Women, Resistance and Revolution (27 page)

Women have clung on to the two aspects of emancipation for which Russian women are noted in the west – the right to work and welfare facilities for the children. Indeed, emancipation has come to be defined as the right to work – a narrow definition but still an important one. The editor of the journal
Soviet Woman
, Olga Ushakova, said in an interview in
The Times
in 1966, ‘Work is so important to us, we cannot imagine life without it.’ Another member of the editorial staff, Rodkina, said, ‘None of us want to stay at home, not even if our husband earns a million.’
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Round the fact of a female labour force and the encouragement of large families a whole network of welfare and community services have developed: leave for both mothers and fathers, arrangements for jobs to be held open during pregnancy, part-time work in factories, crèches on the premises and breaks at work for seeing the children, as well as other extensive nursery facilities and shopping hours arranged for working women. With half the working population women the need for these is apparent. Indeed, the demand exceeds the supply. They are still not adequate. Some children can’t get into the nurseries and mothers are forced to make private arrangements. Facilities for dry cleaning and laundries too don’t exist in some small towns and villages.
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Related to the work situation too is the improvement in the education of women. This is partly at the level of literacy, but there has also been an impressive rise in the numbers of women who receive higher education. The proportion of women to men varies by occupation. Women predominate in the health services and in education.
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They have also invaded the ‘masculine’ domains of engineering and science. Some have penetrated into the most complex and highly sophisticated forms of scientific work. Alla Masevich, for instance, chairman of the sputnik tracking group of the International Committee for Space Research, received a symbolic passport at a congress of astronomers recently: ‘A place has been reserved for you on one of the astro-ships which will be sent to the moon. In view of your services to science you will be allowed to move freely about cosmic space and to visit any planet.’
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Although the revolution is able to grant access to the moon to its women it is still not able to eradicate many of the features of the old
inferiority. They are prominent in jobs which reflect ‘women’s role’, and a high proportion of women are in the unskilled sector of industry. The importance of piece-work makes equal pay a reality on paper only. In some factories the average rate for female turners and machine-operators works out considerably lower than that for men on the same jobs. In the last few years there has been discussion about this, and the difficulty of women in industry in being promoted. While men argue that the system operates according to merit and regardless of sex differences, women point out that this tends to reinforce itself. A writer in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
in 1967 maintained that women reached managerial and supervisory posts six or seven times less frequently than men: ‘This practice means, apart from everything else, that a woman’s average earnings are less than a man’s, her creative development is arrested, and she acquires a “female inferiority complex”, a lack of self-confidence.’
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Evelyne Sullerot in
Histoire et Sociologie du Travail Feminin
, describes how this process is reflected too in the relatively small percentage of women in positions of leadership in the party, the unions and in industry, though even these are high compared with the west.

Undoubtedly, despite welfare facilities many women hesitate to try for jobs which demand total commitment and carry important responsibilities, for in the family Soviet women find themselves in an ambiguous situation. Often they are doing two jobs. Four mothers who work in a ballbearing factory in Sarutov wrote to a Russian paper in 1960 complaining about just this: ‘In the factory we work like our husbands often in the same shop. But in the house the duties are unequally divided.… And when you ask a husband to help the answer is always the same, “Do you want me to do a woman’s work? Why, the neighbours would laugh at me,”
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Although the revolution in Russia has brought women into the external economy as workers it has not been particularly effective in breaking down the division of labour between men and women. This applies to the home as much as work outside. A recent study of 160 Leningrad working-class couples showed that in 69 families the wife did the housework, in 26 the granny, in 17 the wife plus children, and in 48 the husband helped. An analysis of several such studies done before 1961 indicated that a woman with a family who also has a job will be busy for three more hours, have two hours less leisure time, and one and a half hours less sleep. Undoubtedly the effects of this will
build up over the years. Though comparisons with workers’ families in the twenties show there has been some shift in the division of labour – men are now more likely to do the shopping and look after the children – the revolution has apparently not really entered the household.

In other ways it has. Male dominance still persists in the older peasant families but the patriarchal pattern has been much weakened. Some of this is just the normal impact of industrialization on peasant society. But there is something more, a consciousness that women have some official support on their side. A peasant woman describes this:

I am your wife. You say, ‘You will not go there. I don’t want you to go there.’ But I say, ‘You have no right. I’ll go where I please. The husband does not have the right to tell his wife what to do.’ There is a law … they call it equality of rights. The wife may want to go into the Komsomol or do something, and she does what she wants, not what her husband wants.
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But the fact that the Soviet Union is not a society based on equality, that it is probably not any longer a society struggling to become more equal, has affected women’s inequalities. There is not just inequality between men and women at work, in education, in the home; there is also inequality between women. Because some women have become privileged they think the liberation of all women is completed. They also use other women to maintain their superiority. Trotsky noted this even in the thirties:

The situation of the mother of the family who is an esteemed communist, has a cook, a telephone for giving orders to the stores, an automobile for errands, etc., has little in common with the situation of the working woman who is compelled to run to the shops, prepare dinner herself, and carry her children on foot from the kindergarten – if indeed a kindergarten is available.
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This has continued. Not surprisingly in a meritocratic educational system, professional women value themselves higher than the uneducated and the unskilled. A woman who is a teacher remarks, ‘I wanted to get away from the hard thankless work at home. With my pay I could have been able to hire a houseworker.’
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There is no question about the attitude of the women who have to choose between unskilled work in industry or being the houseworker for
someone else. She obviously is at a disadvantage all round. In industry she will on average have a worse position than male workers, at home she carries most of the load, or she can do the ‘hard thankless work’ which a more privileged woman can escape.

For women who can compete successfully though, there is a definite possibility of turning the normal economic dependency of the female upside down: they earn more than their husbands. Some women are rather embarrassed about this. But this individual dependence in a period of prosperity is having cultural effects. ‘The concept of man as a breadwinner for the family is falling by the wayside. A tendency is growing for women to have children outside wedlock, so that they can fulfil their maternal instincts without taking on wifely chores.’
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Husbands have become a bad investment. Developments like this immediately raise very fundamental questions about the nature of the liberation of women within socialism. Because although having a child without a man could be seen as a gesture towards liberation, in practice it could be in fact women simply taking over the responsibility of being both parents. There has been an economic change which has resulted in a shift rather than a transformation of male/female roles, which has probably also been affected by practicalities like the difficulty of getting a divorce. It would seem from the Russian experience that the existence of a large female labour force, improvements in women’s education and the welfare facilities for children, have not been able really to overcome other features of Soviet society in which inequality and competition are marked.

However, these also came under attack in the late sixties. In 1967 a series of letters appeared in the
Literary Gazette
, a writers’ paper, in which women readers criticized very strongly the nature of the work they could do. They not only objected to women being pushed into the worst jobs, they challenged the idea of women doing heavy industrial work. The sight of women on the roads has always been a horror theme of observers in the west. In the twenties communists tended to argue that it was not so much the kind of work but its physical effect. But in order to make sure that no workers of whatever sex are employed in a way which makes them suffer physically or mentally, it requires a society which is completely geared to the health of its people rather than to efficient production. As yet the Soviet Union would not appear to be such a society. The reaction of
these Soviet women is to assert the separation of male/female work. In terms of its implications this is obviously not going to create a new society for women as a whole, though it may mean that a particular group will benefit.

A very similar response is emerging within Soviet sociology in the last decade. There has been much discussion about the effects of institutional care on young children who have tended to become more backward than those in more direct contact with adults. Instead of leading to a questioning of the type of nursery facilities and trying to improve them this has developed into an attempt to convince mothers that they should stay at home – not, note, fathers. Behind this is also concern for the birth rate. Russian women determinedly have small families despite inducements from the state.

It is hard to predict what women in Russia will do: whether they will try to extend the areas of emancipation and structure them according to their needs, or whether they will simply allow everything to be eroded. It could be that because they have been brought up in an economically fundamentally different society from ours, and because they inherit a rhetoric if not a reality of equality and democratic control, they will be able to envisage and force a way through. The questions raised by the efforts of the revolution in Russia to liberate women are of course indistinguishable from the possibility of human liberation. But the vantage point is different. Women as a group remain in a different material situation from men – they have babies. For them therefore the relations of reproduction are as important as those of production. If the revolution has not solved the second problem, it has barely begun to understand the first.

The only people who could create such a possibility are women themselves. Only they know how they feel, how the external shape of society touches them. A journalist, Larisa Kuznetsova, commented recently on the need for women to define themselves what they wanted. ‘If we imagine the “female question” in the form of a sphere, then the women would be looking out from within, while the men would see only the external surface.’
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The ‘correctness’ of what women say they want is not the case. Correctness anyway is subject to alteration and cannot be separated from who has power to say what is correct. The right to make your own mistakes and become responsible to history is an essential, if
costly, part in the process of the emergence of the oppressed. The demand by women for control over all aspects of their lives in a society which has not yet solved the problem of combining the socialization of all the means of production with effective means of social and political control for all human beings on an equal basis, would have tremendous implications. Such a demand has not appeared from Soviet women. In the meantime the discovery of what they feel they want now is vital for any attempt to understand the nature of Soviet society. This is not because women possess some mysterious power to solve problems better than men, but because they speak for a section of Russian society which was awakened and then silenced by the revolution, and because their subordination in the external and internal structure of that revolution still continues.

CHAPTER 7

When the Sand-Grouse Flies to Heaven