Historians have identified two dominant currents in the Russian women's movement of the late tsarist period.  "Bourgeois" feminism, so called by its more radical opponents, emphasized "individualist" feminist goals such as access to education, career opportunities, and legal equality.  "Socialist" feminists, by contrast, emphasized class, rather than gender, as the principal source of women's inequality and oppression, and socialist revolution, not legal reform, as the only road to emancipation and equality.

 

However, despite antagonism between bourgeois feminists and socialist feminists, the two movements shared certain underlying beliefs.  Both regarded paid labor as the principal means by which women might attain emancipation:  participation in the workplace and economic self-sufficiency, they believed, would make women socially useful and therefore deserving of equality with men.  Both groups also recognized the enormous difficulties women faced when they combined paid labor with motherhood.  In fact, at the First All-Russian Women's Congress in 1908, most participants advocated maternity insurance and paid maternity leave, although the intense hostility between some socialists and bourgeois feminists at the Congress made it difficult for them to recognize these areas of agreement.  Finally, socialist feminists and most bourgeois feminists concurred in subordinating women's emancipation to what they considered the more important goal of liberating the entire Russian population from political oppression, economic backwardness, and social injustice.

    There is no consensus among researchers regarding what qualifies a substance as a pheromone. While most agree on a basic definition of pheromones as chemicals released by one individual of a species which, when detected by another individual of the same species, elicit a specific behavioral or physiological response, some researchers also specify that the response to pheromones must be unconscious. In addition, the distinction between pheromones and odorants—chemicals that are consciously detected as odors---can be blurry, and some researchers classify pheromones as a type of odorant. Evidence that pheromone responses may not involve conscious odor perception comes from the finding that in many species, pheromones are processed by the vomeronasal (or accessory olfactory) system, which uses a special structure in the nose, the vomeronasal organ (VNO), to receive chemical signals. The neural connections between the VNO and the brain are separate from those of the main olfactory system, whose processing of odorants triggers sensations of smell. But while the VNO does process many animal pheromone signals, not all animal pheromones work through the VNO. Conversely, not all chemical signals transmitted via the VNO quality as pheromones. For example, garter snakes detect a chemical signal from earthworms—one of their favorite foods—via the VNO, and they use this signal to track their prey.