The emergence of higher education for women in the Russian Empire proceeded in distinct stages. A first step was the permission granted to women to attend selected university lectures in the late 1850s and early 1860s; at that moment, however, the question of systematic instruction was scarcely raised. This was due in part to the mismatch between the curricula of women’s secondary schools and the level of preparation expected of first-year university students. A second, no less important factor behind the slow institutionalization of women’s higher education was the government’s limited interest in it. Against this background, the first women’s institution of higher learning — the Courses for Learned Midwives opened in 1872 at the Medico-Surgical Academy (renamed in 1876 the Women’s Medical Courses) — was, significantly, a state enterprise. Its establishment and expansion were largely owed to the minister of war, D.A. Miliutin, who not only placed the courses under his ministry but also, circumventing standard bureaucratic procedures, secured an enlargement of their curriculum. The article surveys attempts to organize women’s higher educational institutions both through public initiative and through governmental channels, emphasizing, on the one hand, the difficulties that confronted voluntary and civic efforts to create courses and, on the other, the ambivalent position of state structures compelled to introduce higher education for women despite broader tendencies in government policy. The organizers of the Women’s Medical Courses also devoted considerable effort to distancing the institution from the student movement and to demonstrating the loyalty of its auditors, whose commitments, they insisted, lay exclusively with study. The next step would have been the creation of a separate system of women’s higher education, yet no governmental department assumed responsibility for this demanding task. The War Ministry itself withdrew its support: after Miliutin’s resignation in 1881, institutional reform made the existence of a women’s educational institution within the ministry’s structure “inappropriate”. As a result, notwithstanding the widespread recognition of the courses’ utility, they survived only fifteen years and were closed in 1887.