Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  SK: I will do some translating for my husband, Vladimir Kovalevskii, a publisher of scientific and political writings, without pay, of course. He kindly agrees to enter a fictitious marriage with me. Otherwise, how would my sister Aniuta, my cousin Zhanna, and Zhanna’s cousin, Iulia, and I have been able to travel abroad? A Russian woman in the 1860s, although she was entitled to own property, and as a property owner to vote via male proxy and was protected by law from wife-beating, remained on her father’s or husband’s internal passport. The three of us all meet again in Heidelberg, where, in spite of Vladimir, we establish a women’s commune.

  EKS: You will fall in love with a younger man, a distant cousin of your husband’s, after Vladimir inhales a bottle of chloroform. He is in debt to oil entrepreneurs and no longer appears for his classes. He will be remembered as one of the founders of evolutionary paleontology. As a widow, you will finally be respectable. Mathematicians begin to invite you to meet their wives. I too fall in love with another man, but he will fall in love with my daughter. She will bear his child, while I imagine the tumor I am growing is a man inside my stomach.

  FK: When I return to America in 1886, I am greeted by the newly erected Statue of Liberty.

  EKS: Lady Liberty is a French concept. The French will bestow you, Sofia, with their most prestigious prize, the Prix Bordin, but the Swedes will make you the first female professor at a European university. In Stockholm you will quickly learn Swedish, but you will always long to speak Russian. You will hope for a position at a Russian university.

  MCT: I pursue my degree with the same determination I pursue Mary Garret, who, like Mamie, I meet at Cornell. Why should the fact that I am only twenty-five years old and have never been employed prevent me from becoming the president of Bryn Mawr? After fourteen years, Mary finally returns my love. If they make me president, she says, she will pay 10 percent of the college’s annual budget. Mamie begins as my graduate student and eventually becomes a professor of English. She wants to be recognized for the lectures she wrote and I delivered for eleven years in a two-year survey course of Western literature required of all entering students.

  FK: Your name and that of Jane Addams will be linked, as those belonging to the two women with the greatest influence on American girls. Jane takes me in when I leave Lazare, who accuses me of speaking English with the children and has become physically abusive. I arrive at Hull House, win custody in a court battle, and leave the children with friends in Winnetka. In Jane, I finally find a peer. I become her closest friend. The settlement feels like home, the relations between women reserved, rather than intimate.

  MCT: Unlike Hull House, a settlement of unmarried women, Bryn Mawr feels like “a fairey palace,” “a house of cards that 13 men could destroy in an instance” (Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas), that is, the college’s thirteen male trustees.

  EKS: I set sail for America because my father casts his long shadow across my fatherland. There is no public swimming place for women along the lake because he has voted against it. I learn to swim in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where I am sent to be polished up for the marriage market. But I keep my swimming a secret. “Zürich, the barb in the center of my heart” (Hasler, Flying with Wings of Wax). When I begin studying at the university, my father refuses to speak to me. When I come back from America a professor, he fails to recognize me on the street.

  MCT: I live at 43 Plattenstrasse. Ten years later, Rosa Luxemburg, who remains on the periphery of Russian-emigrant bohemia, will take up residence a few doors down. Once I become the first woman ever to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Zürich, people treat me like a celebrity. For the first time, I enjoy being stared at on the street.

  SK: I arrive during the final months of the Russian colony and visit the Russian library on the first floor of the Pension Frauenfeld in Fluntern. Apparently I am following in my husband’s footsteps. He was here already in 1864, cofounding a pension for Russian students and emigrants. In the reading room, I find Russian exile publications, the most recent writings about the French revolution, tracts by German and French socialists. There are dozens of newspapers in numerous languages, including Georgian, Armenian, and Yiddish. The only thing I can’t find is literature. “It is impossible to be a mathematician without the soul of a poet” (Koblitz, A Convergence of Lives). There is a lot of coming and going, tobacco smoke and loud voices. It is difficult to read, but it is well heated. The samovar is on. There is always tea for those with “pale faces, thin jackets, doubtful shoes” (Schirmacher, Zürcher Studentinnen). The Russian women are not all nervous, loud, unkempt, with short hair, blue glasses, and a cigarette. They are not all “nihilist girls.”

  FK: When I arrive at Cornell, I fall in love with Margaret Hicks, who is in love with M. Carey Thomas. When Margaret dies, I come down with a fever that alarms even my Zürich physician. The doctor puts me on a diet and for a fortnight forbids me to read heavy books or to write. Before I fully recover, I agree to receive the attentions of Lazare. As a Jew, he is barred from teaching, so he studies medicine; a medical degree will allow him to reside outside the Pale of Settlement. I refuse to allow the publisher to omit my unpronounceable name, his name, Wischnewetzky, from the cover of my book.

  MCT: I considered marriage, for just a moment, as a way to get abroad.

  EKS: I went abroad, that is, sailed for America. “She arrived in the New World bringing with her the Old: twenty-two crates, an out-of-work husband, three small children, and a homesick house servant” (Hasler, Flying with Wings of Wax). That is how my daughter remembers it. She has no idea what it is like to have a law degree and not be able to practice because without the vote women do not enjoy active citizenship; not to be able to continue teaching at the university because as Privatdozent I have no staff affiliation or salary, only the private fees of a diminishing number of students; not to be able to teach the law to women earning their own living because I am unable to find a space large enough. In New York, Walter can’t take root, but I fly, even if only with “wings of wax.”

  SK: I have become friends with both Suslova and Bokova through Aniuta’s radical circle in St. Petersburg. Suslova has just returned from Zürich with her degree. Bokova introduces us to Vladimir as a potential fictitious husband. Although Aniuta is older, he prefers me. Maria Bokova, whom I adore, is the model for the heroine at the center of the ménage à trois in Chernychevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863). Maria Bokova has entered a fictitious marriage with Petr but is in love with I. M. Sechenev, a physiology professor she meets at the Medical Surgical Academy. Petr is my daughter Fufa’s godfather, and Vladimir, in his suicide note, asks Maria, an ophthalmologist now married to Sechenev, to raise her. I should never have consummated my marriage. We should have continued to live in separate rooms.

  Scene II

  A lull enters the conversation as the women divert their attention to the view. The fog has lifted. The Fraumünster comes into focus. The snowcapped mountains appear at the end of the lake.

  FK: This is how I remember it: “Zürich in those days was a small and simple city, with many steep and narrow streets, some of them beautifully curved, and lined with impressive remnants of old walls. There was abundant music, and a little repertory theater subsidized by the city. The forest, owned by the canton and maintained according to the highest standards of forestry then known, extended down from the top of the Zürichberg almost to the Polytechnicum [where the university inhabited the south wing until it moved into its own building in 1914]. It was an enchanting forest with broad allées cut as fire safeguards, and between the endless rows of pines, wild flowers such as I had never seen” (The Autobiography of Florence Kelley).

  EKS: In Zürich, only my father-in-law’s bookshop, on Stadelhoferplatz 5, where the Russian students met to protest the ukaz, offers an oasis. I want to study law, like my cousin Bernhard, the son of my aunt, Johanna Spyri. She has carved out a life for herself, but she has done so writing books like H
eidi, which I read to my children. I want to write books on modern trusts and the influence of Roman law on England and America.

  SK: Some, like the revolutionary Vera Figner, were eager to leave but disappointed when they arrived: “It was a clear April day in 1872, a remarkable, invigorating day, abounding with sunlight and the scent of spring, when my sister and I set out from our native village of Nikiforovo [Kazan], traveling briskly on a troika with bells ringing. From the administrative center of our district we had taken a steamship, then a train, to Switzerland. Now I was in Zürich, with its ancient, narrow streets, its miserable lake, unappealing in the rain, and that ugly view of the tiled roofs from my window” (Engel and Rosenthal, Five Sisters).

  FK: I am not invited to eat in the dining hall on Clausiusstrasse, a three-room apartment with kitchen, where up to fifty students, all of them Russian, have lunch. This is often their only meal of the day. I learn from the memoirs of the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin that “tea and bread, some milk and a little slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp, amidst animated discussion of the latest news from the socialist world or the last book read … was their regular fare. Those who had more money than was needed for such a mode of living gave it for the common cause” (Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution). During summer vacations they travel on false passports to smuggle revolutionary literature back into Russia, or they escape into the Swiss mountains.

  MCT: I call on Dr. Heim-Vögtlin when I become ill after my three-day written exam. She is the most prominent female doctor in Zürich. But it is Dr. Emma Culbertson, who lives in a Boston marriage with a Dr. Smith, who makes me drink two cups of strong tea with milk before my oral exam: three hours in front of the entire philosophical faculty. I have to speak German and be examined by professors under whom I have never studied. I am hoping my summa will secure me a professorship in any women’s college in the country, even though my uncle has practically promised me a position at Bryn Mawr. I too began by thinking I wanted to study medicine, but I am instantly chastised: “What we want in the cause of women are not doctors and lawyers (there are plenty of those), we want scholars” (Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas).

  FK: I have been ordered to the Riviera with my brother who is going blind; I am the only person who can accompany him on such short notice. Jane will call this the “family claim,” a lifetime of dependency on and service to relatives as an unmarried woman, the answer to “after college, what?” After being detained for months in Avignon, M. Carey and Mamie spend the night at our hotel. M. Carey has just received her summa cum laude distinction, and they are on their way to Italy. She says I should skip Oxford and head straight for Zürich.

  MCT: Is it true that Dr. Heim decides to become a doctor when the man she is engaged to marries someone named Nadezhda Suslova? That she climbs the Glärnisch, which requires ropes, seven times, including with her future husband, a geologist, commissioned to draw its panorama? That she too studies in Leipzig, where, when the male students become too disruptive, the professors agree to wait with her in an antechamber so that they can enter the lecture hall together? She writes letters that are sometimes sixteen, sometimes twenty-four pages long, to her son who has immigrated to, among other places, America.

  EKS: I am too much the lawyer to be a feminist. I insist on my own exclusivity. There is a haste to my initiatives. In the end, I have no support system, only fantasies about fleeing to England with my doctor.

  MCT: They want me to publish my dissertation, but I never return to the British Museum to do the needed work. I never become a scholar. I dedicate myself to the cause of women, but I never fully choose a life of action. I often feel rushed, overworked, irritated, and angry. I am delighted that Mary, one of the richest women in America, will renovate the Deanery, an eight-room cottage on the Bryn Mawr campus the trustees have allowed us to live in for life. We add a guest wing and housekeeper’s apartment; leaded windows and a copper-beamed ceiling; Tiffany glass, Persian rugs, Indian chests. John C. Olmsted agrees to design the garden.

  EKS: Standing on the university terrace, I float high above the roofs of the old part of the city. The city can be taken in at a glance, who is sitting with whom on the benches by the lake. I observe how Swiss men marry Russian female students to become better socialists. Some of them travel to Russia, like Fritz Erismann, an ophthalmologist, who leaves for St. Petersburg with Nadezhda Suslova, who will have one of the most sought-after gynecological practices in the city. He marries a second Russian student, Sofia Gasse, a friend of his first wife’s, who, after the ukaz, continues her medical studies in Bern. He becomes a professor of public health in Moscow, and eventually they return to Zürich, where he acquires a seat on the city council. Women who study law are restless, not like doctors who have a clear, delimited career goal. Medical knowledge is scientific knowledge easily translated into social service. Women are naturally suited to medicine because of their traditional roles as healers and comforters of the sick.

  MCT: I insist that as women enter the professions, their education must be the same as men’s: “Given two bridge-builders, a man and a woman, given a certain bridge to be built, and given as always the unchangeable laws of mechanics … it is simply inconceivable that the preliminary instruction given to the two bridge-builders should differ in quantity, quality, or method of presentation because while the bridge is building one will wear knicker-bockers and the other a rainy-day skirt” (Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas). And yet I remain a lifelong advocate of single-sex education. A single female scholar does more for human advancement than thousands of ordinary college graduates.

  EKS: I insist on the separation of goods in marriage, against the future author of the Swiss civil code, who favors a law that will merge the property of married partners. In marriage, a woman is always at a disadvantage.

  SK: There were Russian students who were openly contemptuous of Swiss values. They found Swiss bourgeois expectations of behavior more restrictive than those of tsarist Russia. Maria Subbotina says: “There is no such depressing atmosphere of routine and habit as in free Switzerland” (Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution). The Swiss condemn the tsarist regime, but Swiss students have a reputation for wanting to marry rich women and make money. The Russians are uninterested in Switzerland, except as a place where for the first time they meet those who are like-minded in an atmosphere that is politically tolerant. As Vera Figner writes: “I must tell you that Switzerland is the most bourgeois place in the world, in the sense of reverence for convention, propriety and external appearances” (Engel, Mothers and Daughters). Russian women have men in their rooms, but they have renounced sexual relations.

  EKS: When Franziska Tiburtius, the first German woman at the university, becomes a student, she is no longer received at the homes of two friends she has known in Zürich.

  FK: Two women in the waiting room of Dr. Heim-Vögtlin’s practice on Hottingerstrasse: “She’s from Russia, isn’t she?” “No, she’s from Brugg.” “Only from Brugg?” (Siebel, Das Leben von Frau D. Marie Heim-Vögtlin).

  EKS: If prison is the final schoolroom for Russian revolutionaries, my counterpart to the university is the Burghölzli, the insane asylum of my Heimatstadt, where I have been asked to be transferred.

  MCT: Like Chernychevsky, I delighted in triads.

  Scene III

  The sun begins to set. A multitude of tiny lights glimmers along the shore on the other side of the lake. The Limmat flows past the Schipfe and under the Lindenhof, where in 1292 women saved the city from its enemies by dressing as men. The bar gets dimmer as couples replace those who have been conversing in single-sex groups.

  In the 1890s the brain of Sofia Kovalevskaia is among those of eminent scientists investigated for the correlation between achievement and brain size.

  In 1895, after reading Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, M. Carey Thomas comes to realize that the passionate feelings of sentimental friendship are the expression of female homosexualit
y.

  In the 1890s Florence Kelley mentions to Engels that she continues to find “the Russian Hebrew immigrants” in Chicago to be “the most-open-minded workers” among union organizers in the women’s garment industry (Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work).

  It will be 1983 before the University of Zürich makes the second woman after Emily Kempin-Spyri a Privatdozent in law.

  * * *

  Coda

  The degree my mother receives as parliamentary interpreter and translator in French, German, and Italian, after attending the University of Geneva, leaves her unprepared for a world at war and the closing of national borders. She returns to Zürich and decides to study law; she is one of a handful of women. Her dissertation, published in 1949 as Die Staatsangehörigkeit der Kinder aus national-gemischten Ehen (The citizenship of children of mixed-nationality marriages), asks, “How is it possible for Swiss women to lose their Swiss citizenship by marrying a non-Swiss? How is it possible for those women who continue to live in Switzerland to become foreigners in their own country and raise children who do not share their nationality?” A wife should not be required to forfeit her citizenship for that of her husband, given the increasing mobility of populations since World War I and the growing participation of women in social life.