SUMMARY:

The article traces the process of elaboration of education policies in the field of female education in the Northwestern region of the Russian empire by different agents of the Russian imperial state on central and local levels in the 1830s–1860s. However, Olga Mastianica’s principal goal is not a history of education in a gendered perspective, but a history of the construction of female social roles and national otherness in this troubling imperial borderland. Ethnic and confessional markers of difference in her analysis are complicated by a gender marker in order to produce a complex and dynamic picture of conjuncture of social, national, and gender discourses as well as idiosyncratic local considerations in contradictory efforts of imperial social engineering.