Living Gender after Communism
280
Living Gender after Communism
280Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253348128 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2006 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Living Gender after Communism
By Janet Elise Johnson, Jean C. Robinson
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34812-8
CHAPTER 1
Housewife Fantasies, Family Realities in the New Russia
Tania Rands Lyon
Since the early 1990s, the Western press has published a regular flow of articles about the changing gender climate in the former Soviet Union. These articles describe Russian women finding a high-earning husband and becoming the bored, beauty salon–hopping housewives of the new rich, or signing up in droves for international matchmaking services. Popular media and survey data reveal that an overwhelming majority of both men and women believe in the supremacy of what Westerners would consider "traditional" gender roles: man as breadwinner, woman as homemaker. Russians generally presume these kinds of masculinity and femininity to be natural and rarely appear to question them.
A wave of academic literature from Western and Eastern feminists also emerged in the early to mid-1990s critiquing the apparent resurgence of patriarchy in Eastern Europe. Most of these scholars agree that the proliferation of "traditional" gender norms in the late 1980s and 1990s was part of a backlash against Soviet models of androgynous worker-women and the blurring of sex roles. Many see this as evidence that Soviet policies spread only a thin veneer of "equality" over the entrenched patriarchy of pre-Revolutionary Russia, leaving a patriarchal culture to reemerge virtually unscathed after 1991.
Unquestionably, women suffered setbacks during the transition period of the 1990s, and views about the natural supremacy of men have become more overtly pervasive in Russia's media. Argue, however, that the impact of Soviet egalitarian policies and rhetoric has not dissolved with the collapse of the Communist Party and its ideology. Using survey data and in-depth interviews with both husbands and wives in Saratov, a fairly typical midsize Russian city, I find that in lengthy conversations and in the decisions they make for their lives, Russians do not consistently adhere to the opinions they express in more abstract written survey questions. This study of gender roles and work-family choices of men and women in the context of parenthood suggests that a Post-Soviet backlash has not crowded the Soviet icons of sexual equality or of the woman-worker completely off the shelves of available gender role models. Few women are interested in giving up work altogether, and Russian men rarely exercise the kind of patriarchal authority in the home that they claim in survey responses to uphold. I argue that the Post-Soviet gender culture is characterized by a multiplicity of competing gender role models, including both "traditional" and "Soviet," and is influenced by a freer flowing traffic in ideas and images from around the globe. I find empirical evidence of women negotiating gender — shifting in and out of different gender "gears" — within this neotraditionalist gender culture. Russia's "patriarchal renaissance" is not as monolithic as some initially feared and described, and within certain limits, women are actively experimenting with the combination of gender models that suits them best. Moreover, their experimentation is itself hinged on the more rigid role of men as providers, a role that has been emphasized as part of that "renaissance." For both men and women, regardless of their support for neotraditional values, they negotiate their roles, make sacrifices, and experiment with new modes of work, in order to address both personal and family needs. This study examines the interconnectedness of male and female gender roles, going beyond the literature's previous emphasis on women's experiences.
In the chapter, I first clarify my terms, "traditional gender roles" and "Soviet gender roles," and describe in more detail the Soviet gender legacy. Second, I summarize the impact of the transition on women and men, highlighting neotraditional gender expectations' role strain on men . Then, I detail my data and methods and explore how these role strains are played out in the families I interviewed, demonstrating the disconnect between dominant gender beliefs and common gender strategies as men and women negotiate their family roles in a time of transition. I show that while on the surface there is much support for gender traditionalism, probing deeper reveals less traditional views and behaviors. I conclude with a discussion of how these trends may impact Russia's evolving gender culture.
Russian and Soviet Gender Roles
To Westerners, the phrase "traditional gender roles" is understood to mean men as public actors and heads of families and women as primary caretakers for homes and families. I use the term "traditional" in the Russian context to evoke similar images: it legitimately refers back to the dominant discourse on proper gender roles in pre-Revolutionary Russia, which projected "a domestic and maternalist ideal of womanhood" in both religious and secular writings. There are deep parallels between the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity developed in the West and its adoption into the upper classes of Russian society, where it settled as the discursive ideal for Russian women in general. At the same time, as Johnson and Robinson outline in the introduction to this volume, the pervasive neotraditional approach to appropriate roles for men and women is also informed and shaped by the experiences of Soviet socialism.
By "Soviet gender roles," I do not refer to the lived reality of gendered life in the Soviet Union, which was saturated with essentialist assumptions about male and female nature and often exhausting role conflict for women. I mean it rather to evoke the Soviet rhetoric emphasizing equality between the sexes (at work and in marriage), the deep link forged between identity and work for both men and women, and in particular the idealized dual worker-mother role of women.
This Soviet gender rhetoric was situated within a complex approach to gender. Given the extensive documentation and analysis already in print of dominant gender norms during the Soviet period, I refer here only briefly to this Soviet gender legacy. In short, although official emphasis on women's roles as workers in the productive labor force often expanded and contracted under pressure from the state's economic and demographic needs, women's dominant role in the domestic sphere was left unquestioned. As women were constantly working to balance between the productive and reproductive worlds, men's prescribed roles as breadwinners and heads of household remained relatively static. At the same time, women grew less dependent on men's income because of wage leveling, their own working status, and the growing state supports offered to women and children. Thus, men's roles were undermined in both material and symbolic terms by the dominant role of the state in both public and private spheres, while women consistently retained a measure of influence, power, and legitimacy in their homes. The range of acceptable roles for women to adopt was broader than that for men in Soviet times.
Beginning gradually with perestroika in the 1980s and accelerating rapidly through the 1990s, the state has relinquished its monopoly over economic and social life. Given its powerful influence in gender relations during the Soviet period, the receding state has, as Johnson and Robinson argue, now left new space for gender role negotiation. The transition to a market economy is also changing the perceived relative value of family and work spheres, with paid work gaining greater prestige over domestic work. This revaluing has different impacts on men and on women.
Men and Women in Transition
International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and feminist observers are practically unanimous in their assessment that the transitions following the collapse of the Soviet Union have been especially unfavorable to women as a group. The most obvious erosion of women's status in Russia can be seen in women's relative disappearance from political life, their disproportionate numbers among the newly unemployed and the poor, and the eroding value and availability of social supports for women and children. Because these negative impacts on women have been well documented, the following section will focus more on how men have fared in transition. I then explore implications of these outcomes on strategizing gender roles within families.
Although they have been less likely than women to lose their jobs (especially in the early 1990s), men too have certainly suffered from high unemployment rates and severe wage arrears in the state sector. But they have faced other, more gender-specific pressures. The heavy-handed paternalistic Soviet state emasculated men as public actors by discouraging individual initiative and as heads of households by eroding their roles as primary providers in their families. Now, with the retreat of the state and a greater emphasis on a more traditional division of labor, men are suddenly expected to provide single-handedly for their families in an economic climate that has favored only a small minority and in which a single earner for the family is rarely sufficient to maintain the standard of living, much less to advance it. How can a Russian man attain the ideal of patriarchal head if he cannot support his family? Most Russian men have no experience with unemployment or with the difficult burden of finding new work in a choked economy. This is not the world they were educated or trained for. The toll of the transition on men can be read in the well-documented higher levels of alcoholism and higher crime and suicide rates. It is also reflected in the alarming drop in life expectancy for men relative to women since 1990. (It may also be documented in increasingly high levels of domestic abuse by husbands of wives, as the patriarchal power of the husband/father has been newly accentuated. See Johnson in chapter 2 for more on this.)
While men are primarily expected to fill the financial resource gap left by crumbling Soviet supports, women who "fail" in the workplace can blame the economic crisis and still derive a sense of identity and purpose from their role in the home. In some ways women have more options in this new context than do men. The wife of a busy surgeon, who curtailed her own medical career to handle the housework and child care, asserted:
Work is always more important for a man's sense of self. A woman can prepare a good meal and make a family and that can be her self-affirmation. But for a man, self-esteem is his work, so of course he'll spend more time there. (Radiologist, mother of one)
Even though women have been the more expendable and malleable labor force, subject to mobilization according to state needs, their very mobility has also bequeathed them a broader gender-role base from which to derive their sense of identity. Women may face greater structural constraints in the new economy — most notably, options for pursuing meaningful careers — but they also have a wider range of gender models to choose from (as well as greater complexity and more options for gratification within each model) as they strategize gendered choices. Men have a more confined range of role models and less culturally accepted flexibility in choosing a gender strategy. Their more singular role of provider is relatively rigid and clearly defined, as well as being more dependent on external factors such as the economy. This leaves men more vulnerable to falling short of gender ideals and expectations than are women.
Data and Methods
To support and elaborate this argument, I draw on field research conducted in Saratov, Russia, in 1998 and 2000. I chose Saratov — a midsize city (population approximately one million) located on the Volga River about 250 miles south of Moscow — in an effort to capture the "typical" Russian urban experience. While Moscow and St. Petersburg have cultural and economic histories that make them unique in many ways, Saratov, in size, economy, and industrial makeup, is much more similar to the average Russian city.
The heart of the data consists of in-depth oral interviews and written questionnaire responses garnered from a core sample of twenty married couples with children. The extensive time I spent with each family provided a richness of data impossible to attain in survey data or in one-time sampling. I interviewed each spouse privately and then both as a couple. I spent hours in each household, often stopping by for unexpected visits (many households lacked telephones). In many cases, the lengthy interview process evolved into participant observation, and I spent weekends with families at their dachas, attended cultural events or church services with them, toured their workplaces, and visited socially in their homes. Interacting consistently with these families over the course of many months, including follow-up visits two years after the initial interviews, allowed me to observe fluctuations in their employment, living conditions, spousal relations, and family arrangements.
I chose to limit my sample to married couples with at least one child who was about 9–10 years old: these parents would have raised their children through the rapid social change of the 1990s. It was also important to me to include only opposite-sex, dual-parent homes in order to explore the issue of gender role negotiation in families considered the ideal. I located a few of the couples through networks of acquaintances. Most of my sample, however, I recruited directly by attending parents' meetings for third-grade classes in four different schools. I selected schools in different neighborhoods and with differing levels of competitiveness and cost in order to access parents from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. This stratified sampling method yielded an interview pool that reflected about 50 percent struggling low-income families, 25 percent more stable, surviving families, and 25 percent wealthier and more upwardly mobile families.
Because my sample could not be random, I allow for sampling biases. Since I was dependent on participants' willingness to donate many hours of their time for long interviews, I may have selected for parents with an interest in talking about their lives, which could have biased my sample toward more stable and happy marriages than the average. In two cases, however, couples were separated or divorced when I followed up two years later. Secondly, because I was a foreigner asking to come into their homes, I may have selected for Russians with greater trust, openness, curiosity, income, and education than average. On the other hand, my data may have benefited from the "stranger on the train" syndrome. Train travel in compartments of four to six people is extremely common in Russia, and Russians often joke that they might tell a stranger on the train more than they ever would tell someone close to them. As an outsider passing through their lives only temporarily, to many I represented a safe ear to hear otherwise private information.
My data for this paper therefore consists of published material gathered in Moscow, Saratov, and the United States, field notes from participant observation, and transcripts of the tape recordings of every interview with my core sample of forty parents. I hired native Russian speakers to transcribe these interviews in order to minimize errors and misunderstandings, after which I translated the bulk of the texts into English and coded them by theme. In order to preserve confidentiality, I have changed the names of the participants.
My use of qualitative methods to provide a close-up view of a handful of couples in a single city comes with the usual strengths and weaknesses of that approach. Although my sample size is too small to generalize broadly to all of Russia, my in-depth data suggest important realities within families that are not easily captured in large-scale surveys. My findings are designed to reveal crucial questions and sensitize future research on the postcommunist gender climate.
Gender Beliefs versus Gender Strategies
My survey of twenty couples reflected the traditional and essentialist discourse on gender that many observers have argued characterizes postcommunism. The support of traditional gender roles — men as the rightful primary actors in the public sphere and women as the primary caretakers of the hearth and home — was evident when I asked respondents to what extent they agreed with the following statement: "It is better for all family members if the husband provides for the basic material needs of the family and the wife cares for the home and the children" (see table 1.1). Overwhelmingly, both husbands and wives agreed, and only two respondents, both women, disagreed with this statement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Living Gender after Communism by Janet Elise Johnson, Jean C. Robinson. Copyright © 2007 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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