Anna Kuliscioff

(1854–1925), Russian feminist, socialist, and doctor. Anna Kuliscioff was born Anna Markovna Rozenstein in 1854 in Simferopol, Crimea, the daughter of a well-to-do and semi-assimilated Jewish merchant. After finishing her secondary education, she went to Switzerland, where in 1872 she entered the Polytechnic and married Peter Makarevich . There she started her revolutionary involvement, influenced by the ideology of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). By 1873 she was back in her country, having joined a group whose purpose was to spread the ideas of freedom and justice among the local proletariat.

In 1877 Kuliscioff left Russia for good and went to Lugano, Switzerland. There she met Andrea Costa , an anarchist who later became the first Socialist member of the Italian Parliament, with whom she had a daughter in December 1881. In February 1882 Kuliscioff began studying medicine in Switzerland, which she continued after moving to Naples, Italy, in 1884. That same year she introduced in the Socialist newspaper Avanti the program of Emancipation of Labor, the first Russian Marxist organization. She saw this group and its scientific socialism as the party of the future. She left Costa in 1885, and in 1886 she completed a dissertation on the etiology of puerperal fever, becoming the first woman to graduate with a degree in medicine from the University of Naples. That same year she started corresponding with Filippo Turati , a lawyer from Milan, and they developed a relationship that ended only with her death in 1925.

Kuliscioff's devotion to the feminist cause started in Russia but became her main concern in Italy. Her political perspective is evident in the lecture “The Monopoly of Man” that she gave in 1890 at the Philological Club in Milan. The lecture offers an analysis of women's condition. It argues that throughout history women have been condemned and abused by men. The history of women is therefore a history of martyrdom. The only way out is economic independence and labor, which is the only way to improve the lives of humans. However, Kuliscioff did not limit the social function of women to work; in her opinion motherhood is the most delicate and important of all social services.

Kuliscioff was a consistent fighter for women's rights although she made a distinction between working women, oppressed by capitalism, and middle-class women, barred from professions dominated by men. Her writings, published in Critica Sociale, a biweekly founded by Turati, helped raise public awareness of the socioeconomic conditions of women. She was prepared even to fight against the Socialist Party and against Turati himself when they called for a vote limited to middle-class women. She insisted instead on universal suffrage, arguing that the vote is the defense of work and that work has no sex. In 1911 she founded a journal, the Defense of Women Workers, in which the recurrent themes were universal suffrage and antimilitarism. Her legacy came to fruition in 1945, twenty years after the Fascist dictatorship and her own death, when Italy finally achieved universal suffrage.