Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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Our role seems clearest in terms of intellectual collaboration. In the first place, we must pursue more extensive and diverse literal translation, supplying information and texts about the wide variety of gender issues and the wide variety of women’s experiences and accomplishments in different cultures that remain untranslated and largely unavailable to a Russian audience; we must help subsidize those in-country publications, like Lipovskaia’s Zhenskoe chtenie, that have already undertaken this mammoth task. We must invest more concertedly in that other, trickier sort of translation — the development and sharing of gender-aware scholarly analyses and teaching materials focused on Russian texts and contexts. While it has been somewhat useful to export various feminist classics, the very language and premises of these texts often make them alien or indigestible reading for a Russian audience. It is far more productive, I think, when we can discuss and debate issues and analyses on common con/textual ground. Above all, we must create venues for dialogue with Russian women and men through both academic and popular conferences, exchanges, and publications.
The next steps in this collaboration are infinitely harder because they require big bucks, insider access, and a constant self-monitoring.28 In our interactions with the second world we need to strike a careful balance between an exclusionary insistence on women’s needs and concerns (the historical Achilles heel of liberal Western feminisms) and the rapid, largely unchecked erasure and devaluation of those needs and concerns in the new Russia. The point of our efforts — whether they take place on paper, in institutional fora, or on the street — should be to keep these issues and concerns visible and to offer sample scenarios of women’s successful involvement and achievement. It is important that we finance more contingents of women professionals, politicians, and activists to be alternative voices among the advising hordes of retired American executives and Jeffrey Sachs clones. It is imperative, too, that we develop and support specific working exchanges between a wide variety of American and Russian women’s groups, that together we establish a carefully reciprocal networking and pooling of resources and expertise.29 Whatever methods we can manage, it is clear that Russian women can learn much from Western women’s struggles to participate in and reform different capitalist and democratic systems. In equal turn, Western women can learn much from Russian women’s long experience balancing the multiple burdens of family, home, and job and their effective involvement with other social and political causes. In any event, if we wish to keep the border open and friendly, it is high time we bug inspectors exchange our respective clipboards and “rigid manner” for an open mind, a ready ear, and a briefcase stuffed with concrete possibilities, and, whenever possible, hard cash.
NOTES
A first version of this essay was presented at a March 1993 conference entitled “Rethinking the Second World” and sponsored by the University of California at Santa Cruz. My thanks to Stephanie Jed, Nicole Tonkovich, Pasquale Verdicchio, and Winnie Woodhull for their criticism and comments on subsequent versions; the mistakes remain my own.
1. Tat’iana Tolstaia, “Notes from Underground,” (a review of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope), New York Review of Books, May 31, 1990: 3.
2. See Barbara Alpern Engel, “An Interview with Olga Lipovskaia,” Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989): 6–10; Ol’ga Lipovskaia, “New Women’s Organisations,” in Perestroika and Soviet Women, ed. Mary Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 73–74.
3. Andrew Kopkind, “What Is to Be Done?: From Russia with Love and Squalor,” Nation, January 18, 1993, vol. 256, no. 2, 50, 55.
4. Elizabeth Shogren, “Russia’s Equality Erosion,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1993, 1.
5. Jo Anna Isaak, “Reflections of Resistance: Women Artists on Both Sides of the M/V,” Heresies, special Russian/English bilingual edition entided Idiom’s, no. 26 (1992): 9–10: “Like many letters of the Russian alphabet that seem reversed to us, the ways in which ‘woman’ is represented is frequently the mirror inversion of the representation of woman in the West. In looking at the image of women on the other side of this mirror, we have an opportunity (almost as we could with computer image programming) to see how our lot would differ if our image was different.”
6. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction” to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 7.
7. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” the most updated and modified version of which is reprinted in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 52–80.
8. In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1992), Kumari Jayawardena does frame a more textured reading of this interaction, noting that “[t]he concept of feminism has also been the cause of much confusion in Third World countries” — scorned as a foreign or “bourgeois” product by “traditionalists, political conservatives and even certain leftists” and claimed as a solely Western phenomenon by North Americans and Western Europeans (2).
9. Barbara Holland, “Introduction,” to Soviet Sisterhood, ed. Barbara Holland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 23.
10. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 191. For a perceptive analysis of women’s participation in the Russian revolutionary underground, see Barbara Alpern Engel’s Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
11. See Laura Engelstein’s nuanced analysis of the distinction between Russian and Western societies in the late nineteenth century: “But although they [the Russians] adopted the liberal ideal of the autonomous subject, they often rejected the Western bourgeois regard for self-interest and the goal of self-fulfillment.” In The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4.
12. In Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), Mary Buckley provides a very useful overview of women’s situation in the various periods of Soviet history.
13. Tat’iana Tolstaia with Irena Martyniak, “The Human Spirit Is Androgynous,” Index on Censorship 19, no. 9 (October 1990): 29.
14. See Vladimir Shlapentokh’s study, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Shlapentokh argues that after Stalin’s death there ensued a process of “privatization” or “destatization” (14) in which the state gradually lost authority “over all strata of the population” (153) and the Soviet people shifted their interest “from the state to their primary groups (family, friends, and lovers) and to semilegal and illegal civil society as well as to illegal activity inside the public sector” (13).
15. Elizabeth Waters, “Soviet Beauty Contests,” in Sex and Russian Society, ed. Igor Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118, 132.
16. Russian commentator Nadia Kakurina identifies this historical tradition of self-sacrifice, dubbing it “the oppressive power of pity”; while she admits that “[t]here is … something deeply moving and decent about [women’s] tactful lack of emphasis on their own needs,” she recognizes the hazards of such self-denial. “The oppressive power of pity: Russian women and self-censorship,” Index on Censorship 19, no. 9 (October 1990): 28–29.
17. Larissa I. Remennick, “Patterns of Birth Control,” in Kon and Riordan, Sex and Russian Society, 45–63.
18. Barbara Holland and Teresa McKevitt, “Maternity Care in the Soviet Union,” in Holland, Soviet Sisterhood, 145–76. Holland and McKevitt base their analysis in part on interviews with Soviet women.
19. Yelena Shafran’s 26 January 1994 article