“Efforts and labour defeat all resistance”: autobiographies of Jewish female students of the early twentieth century about the path to higher medical education in the Russian Empire

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, autobiographies of Jewish students of the medical department of the Kyiv Higher Courses for Women, stored in the State Archives of Kyiv, have been analysed. The focus is on the study of the inner world of young Jewish women of the modern period, their educational trajectory and motivation for socio-professional fulfilment. Behavioural models of Jewish parents and daughters – subjects of educational processes of the early twentieth century – demonstrate the humanization of relationships, emancipation of personality and individualization as a meaningful result of the modern era; specify the autonomy of the woman’s inner self due to the lack of external motivations on the way to higher education; awareness of responsibility for the chosen path. The social character of Jewish women was tempered by both their own life incidents and literary heroes whose images were imitated by teenagers of the modern period. Understanding the autobiographies of young Jewish women convinces us that it is the daily actions of ordinary citizens, aimed at active adaptation to the world around them, that gradually changed the society in which they lived.