Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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
COMMON MARKET, COMMON CAUSE?
Grass-roots protest versus mandated change, insistence on individual rights and fulfillment versus self-sacrifice for presumably greater “causes,” career prospects versus obligatory work, domestic entrapment versus domestic refuge, commodification versus improvisation, a constantly generative factionalism versus an all-determining opposition — these are the sorts of historical differences that have jammed communications between Western and Russian women. In predictable consequence, these differences have also stymied exchange between scholars of Western cultures and Slavists in the West. The latter group has developed very much under the influence of successive generations of Russian emigré scholars, has become accustomed to regarding the Russian experience as singular and (at times) exemplary, and is especially wary about applying theories and premises based on Western contexts. As a result, many Slavists have been altogether reluctant to recognize gender (not to speak of sexuality) as an influential category of identity, experience, and perception. Their resistance (stiffened at times by a complacent isolationism) has complicated and retarded scholarly and curricular attempts to mediate between the worlds of Western and Russian women.
Yet now that the Soviet system has collapsed and Western and Russian politics and economies seem to be converging (academic convergence struggling to keep pace), we might at last entertain hopes for a more informed, mutually intelligible dialogue. Certainly the Russians seem more avid right now for Western goods, more alert to helpful voices in the present cacophony of Western advisors and opportunists. And the need for better, more nuanced translation has never seemed so urgent. Even making allowances for any first world bias, it is striking how much the new Russian powers-that-be are measurably diminishing or demoting women in their shift from socialist state to capitalist nation and their concomitant selection and adaptation of various Western “imports.” Women’s “paper rights” are even now being erased. The new Russian government has already “omitted the legal guarantees of equality for women in the workplace” in its draft constitution; women’s representation in the new Russian parliament has dropped precipitously from a once mandated 33 percent to 10 percent; and Yeltsin and other male leaders, by word and example, encourage the old patriarchal distribution of men in politics and women in the home.22 Lipovskaia characterizes these trends as “the emergence of so-called ‘male democracy,’ in which women, long associated with the home, are simply not seen in this newly emerging society.”23
The economic situation of Russian women is even grimmer. Not only has the rocky transition to a “free market” exacerbated women’s double burden to inconceivable extremes, but it has generated what I would call, embellishing on Lipovskaia’s example, a kind of “macho capitalism” dominated by young male entrepreneurs (the so-called “millionaires’ club”), ex-members of the old Soviet nomenklatura, and mafia-like networks of extortion and enforcement. Although some women have emerged as entrepreneurs, their businesses, according to one witness, tend to be “small and scarce” and their owners “less successful because they’re more law-abiding.”24 This “masculinization” of private enterprise revives one traditional fiction of man as the more competitive, capable, committed (i.e., undistracted by childbirth and children) employee and evokes corresponding fictions and job descriptions of woman as helpmate — as homemaker or whore. After decades of recruitment into the labor force, women workers are being laid off in large numbers, and in many cases, from more prestigious, higher-earning jobs. Posadskaia gives an eyewitness account of this metamorphosis:
The Soviet pattern was that a woman first got an education, then a lifelong job and finally a pension. … It was very stable and secure. Now all this pattern is smashed. Women make up 70 percent of the unemployed. And of these unemployed women, 85 percent have higher or specialized educations. Now the placement officers say they should be cleaners or nurses, the lowest-paid, least prestigious jobs. They say women under 18 or over 45 should not be trained or retrained, because there are no jobs for them. The paradigms of women’s lives are changing. Why should they get a higher education? Most of those losing their jobs are engineers in construction or chemistry, for example.25
Much like current Russian translations of “democracy” and “capitalism,” the extant translation and adaptation of “free speech” also conveys the privileging of men’s desires and value at women’s expense. In the most flamboyant example, the “free speech” of glasnost has led to “freer” representations of sex and sexuality, but, as Helena Goscilo deftly argues in her essay “New Members and Organs: The Politics of Porn,” the new erotica is mainly heterosexual and male-oriented in its focus, projecting for male delectation images of naked or scantily clad, provocatively posed women in all sorts of public fora — television, taxicabs, the mainstream press, commercial advertising.26 Through the media of the new Russian market, sexual freedom is being purveyed as a heterosexist male prerogative, with women enjoined to consume their own commodification as a means of earning value in men’s eyes.27
Again (as I must remind myself), such new contextual developments may forever elicit responses in Russian women that differ from what Western feminists (and especially socialist feminists) may expect or presume. But what is particularly frustrating about this moment in Russian history is that we may feel we recognize these “new” commercial manipulations and social values, that we know best the strategies and consequences of capitalism, and it therefore behooves us to play Cassandra, warning Russian women of the feminine mystique, yellow wallpaper, and Stepford wives to come. We can cite chapter and verse: scholars working from Western models have outlined certain scripts of women’s devaluation and manipulation under capitalism — their designation as consumer and consumable, the commercial exploitation and careful political containment of their images and desires. We seem to anticipate and perhaps even hope that the same sorts of scripts will unfold in a newly capitalist Russia, so that our expertise might be of value and use.
Yet before we presume one kind of oppression and impose solidarity, we might admit the complexity and possible variation of such scripts. Despite the inequities and ravages of capitalism (or, for that matter, the hidden privileges of democracy), women have not only been made its victims and unwitting accomplices, but have managed to work the system to gain political and economic power. Rather than reprise the role of gloomy prophet, we in the West might help Russian women explore this