Fictitious marriage as a sacrificial path to the intellectual freedom for women (based on Sofi A. Kovalevskaya biography)
Discrimination against women in the middle of the 19th century which meant that they were excluded from higher education in Russia forced women to fictitiously marry removing the traditional restriction. Young men worried about the violation of women's civil rights agreed to a sham marriage. This created an opportunity for married women to leave tsarist Russia and to have a chance to study at foreign higher educational institutions. The fictitious marriage played a huge role in S.V. Kovalevskaya's personal life and created an opportunity of her creative self-realization in the field of mathematics outside of tsarist Russia.