This is so interesting! Thank you, both of you, for contributing your knowledge.
I know that my great grandmother was admitted to and attended dental school and I have a photo of her with another woman from her class. I must assume that she graduated and got a degree, because when she came to the US she was permitted to immediately open her own dental office......
She was a Jew from the Ukraine, and I have always thought that her religion in addition to her gender SHOULD have prevented her from getting in to University....I wonder how she did it?
I know that Victoria did NOT approve of women in the medical profession, yet I believe she actually met Flo Nightengale. In those times, of course, motherhood was the "only real" job of a woman. (My great grandmother raised 4 children in addition to having her dental practice....) Anything that would threaten that role would have been "just not done". And yet.....slowly but surely, it happened. There were hardly any female dentists in the US in those days, but obviously women in Russia could study.
I have been thinking about this posting since it was first listed. It raises some interesting questions, so let's have a look at them, in this case the situation in particular.
1. I believe that the poster has indicated that her family came from Romy, Ukraine. Romy, Ukraine would have been in what was called the "Pale of Settlement" of old Imperial Russia.
The Pale of Settlement was a special part of Russia (essentially occupied Poland and parts of the Ukraine) that were designed by the Tsars as areas in which Jews could live and exercise certain professions. After the partition and annexation of Poland, the actual number of Jews in Russia increased considerably. I have heard as much as ten-fold.
The exericise of the liberal and salaried professions in these areas was extremely limited, and it did not include farming the land, or in any way touching the land directly. The daily occupations were permitted -- butcher, baker, candle stick maker, etc. Entrance into into the liberal profession was so limited as to be non-existant. It was control and discrimination in the extreme, particularly in the Pale. A prospicka was needed to move from one shettl to the another. Poor families, without the means to bribe the corrupt and often drunken local officials, could not afford prospickas and the choice was either lifelong poverty or immigration, often clandestine, at night, or over-the-border.
2. The poster was kind enough to tell us that her grandmother spoke several foreign languages and that she had a mastery of the domestic arts. This would indicate that the grandmother's family was definitely a rural middle-class familiy of a certain standing. I am curious as what the profession of her great-grandfather might have been.
Thus, since it was the parents' wish that their daugther study in St. Petersburg, it would have required graciously oiling the hand of the local Okhrana for all the requisite permits and then again oiling all the requisite hands in Petersburg. But it was a door to a better world because in spite of all of the official Tsarist restrictions on what Jews could and could not do, and there were so many that my head spins, once a Jew from the countryside made it to Moscow or to Petersburg, he or she attained an almost emancipated status. Papers could be bought, a change of status could be sought and obtained, and particularly in Petersburg where there were hundreds of thousands of persons with German-sounding last name, one more German-sounding last name didn't mean much. For example, there were Jewish Rosens and there were very noble and very Orthodox Rosens. Identities became blurred in old Petersburg with time and money.
What was the catch all, however, was what is called the "kartavitz". For many reasons, the Jews in the countryside learned and heard the Russian of the noble famlies that surrounded them. These Russian nobles, approximately 200 years ago, and for approximately 100 years thereafter, spoke Russian with a gutteral French "r" as everyone what to appeared as if they had spent long periods of time in France. Ce fut la mode. The Jewish population followed in their stead. However, for whatever reason, the "kartaviz" remained embedded in the village pronuncation of Russian-speaking Jews, long after it had passed out of the pronunciation of the Russian-speaking upper classes, and in Petersburg and in Moscow, even well assimilated Jews (those who had managed to make the jump from the Pale to the big cities) with all the right spurious papers and the right and legally-exercised liberal professions, if they made the mistake of "kartavil" in front of the wrong persons, it would raise eyebrows at the least and perhaps even cause a visit by the police, and a subsequent "chat" which was never pleasant. Anyne could be banished from Petersburg or Moscow at any time and it is truly unfortunate to note that this happened all too frequently. There was no official droit de cite -- just the supposed largess of the Emperor. It was a litmus test. Lenin, for one, was never able to get over his "kartavitz" nod did Dzhersinky nor did Trotsky nor did Beria nor Sverdlov nor did Zinoviev.
3. That the poster's grandmother entered Dental School in St. Petersburg in 1896 is both a testimony to a financially-stable family, a hard-working person and someone who was decidedly upwardly mobile. She would have been able to open her own clinic and eventually draw her own series of patients. And all of this from beginning-to-end would have cost the family "gramadnii denghii". By the time 1906 arrived, she should have been by all means a stable middle-class member of Petersburg society.
BUT
4. The poster was kind enough also to tell us that her grandmother immigrated in 1906, that is after all of the disasterous events of 1905 in Russia and the subsequent pogroms that ensued. The pograms in Moscow in 1905 were horrific and under the aegis of Sergei Alexandrovitch. In his personal writings, the Grand Sergie Alexandrovitch very disgustingly refers to them as "la chasse aux juifs". No one buy no onr did anything to stop them and not even a world-wide outcry would move the Emperor to put an end to them. However, I am not aware that there were specifically pogroms in St. Petersburg that year, and frankly, please assist me, because I know, factually speaking that the Metropolitan of Petersburg, Metropolitan Antony in those years, was not part of the antisemitic wing of the extreme right wing of the Church. He protested and was rebuked by the Emperor in quite a scene that eventually led to his disgrace. But yes, the Pale of Settlement was awash with the blood of innocent people, very awash. There is no question about it. Perhaps the grandmother emigrated with these events in mind.
OR
5. The poster has been kind enough to tell us in another series of postings, right after I joined this Board, that her grandmother became involved with the Trotskyites and was invovled in some other activities thereto associated. I know nothing of the Troskyites movement in the years 1905/1906 but I was unaware that they were up-and-terrorizing as early as then. But as I said, I know nothing about these kind of disgusting elemetns. Can the others help me here?
What a path this distinguished and educated person took, from a village in the Pale of Settlement, to a Petersburg resident, to a Faculty-educated dentist in St. Petersburg to a member of such a violent group and then to a solid life in America. There is a whole interesting book to be written here. She seems to have gotten around many of the prohibitions and interdictions of her time. Maladetz!
Thank you for sharing this with us.
