Institute for Noble Maidens

An Institute for Noble Maidens (Russian: Институт благородных девиц) was a type of educational institution and finishing school in late Imperial Russia. It was devised by Ivan Betskoy as a female-only institution for girls of noble origin. The first and most famous of these was the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg.

Secondary education for girls and a path to university education for women was extremely limited in Tsarist Russia. One path of educational training for the daughters of the Russian nobility were the Institutes for Noble Maidens (Instituti blagorodnykh devits), cloistered private academies which housed primary and secondary students and offered basic scholastic and cultural training.

The idea of the Institute for Noble Maidens dated to 1763, when Ivan Betskoy to Empress Catherine the Great a "Statute for the Education of the Youth of Both Sexes," which proposed the education of both sexes in state boarding schools aimed at creating a "new race of men." Boarding schools were to be preferred to other institutions of education in accordance with Rousseau's idea that "isolating the pupils enabled their tutors to protect them from the vices of society."

An important memoir touching upon life at these facilities was left by populist leader Vera Figner, who attended the Rodionovsky Institute for Noble Girls in Kazan from 1863 until 1869. Figner found the educational regimen at the Rodionovsky Institute to be largely unsatisfactory, with instruction in literature avoiding controversial modern themes and history likewise skewed towards the ancient period rather than more modern events. Scientific instruction was said to be particularly paltry, with the zoology and botany instructor said to have

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