“We regarded her as the embodiment of everything lofty, excellent, altruistic and ideal. She was self-sacrificing in matters large and small,” a contemporary recalled of a radical comrade. Decades ago, I used this quote from her memoirs in a book I wrote about Russian radical women of the 1870s. In the course of that decade, several thousand women and men, most of them no older than twenty, fought to overthrow Russia's social and political order. Their goal: to end the autocracy and the economic exploitation of the peasantry, and to create a more egalitarian world, in which those who toiled would reap the full benefits of their labor. Russia's peasants, the overwhelming majority of the population, would provide the means. Rising in revolt, they would bring about a socialist order. The revolutionaries became known as narodniki from the Russian word narod, or people – populists in the usual English translation. Idealizing Russia's peasantry, whom they regarded as inherently socialist, the revolutionaries pursued the goal of an agrarian socialism that would enable Russia to avoid capitalism, then only slowly gaining momentum, and all the human suffering they associated with it. Roughly 17 percent of participants in the populist movement were female.

In the book, I used the preceding quote to illustrate the extent to which populist revolutionaries and their sympathizers idealized women on the left. It represented merely one quotation among many I might have chosen. I encountered some or all of its terms – lofty, altruistic, ideal, self-sacrificing – innumerable times as I studied the history of Russia's radical women. Those words influenced the thesis of my book. Drawing on the narratives of other revolutionaries as well as on radical women's accounts of their own political trajectories, I argued that those terms demonstrated the powerful cultural imperatives that first enabled radical women to rebel against customary female roles and then inspired their conduct as revolutionaries – and to a far greater extent than they inspired men. I traced the source of these ideals to religious values that glorified suffering, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice – values that were inspired by the Russian Orthodox faith. I was astonished, therefore, to discover when I reread the source of the quote that the woman to whom it referred was Jewish, not Russian Orthodox.