I first began to think about boundaries, although not about bridges, and the history of education when my first Ph.D. advisee walked into my office sixteen years ago to tell me about her dissertation topic. “I'm going to look at the history of the world to see who got educated, who didn't get educated, and why,” she announced. I was horrified. Needless to say, I soon persuaded her to abandon her boundless, boundaryless, topic for a neat “do-able” one with clearly defined boundaries of time, place, and subject. Two years later, my student had her degree. Sixteen years later, I am having second thoughts. What might she have produced if I had not fenced her in?

Turn-of-the-century women, armed with college or professional education, encountered many barriers as they attempted to enter the professions. Although circumstances in such male-dominated areas as science and medicine differed from the feminized fields of nursing and librarianship, some similarities existed. Margaret Rossiter, in Women Scientists in America, revealed that colleges and universities were more willing to educate than employ female scientists and, as a result, women developed several strategies to infiltrate the field. The most successful approach was segregation, both topical (women gained control over such feminine areas as home economics and hygiene/physical education) and hierarchical (women gained employment as lab assistants under male supervision). Medicine, according to Gloria Moldow, provided an even greater challenge to women who wished to become doctors. Although marginal medical schools welcomed them as students, female graduates encountered great difficulties as they sought legitimation from hospitals and professional associations directed by men. Moreover, after 1900, these associations successfully drove the less-orthodox areas of medicine from the profession.

The history of literacy in Russia may be divided into four periods: 1) the Kievan, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries (before the Mongol invasion); 2) the medieval (Muscovite), from the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries; 3) the imperial, from the eighteenth century to 1917; and 4) the Soviet, after 1917. For each of these periods distinctive sources have been preserved that call for special handling and methodologies.