Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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the rising number of Russian women who yearn to be full-time homemakers or aspire no further than the very often prone position of “secretary to a biznesman who earns hard currency” (50). In an article of 11 February 1993 for the Los Angeles Times, Elizabeth Shogren simply frames her survey of Russian women in Western terms, stating that these women “[b]y their own choice and because of mounting new social pressures … are less liberated, in the feminist sense, than they were when the Communist Party ruled the country.”4 Even Shogren’s Russian source, the social anthropologist Irina Popova, seemingly relies on American analogies: “Russian society is going through a phase similar to that in 1950s America, when homemakers and wholesome stars were idealized, … but because of a rebellion against the state-decreed sexual puritanism of the Soviet era, the ideal Russian woman is more sex kitten than homecoming queen.”
All of these attempted border crossings, with whatever intent or audience in mind, underscore the real difficulties of translating and transposing even a mainstream Western awareness of gender issues into the Russian (or generally Slavic) context. As one observer remarks, such crossings are liable to produce a kind of “mirror inversion” of images: Whereas Russian women sight the bogeywoman of doctrinaire or self-involved Western feminists, Western women lament what is for them the inexplicable “backwardness” of Russian women retreating to the home or readily consenting to play well-paid male sex object.5 This mutual misunderstanding seems especially pointed today, but it has existed for decades and pervades both popular attitudes and presumably more complex and considered trends in scholarship. I can offer myself as witness and accessory to this phenomenon. As an American woman trained to be a Slavist and beginning my teaching career in the late 1980s (when women’s studies programs were being established throughout the American university system), I have experienced these border troubles firsthand and at length. Already minted as a traditional scholar, I only learned about gender studies “on the job” from patient colleagues in other fields, and much to my surprised delight, this exposure revitalized and transformed my own research and teaching. Yet I quickly discovered that the integration of gender studies into Slavic studies involved complicated acts of translation and adaptation — acts that distanced me somewhat from my colleagues in women’s studies and for the most part disaffected or bemused my Slavist colleagues. As I have taught and written my way back and forth across this border, I have come to appreciate that the misunderstanding between Western women and Russian women and, by extension, the recurring difficulties of integrating gender studies into Slavic studies, stem from complex differences between first and second worlds, between two very separate contexts of experience, expectation, and expression. This essay attempts only a utilitarian sketch of these border troubles mainly drawn from a first world angle and focused on a limited number of examples, but it provides, hopefully, a somewhat experienced traveler’s “tips” for making a friendly border crossing, a mutually informed and transformative exchange with women in postcommunist Russia.
WHOSE FEMINISM?
When Shogren speaks of Russian women “being less liberated, in a feminist sense,” when Kopkind records the absence of a feminist movement, or when I glibly introduce the term “gender studies,” we cannot presume a common ideology, but we seem to rely on a common heritage — one founded mainly on the experience of certain privileged groups of Western women and especially manifest in Western feminist movements of the late 1960s. This is not to claim that Shogren, Kopkind, and I represent the broad spectrum of extant Western feminisms or to argue that these feminisms can be reduced to a 1960s agenda. But if we are not to generalize our historical experience (especially when we are assaying comparisons with non-Western women), then it is imperative that we acknowledge the long-lasting formative influence (both positive and negative) of that earlier agenda and its regional context. The 1960s movements largely formed in protest against the situation of middle-class white women in advanced capitalist states — specifically, against their socially assigned and enforced roles as wife, mother, and homemaker; the legal and actual inequities in their professional, social, and economic status as compared with that of middle-class white men; and the general exploitation and commodification of women as objects of desire. Predictably enough, when feminist scholarship furthered this protest, it focused first on its own “first” conditions and articulators — on the models, experiences, and works of privileged first world women. This specialized focus prevailed for some time, as did the notion of gender as the unifying category of identity, subsuming other categories like race, class, or sexuality.
Over the last quarter of a century, this bias has provoked much protest, factionalism, and metamorphosis among Western women’s groups; internal debate has facilitated a dismantling of traditional presumptions about gender and sexual identity, a greater acknowledgment of class and race differences, the generation of a plurality of feminisms. But despite the attempts of Western feminists to theorize and accommodate difference, we face perhaps the greatest challenge in relating to non-Western women, for such relations require the negotiation of the most complex differences and antagonisms and suffer most acutely from tendencies to generalize the local and stereotype the other. To date, this challenge has been most vividly illustrated and amply studied in relations between first world and third world women. It seems particularly telling that, at least in the early stages of their inquiry, critics writing from third world perspectives asserted regional bias rather than plurality in their readings of Western women; they critiqued Western feminists in general for “shortsightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class white experiences, and in terms of internal racism, classism, and homophobia.”6 Elaborating this position in her pioneering essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty charges that Western feminists’ presumption of gender as the main source of identity, oppression, and therefore solidarity “implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally” and establishes middle-class white Western women as a “normative referent” against which women of other races, classes, and especially third world nations seem lacking or “underdeveloped.”7
However debatable her position, Mohanty’s protest and critique should alert us to the possibility of a similar “early” dynamic between first world and second world women.8 If relations between Western feminists and women in the postcolonial world sometimes recall (or are perceived to recall) the blind opposition of Western imperialism versus colonial resistance, Western approaches to Slavic women can be read as similarly myopic, if somewhat less condescending. Certainly conditions were ripe for miscommunication. By the late twentieth century, decades of cold war politics and Stalinist repression had curiously distorted relations between Soviet women and a wide array of Western feminist groups; in both “camps,” the propaganda deployed to demonize the “other” superpower often inadvertently fostered a kind of blinkered idealization. From the vantage point of Western women (even liberal feminists), the public gains of Soviet women under socialism seemed undeniable — the Soviet constitution’s guarantee of women’s equal professional and economic rights, the access of Soviet women to most areas of the work force, the state’s at least partial support for working women (paid maternity leave, public day care). In turn, Western focus on these coveted achievements at times obscured or dismissed the special problems of Soviet women (their unrelieved domestic labor, the lack of consumer goods and services that would ease their domestic burden, the political victimization they shared with men). In fact, in her introduction to Soviet Sisterhood in 1985, Barbara Holland readily admits Western feminists’ self-serving nostalgia for the “new Soviet woman” of the 1920s, that almost-realized socialist feminist:
Feminists in the West may feel nostalgic for the determined pioneers of the past who, their red kerchiefs firmly knotted round their heads, climbed into the driving seat of a tractor or picked up a shovel on a building site. We may be hurt by the ridicule now attached to these images by Soviet women, themselves anxious to buy our fashionable jeans and dresses, and leave their dirty overalls behind.9
It seems predictable, then, that this sort of nostalgia would elicit protest, debate, and correspondingly reductive readings from the Russian side. It is interesting to note that a Russian feminist (Anastasiia Posadskaia quoted by Kopkind) redirects Mohanty’s