Chapter 6 - A Champion of Women’s Rights

Summary

By the turn of the twentieth century, the subject of women’s education had become a hot journalistic topic. The Russian-language newspaper Kaspiy (The Caspian) and Azerbaijani-language newspapers such as Sharq-e Rus (East of Russia), and Irshād (Guidance) published hundreds of articles promoting girls’ education and called for the greater integration of women into the public sphere. Muslim South Caucasian educators were ahead of the Iranians with regard to women’s education, but they lagged behind the Ottomans who had progressed much further. The first secular modern schools for Iranian women opened after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 (Afary 1996: 177–95). These schools were held in modest settings, often in the houses of women’s rights activists, nothing like the palatial school that Taghiyev built for girls in Baku. In contrast, in Turkey, the first medical school of midwifery had opened in 1842, the first secondary school for girls (kiz rustiyeleri) was established in 1858, and the first teacher-training college for women (dar al-muallimat) was founded in 1870 (Kandiyoti 1991: 28).

By the early 1900s, a few brave Muslim South Caucasian women had gone to medical school in St Petersburg and returned to practise medicine. They were celebrities in their communities, as the idea of a Muslim woman doctor was still a novel concept (MN 25, 22 September 1906). Leila Khānum Shāhtakhtli was the first woman of her community to study medicine in Europe, with the help of a scholarship from Taghiyev. During her third year of medical school, she died of pneumonia in Switzerland. Her tragic loss was mourned in the pages of Mollå Nasreddin in a full-page editorial (Figure 6.1).

These efforts to promote women’s education and to provide them with greater access to the public sphere did not include reforming family and marriage laws, however. The Russian state had placed family law in the hands of the religious authorities of its various ethnic communities. From time to time, in highly contested cases involving the Muslim elite, religious authorities would turn to the Russian state to settle disputes. The state welcomed such interventions as a sign that its sovereignty was recognised by the community.