The practices of scientific everyday life in ego documents of the first Russian female historians in the second half of the 19th – the early 20th centuries

Abstract

The article focuses on the different stages of the creative process in historical research as a reflection of the professional everyday life of the first Russian female historians. Using their ego documents, it becomes possible to reconstruct the main difficulties in collecting material, creating scientific texts and publishing research results that were typical for female historians and unusual for their male colleagues. For example, the first female historians were forced to master the basics of research work themselves (even the programme of the Higher Courses for Women avoided teaching female students the method of historical research). Despite the active scientific work of female historians, in the second half of the 19th – the early 20th centuries they had not published many significant works because women could not publish their works on their own (in most cases it was too expensive for them), while professional publishers feared the lack of commercial success of the works of female historians. Ego documents testify to cases of borrowing the results of research work of female historians, the need to hide their real names at the request of publishers and other manifestations of discrimination against the first researchers in the Russian historical science.