A Woman’s Challenge: The Petersburg Polytechnic Institute for Women, 1905–1918

So wrote Boris Krutikov, one of the first professors at the Petersburg Polytechnic Institute for Women, in his unpublished memoirs.1 This higher technical school, initially called the Petersburg Polytechnic Courses for Women, has been ignored for nearly eighty years. There is little information on it available in scholarly works.2 Fortunately, Krutikov’s manuscript still exists, and through it we can begin to retrace the early history of this unique institution.3