Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLVI, Nos. 3-4, September-December 2004 The Lithuanian National Intelligentsia and the Women’s Issue, 1883-1914 Tomas Balkelis ABSTRACT: The paper discusses the gendering of the Lithuanian national movement during its formative stage, 1883- 1914. It concentrates on the intelligentsia’s debate on the women’s question, which served as one of the most significant cultural battlegrounds for the national elite, helping to define its own identity and new directions for Lithuanian nationalism. Through the discussion of different marital strategies and women’s roles in national politics as seen by the male intelligentsia, the paper argues that, despite the harsh critique of traditional peasant gender relations, the debate amounted to women’s virtual domestication. For male patriots, the emancipation of Lithuanian women meant, first of all, accepting the role of patriotic wives, i.e., responsibility for the education of children, or the role of nation mothers, which entailed nurturing new members of the community. A few secular and independent women writers were welcomed into nation-building politics but only as junior partners. Around the turn of the 20th century, no debate of the Lithuanian intelligentsia spoke more clearly about its yet to-be-defined national and social identity, or about the early and formative character of the Lithuanian national movement than the debate on “Lithuanian women” and their role in the nation’s politics. This debate surfaced in the last decades of the 19th century, and involved a substantial number of prominent members of the movement. For more than two decades, “the women’s front” was one of the most significant cultural battlegrounds for the national elite along issues such as the Lithuanian language or the struggle against Russian and Polish influence. The aim of this article is to trace the origin and development of the debate, and to explore its role in the Lithuanian national movement. The ideological roots of the debate were common to other East European intelligentsias. For example, “the women’s question” was one of the issues raised by a cohort of the male intelligentsia that emerged in the 1830’s in Russia, and later, in the 1860’s, by the so-called nihilist or raznochinnaia generation of Russian radicals, represented by figures such as Chernyshevsky and Pisarev. The first generation of the secular Lithuanian intelligentsia that emerged as graduates of Russian universities in the