In an attempt to study gender innovations in education in the late imperial Russia, the author has focused on co-education in commercial schools. The practice of co-education, that failed to find strong support in the political and social circles of the late imperial Russia, was introduced privately in the secondary school institutions, mainly in commercial schools. Being a challenge to the traditional mode of gender relations, co-education took hold thanks to the advanced teaching staff as well as gradual acceptance by the urban middle class, whose group consciousness began shifting towards the ideas of a “new” free profession-oriented school, the one where they could carry out a control and corrective function. Disregard to the old pattern of separate education was accompanied by numerous transformations at the micro level of everyday practices of interaction and communication between children of opposite sexes. It was the teachers who made the first generalizations of gender differences in education, as well as revealed their relative nature. The practice of co-education was not even-tually widely spread, but the growth in the number of such schools was quite rapid.
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