I’m not at all opposed to the present woman movement, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The development of woman, and even the political emancipation of woman in the near future – that’s my ideal. I’ve a daughter myself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, people don’t know that side of me. I wrote a letter to the author, Shtchedrin, on that subject. He has taught me so much, so much about the vocation of woman. So last year I sent him an anonymous letter of two lines: “I kiss and embrace you, my teacher, for the modern woman. Persevere.” And I signed myself, “a Mother.” I thought of signing myself “a contemporary Mother,” and hesitated, but I stuck to the simple “Mother”; there’s more moral beauty in that, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
[The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, end ch3]
of course these are not Dostoevsky’s sentiments, they are the sentiments of a character he invented