Lithuanian National Intelligentsia and the Women's Issue, 1883-1914, The

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2004 by Balkelis, Tomas

The gentry estates with their soirées, chamber concerts, literary readings, and discussions were venues where the erotic fantasies of educated Lithuanian youths played themselves out. Thus, Jokantas, despite his desire for an ethnic Lithuanian bride, found himself falling in love with the daughter of a Polish landowner, Helena Tyszko.43 Sliupas became attracted to a noblewoman, while several other patriots courted four gentry sisters.44 Such fantasies also appeared in the fictional works of some Lithuanian authors. The relationship between a male teacher and a gentry female student (or, alternately, a doctor and a patient) became a common form of courting. In Didziuliene-Zmona's story "Sons of the Fatherland," a fanner's son, having become a doctor, not only teaches the wife of a nobleman-and later "dances, plays and sings" in their estate-but also falls in love and marries one of the daughters.45 A hero of Gaidamavicius' novel, Antanas Valys, tutors and falls in love with a daughter of a gentiy family at whose estate he learns "foreign ways of dancing."46 These cultural types (male teacher/doctor vs. female student/patient) implied a sense of hierarchy and domination. Gentry women were not only desirable as educated and sophisticated marital partners but also represented a potential source of danger or moral corruption.

The latter notwithstanding, tutoring in a Polish-Lithuanian gentry family did lead to marriages with women of higher social standing, which also helped to solidify the social status of male intellectuals. A striking feature of private lifeone that is often omitted from modem Lithuanian nation-building narratives-is the significant number of marriages between Lithuanian intellectuals of peasant origin and Polish-Lithuanian gentiy women. Among those who married such women, we find many prolific figures of the Lithuanian movement (Kazys Grinius, Antanas Smetona, Mykolas Birziska, Liudas Gira, Antanas Vileisis, and others).47 Among the total number of contributors to Ausra (74) and Varpas (73), there were twenty-eight cases of marriage between peasant sons and gentry women.48 Among the fifty-five Lithuanian women patriots listed in the study [zymios lietuvos moterys (Prominent Lithuanian Women, 1935), twenty-nine came from the gentry and only seven were daughters of farmers. Most of them married Lithuanian men of peasant origins.

Although such marriages went clearly against the radical ideology as propagated by early patriots, only rarely did they result in the husband's loss of Lithuanian identity or a serious "ideological conflict" between spouses. In fact, in many marriages, wives accepted the patriotic ideological outlook of their husbands and, more than often than not, tried to play at least a nominal role in the national movement.

FROM 'NATION-MOTHERS' To PATRIOTIC FRIENDSHIPS

Perhaps the first to introduce the issue of women's emancipation among the Lithuanian educated elite was Pranas Masiotas in his Varpas article "Regarding Emancipation of Women." His opinion closely reflected the views of the young Lithuanian elite. Having admitted that women's emancipation is an important international issue "that originates from a fresh source: everyday life," he did, nevertheless, question one of its aspects: