Women on the Philosopher’s Steamboat: A Gender Lens

• In Event: Women Philosophers I

Abstract

In May 1922, Lenin proposed replacing the death penalty for those actively opposed to Soviet rule with exile abroad. Many intellectuals - economists, sociologists, doctors, and philosophers - were expelled on several steamboats and trains from Odessa, Moscow, Petrograd and elsewhere. We mostly know of the male passengers of those voyages, with one small exception – Yekaterina Kuskova (1869-1958). Other female figures on those boats were the wives and relatives of well-known Russian thinkers: e.g., Lidia Berdyaeva (1871-1945), who participated in the “Kharkiv Social-Democratic Worker’s Union of Craftsmen'' in 1902 and was imprisoned. Other such important women include Tatiana Frank (1886-1984), Ludmila Losskaya (1875-1943) and her mother, Maria Stoyunina (1846-1940), the founder of a women’s gymnasium in 1881. There is a serious need to explore these and other biographies through a decolonial and gendered lens, in order to show how the history of a hundred years ago can be interpreted today.

Author

• Tatiana Levina, Independent Scholar