Anna Kuliscioff (Italian: [ˈanna kuliʃˈʃɔf]; Russian: Анна Кулишёва, IPA: [ˈanːə kʊlʲɪˈʂovə]; born Anna Moiseyevna Rozenshtein, Анна Моисеевна Розенштейн; 9 January 1857 – 27 December 1925) was a Russian-born Italian revolutionary, a prominent feminist, an anarchist influenced by Mikhail Bakunin, and eventually a Marxist socialist militant.

She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of merchants who guaranteed her a happy and dedicated childhood, so much so that she attended courses in philosophy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

[1] Her father, Moisei, was one of the five hundred privileged Jewish "merchants of the first guild" who were permitted to reside anywhere in the Russian Empire.

Deserting her investigations, in 1873 she married Pyotr Makarevich, an individual progressive of honourable birth, and together they went back to Russia.

Anna escaped from Odessa to live clandestinely, first in Kiev and then in Kharkov, frequently singing in public parks to make money.

In Kiev, she aligned herself with revolutionaries associated with the Land and Freedom party, who engaged in terrorist acts against the tsarist authorities.

In April 1877, using a false passport, she left Russia and moved to Paris, where she became a member of a small anarchist group which, following Bakunin, preached the abolition of the state.

It was in Paris that Anna was first reported, in police records, as bearing the name Kuliscioff, a created name that distinguished her as coming from the East.

Their group was itself expelled from the PSI later in 1921, leading to the creation of a Unitary Socialist Party (PSU) – led by Turati, Kuliscioff, and Giacomo Matteotti, in opposition to the emergence of Fascism.

[8] The last years of Kuliscioff's life were marked by much bitterness, many health problems, splits within the Socialists, and the rise of the Fascist Party.

[10] She decided to prepare her graduation thesis focusing into a particularly demanding field such as epidemiology, devoting herself to the study of the pathogenesis of puerperal fevers which represented one of the main female causes of death:[9] a particularly stimulating field of research and in clear development both as a result of the discoveries of microbiology and the appearance, also in Italy, of significant developments of a political nature in hygienic rehabilitation.

[9] She concluded her thesis with the audacious hypothesis that the agent of the infection is to be identified not so much in a streptococcus, as supposed by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), but in microorganisms of another nature, the proteins of putrefaction.

The choice to concentrate her own studies in the field of gynaecology appears as a demonstration of Kuliscioff's fidelity to the feminist cause.

During the 20th century, the presence of women, first in medical schools and later in hospitals and every healthcare facility, registered a slow but constant increase.