rossii, 3 : 7 ).^9
Domestic ideology entered Russia through the periodic press as well.“Thick” journals (tolstye zhurnaly) reviewed Russian translations of
French, English, and German conduct books, beauty guides, and mar-
riage manuals that spread the ideology, to the general praise of review-
ers, with the notable exception of Vissarion Belinsky.
Along with the rise of domestic ideology came attacks on intellectualwomen. By the 1820 s, writes the scholar Marlon Ross, the once positive
term “bluestocking”—a woman (originally also a man) with intellec-
tual or literary interests—had become exclusively a term of derision.^10
Byron, for example, in his satire “The Blues: A Literary Eclogue” ( 1821 )
implied that women cannot understand, much less write, poetry. In Rus-
sia, Pushkin, too, in Evgenii Oneginattacked intellectual women:
!h
(God forbid that at a ball
Or on the porch as I am leaving
I should meet a seminarian in a yellow shawl
Or an academician in a woman’s cap!)
( 3 : xxviii)Critics subjected women writers to even fiercer scorn than blue-stockings; it was no longer considered acceptable or even normal for
women to write. The woman writer was seen as usurping male prerog-
atives, an unrespectable “crossdresser... wearing the ill-fitting literary
apparel intended for men,” a woman “prone to scandal”—epitomized
for many at this time by George Sand.^11 In Russia, too, attacks on liter-
ary women began in the 1820 s. Baratynsky in his poem “Sovet” (Ad-
vice, published in Moskovskii telegraf, 1826 , later retitled “Epigramma”
[Epigram]), warned women that if they tried to write poetry not only
would they be ridiculed as unfeminine but also their work would be
pronounced incompetent and promptly forgotten:
,
,
u
!
,
u u
u
,24 Social Conditions