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Alexander Borodin and the Education of Women | Athene Donald's Blog
For those of a certain age who remember Chris Tarrant’s Who wants to be a millionaire?’, there was a moment when the contestant had reached the million dollar question which was: What was the composer Borodin’s profession? To me, that was easy. He was a chemist in St Petersburg. Being a composer was very much a part-time occupation, although he wrote some wonderful pieces, ranging from the thumping beat of the Polovstian dances to more reflective music, such as representing a camel train In the Steppes of Central Asia. He met his pianist wife Ekaterina during his studies in Heidelberg, when she was there recovering from tuberculosis. She alerted him to the problematic situation of women’s education in Russia and in due course he followed this up: certain that women would make excellent doctors, Borodin became one of the founders of the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg. To this day, women make up an unusually high proportion of the doctors in Russia.
