Читать книгу Genders 22 - Ellen E. Berry - Страница 12

Indeed, once we examine the political traditions and historical experience of Russian women, we can appreciate that they have had ample cause to critique their own “determined pioneers” and to dismiss Western “nostalgia.” If the category of gender has been promoted at times at the expense of all other categories of identity by Western feminists, it has been a self-erasing or non-category — indeed, a non-term — in Russian and Soviet societies. To be sure, a “woman’s question” was raised in mid-nineteenth-century Russia to protest noblewomen’s unequal legal, political, and economic status and a Russian feminist tradition (under a variety of names) could be said to extend from the 1860s until the October revolution.¹⁰ Yet, for the most part, Russian women have eschewed specifically feminist programs for what they believed to be the larger, more urgent causes of populism or socialism or, in the Soviet period, Party loyalty or dissidence. For them the unifying, galvanizing categories of oppression and solidarity were those of class and allegiance or resistance to the state (be it tsarist or Soviet). Although the program (and sometimes even the practice) of women’s equal rights was automatically included in many nineteenth-century revolutionary movements, it remains significant that socialist groups (including the Bolshevik party) denounced any explicitly feminist movement as an exclusionary bourgeois by-product, the self-indulgent agenda of privileged middle- or upper-class women.¹¹ Not unlike women activists in various third world countries, Russian women were historically conditioned to scorn the presumably middle-class bias of feminism and its seemingly extravagant emphasis on individual fulfillment — especially in light of the material hardships and deficits continually plaguing Russian society.

Moreover, while seventy-odd years of Soviet rule certainly legislated the public image of the happy working woman, its less publicized realities shaped very different desires and goals in its female citizens. The “paper rights” issued to Soviet women guaranteed them an equal status and professional access unprecedented (and still unmatched) in the Western world, but, imposed as they were on an uninvolved populace, these laws neither produced nor were the product of a widespread social revolution. The “right to work” was extended more as responsibility than empowerment, and after a rather chaotic period of social experimentation in the 1920s, Soviet women were left with a monstrous double burden: the state tacitly endorsed their traditional assignment of housework and child care but invested minimal resources in supporting and supplying the domestic sphere.¹² For all the official rhetoric of equality between the sexes, essentialist notions of men’s and women’s capabilities and roles went unchallenged in daily practice and general social and cultural attitudes, with men and the “masculine” valued as the universal and most accomplished norm, and women and the “feminine” regarded as more limited, secondary, and often second-rate.

Yet, contrary to Western expectations, this double burden and practical inequality did not foment any sizable feminist campaign for a domestic revolution. Instead, the eventual binary opposition of Stalinist state versus society — that determiner of all value — generated an almost inverted scenario. Due to the perils and political compromises of public life and a successful “career” in the Stalinist system, the domestic sphere and family life came to be cherished, even by the women who labored there, as a site of psychological and moral refuge. Indeed, Tolstaia argues that Soviet women, more than Soviet men, were able to “remain human” precisely on account of their domestic attachments: “They tried to protect their own little space from the influence of the state. They locked themselves in with family and children.”¹³ In direct contrast to the many Western women who struggled to escape a devalued home into a powerful professional and political world, many Soviet women (and men) sought sanctuary and fulfillment in the less monitored world of family and friends, a domestic space that was far more capacious and stimulating than obligatory work or meaningless politics.¹⁴ And while the political landscape has changed in the post-Soviet era, I would argue that the moral onus on public life has not diminished, but grown more complex — directed now against ineffectual politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. For Russian women today, the “return to the home” will certainly limit their political clout and professional options, but it may also constitute a kind of self-investment, a long-overdue vacation, even a moral act of dissociation.

In much the same way, this powerful opposition conditioned Soviet women’s very different approach to another Western target — the objectification and commodification of women. Over the years the state promoted political icons of Soviet womanhood (the good mother, the heroic shockworker) that invoked carefully maternal and/or maidenly chaste constructions of femininity; these icons implicitly defined and critiqued “bourgeois” constructions that cultivated a fashionable beauty or sexual desirability. At the same time, the state’s material neglect of the domestic sphere also limited the production of specialized goods and services for women, including fashion and beauty products. These kinds of goods were obtainable mainly through illegal means and Party connections; they were coveted as emblems of unusual status, even subversive display. To a certain extent, therefore, Soviet women construed the image of the commodified woman as a goal rather than a target, an image valorized by both political censure and material lack. Of course, the commodification of Soviet women did reproduce the degradation and exploitation more explicit in its Western forms; Soviet women were as susceptible as any other group to a manipulative “beauty myth.” Yet in the absence of a capitalist market their extreme preoccupation with “looking feminine” (read bourgeois feminine) and obtaining hard-to-get makeup and stylish clothes also signified a personalized triumph over state-imposed norms and consumer priorities. Among her peers, the Soviet woman who managed a bourgeois feminine image without bourgeois advantages (in her context, Party ties) was admirable and enviable for her pragmatic ingenuity — her savvy and daring in manipulating various “private” and even illegal connections. As Elizabeth Waters remarks in an article on Soviet beauty contests, such attitudes very likely help fuel the current enthusiasm for beauty pageants and the seemingly unruffled public response to the new capitalist exploitation of women.¹⁵ She notes the “political statement encoded” in these contests and ascribes their visibility to “the long-frustrated desire for Western style, the sudden emergence of the market, and the freedom granted by glasnost to break old taboos, to explore femininity and sexuality.” At least in this transitional period, the market value recently tagged on women’s beauty and sexual desirability still resonates with an unofficial desire, a past quest in which women did not simply consume a prescribed ideal, but exercised their own creativity and constructed their own “unofficial” (if still convention-bound) self-image.

Yet the dominance of this state/society opposition, with its attendant material priorities, has wielded a reductive impact as well. Material shortages may have lent a “subversive” aspect to women’s commodification, but the combination of shortages, conservative social attitudes, and an historical tradition of women’s self-sacrifice has had a very negative effect on Soviet women’s well-being — most particularly, on their access to safe, progressive modes of contraception and maternity care.¹⁶ As Larissa Remennick notes in a recent study, “IA [induced abortion] has been the principal means of birth control” in the Soviet Union for the last forty years and IA-related mortality rates are shockingly high (10.09 deaths per 10,000 abortions in the USSR as opposed to 0.6 deaths in the US).¹⁷ Contraceptives have always been in short supply; perhaps more surprisingly, sex education has tended to encourage abortion over contraception as “a chosen birth control strategy.” Maternity care has varied in quality depending on location, but it has been standard Soviet practice to segregate mothers from their partners and families and to deny women a choice of options during labor and childbirth.¹⁸ Even as it assigned women sole responsibility for their newborns, the Soviet medical establishment invariably treated these mothers as patients, “not person[s].” Summarizing their analysis of Soviet maternity care, Barbara Holland and Teresa McKevitt identify the bitter paradox of Soviet motherhood: “Though in theory the state acknowledges that giving birth is a contribution to society and that mothers are owed respect and support, in practice women undergo lonely, unsupported and powerless labours” (173).¹⁹

Less overtly, the siege mentality resulting from decades of political opposition (either against a hostile outside world or a hostile state) has also censored women’s exploration and expression of their sexuality. In certain specifics, official icons have permeated the general Russian mindset: the role of the good mother still seems to dictate most Russian women’s ideal. The uniform model of a virtuous heterosexual woman — the chaste and maternal Party worker, the chaste and maternal dissident — has obstructed the emergence and acceptance of more diversified roles, nontraditional life-styles. It is characteristic that lesbians and bisexuals are not even “seen” in Russian society. Historically, they have surfaced in the criminalized margins of prisons and labor camps (although, unlike gay men, their sexuality was not recognized in the penal code), but most have opted to blend in with the heterosexual majority, to avoid attracting official and unofficial disapproval of their difference.²⁰ While this homogeneity may be challenged in present-day Russia, a patriarchal and conservative hierarchy of “causes” is likely to endure, at least over the next decade, as the most powerful force shaping Russian women’s self-worth and political engagement.²¹