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Review Essays/Notes Critiques
Women's Lives Under Socialism
Sarah Ashwin
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Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia,
1870–1917: A Study in Collective Biography (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000).
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Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow
of the Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to
the Second World War (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 2000).
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Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after
Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000).
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IN THE LAST 30 YEARS the social sciences
and humanities have been transformed by a growing awareness of
the importance of gender. The interest shows no sign of abating:
the books under review were by no means the only gender-related
volumes dealing with Central and Eastern Europe published in 2000.
Collectively, the three volumes deal with the period 1870 to the
present day, with a hiatus from the beginning of World War II
to the fall of communism. But, since Susan Gal and Gail Kligman's
contribution on post-communism inevitably reflects on the character
and legacy of "mature socialism," between them the books can be
said to span the rise and fall of the communist experiment in
Russia and Eastern Europe. |
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Their aims differ somewhat. The
goal of Revolutionary Women was to write a "collective
biography" of female revolutionaries in the period 1870–1917
in order "to understand their motivation and assess their role,
without sacrificing their individuality." (2) The editors of In
the Shadow of the Revolution, meanwhile, have brought together
the testimony of women ranging from aristocratic intellectuals
to Soviet tractor drivers from the period 1917–41. While
they do not believe that "there was any single 'women's experience'
of the revolution," they consider that the "range of women's experiences
... can usefully be considered apart from those of men." (viii)
That is, they think that the life stories of women have something
particular to contribute to the understanding of the Russian revolution
and its aftermath. Gal and Kligman have the most ambitious project,
that of exploring "how the discourses and practices of gender
play a major role in shaping the post-1989 reconstitution of states
and social relations in East Central Europe." They claim that
attention to gender leads to a "deeper analysis of how social
and institutional transformations occur." (3) Thus, two of the
books focus on women as a category and their roles and experiences,
while the other considers social transformation from a gendered
perspective. Although these projects differ, they share the assumption
that examination of gender differences — whether through
excavating the hidden history of the second sex or through a direct
focus on gender dynamics — makes an important contribution
to the understanding of societies and historical change. |
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Before turning to examine the books
individually, it is instructive to consider their collective contribution
to our understanding of gender relations in the former Soviet
bloc. The history of revolution and communism in Russia and Eastern
Europe is especially fertile territory for specialists on gender
and women, since the Bolsheviks rejected the public/private distinction
that had generally underlain the exclusion of women from social
and historical analyses. The Bolsheviks' attempt to obliterate
the meaning of the distinction by rendering private life public
is not surprisingly examined by all the books under consideration
in one way or another. Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid make it
clear that the Russian revolutionary movement had been prone to
asceticism from its inception, and that its adherents were apt
to privilege the public over the private and the collective over
the individual. The authors lament the fact that biographical
and autobiographical accounts of female revolutionaries contain
few details regarding their personal lives — their marriages,
relationships, and children — and concede that the accounts
of the lives of the officially-recognized heroes and heroines
of the revolution are "curiously devoid of ... soul." (160) Virtues
such as steadfastness and toughness are celebrated, while intimate
concerns are ignored. In some cases this may be put down to the
bias of official biographers, but in many others it appears to
reflect the priorities of the revolutionaries themselves. For
example, the Menshevik revolutionary Eva Broido abandoned her
son and daughters in 1904 in pursuit of what she called "liberty,
real life and revolutionary work." (174) As the authors show,
"real life" for most revolutionaries was public, collective life. |
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Sheila Fitzpatrick similarly finds
that the typical autobiography of women between 1917 and 1941
"deals more with public matters than with private." (3) "They
remember their lives and structure their narratives in terms of
great public events — the revolution, the Civil War, collectivization,
the Great Purges, and the Second World War — rather than
the personal milestones of marriage, childbirth, divorce and widowhood."
(4) As she argues, this may partly result from the fact that these
women had the misfortune to live in interesting times, partly
from the need of many of them to structure accounts in line with
the dictates of the censor. But, it may also reflect the success
of the Bolsheviks in promoting the idea that individual gratification
should be sacrificed in the interests of the collective. As Jochen
Hellbeck has argued, "to a large extent revolutionary politics
centered on creating revolutionary selves, on making Soviet citizens
think of themselves and act as conscious historical subjects."
(341) He shows how diarists of the Stalin era struggled with themselves
to shake off petty domestic and intimate concerns in the interests
of the plan, the struggle, of "real life." In this they were attempting
to live up to the ideal propagated by their political masters
in which individual interests were not simply subordinated to,
but merged and became inseparable from, those of the collective. |
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The Bolshevik emphasis on the interests
of the collective had an important gender dimension that is well
captured in the autobiographies collected by Fitzpatrick and Slezkine.
The communist authorities attempted to construct a particular
set of gender relations — a triangular set of relations in
which the primary relationship of individual men and women was
to the state rather than to each other.
1
Women were to serve the state in their role as mothers and workers,
while men were prescribed a far more limited role in the Soviet
polity. They were expected to serve as soldiers, workers, and
managers, while their role as household heads was rendered politically
suspect and, ultimately, redundant. The state assumed responsibility
for the fulfillment of the traditional masculine roles of father
and provider, by affording women access to paid work and according
them "protection" in their role as mothers.
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In this sense, the communist authorities can be said to have appropriated
the private role of men (a theme which, as will be seen below,
is picked up by Gal and Kligman). In the light of this, it is
not surprising that Fitzpatrick finds that if there is a "preoccupying
Other" in the autobiographies she and Yuri Slezkine have collected
"it is more likely the state than a husband or father."(3) Thus,
for example, one of the Stakhanovites notes in an account of herself
in a speech to a national Stakhanovite meeting that "I became
… an orphan at that time, but Soviet power, the party and Comrade
Stalin took the place of my father; the kolkhoz [collective farm]
became my home." (336) Meanwhile, another communist heroine of
labour gave this account of receiving her honorary diploma: |
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My heart was full of both joy and sadness at the same
time. I was happy because my dear Soviet Power had not forgotten
my many years of hard work and had singled me out, even though
I had already left the ranks. I was so excited that if Soviet
Power had been just one person I would have thrown my arms around
him and I would have said: "Oh my dear! Thank you for not forgetting
an old woman like me. You saw everything and knew exactly what
you were seeing ...." (195)
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By the 1930s, of course, swooning heroines of labour had "just
one person" to whom to direct their adoration. |
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The state's colonization of the
private sphere is strongly related to another common theme of
the books — that of female strength. The work of Hillyar
and McDermid underlines the fact that strong Russian women were
not just a creation of the Soviet era. Nevertheless, the nature
of the gender order instituted by the Soviet state further cultivated
female strength and independence, while inadvertently fostering
male frailty. As Gal and Kligman point out, while "communism over
the years produced for women a surplus of newly configured tasks
and images — mother, worker, helpmate, manager — it
usurped "head of household" as a masculine image and produced
very few alternative pictures of masculinity. What it did offer
... was not linked to men's roles in families and households."
(54) It was thus not surprising that within the family the man
was relegated to the role of "'big child' ... disorganized, needy,
dependent, vulnerable, demanding to be taken care of and sheltered,
to be humored as he occasionally acted out with aggression, alcoholism,
womanizing, or absenteeism."(54) As Sergei Kukhterin puts it,
for men unable to realise themselves in the world of work "there
was little on offer."
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This is reflected in the autobiographies collected by Fitzpatrick
and Slezkine where the women tend to present themselves as "morally
and even physically stronger than their men." (3) In some of the
stories, relationships with men are portrayed as little more than
an obstacle to service to the state. For example, Gadiliaeva,
a Stakhanovite Bashkir milkmaid, presents her divorce as a step
on her road to the success and fulfillment she has found in her
work, and identifies the state as her liberator: "Before Soviet
power we Bashkir women and Bashkir girls didn't have any rights
at all. Only thanks to the leadership of the Communist Party and
Comrade Stalin did we Bashkir girls and women become active participants
and conscious builders of the new life." (338) In relation to
the previous point regarding the primacy of collective goals,
it should be noted that while the Communist Party may have liberated
women such as Gadiliaeva from their dependence on individual men,
it did so in order to free them to become "conscious builders
of the new life." |
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As Gal and Kligman make clear, communist
policies such as the integration of women into the labour force,
transformed power relations within the family, rendering men in
many senses more vulnerable than women. Nevertheless, the traditional
gender hierarchy was preserved within the public sphere: men continued
to monopolize the most powerful and best remunerated positions
in the societies of the Soviet bloc. The autobiographies provided
by Fitzpatrick and Slezkine provide a fascinating insight into
how this gender order solidified during the early years of Soviet
power in Russia. On the one hand, activists such as Gadiliaeva
were able to shrug off the shackles of the peasant household and
achieve independence and satisfaction through their work, but
at the same time, other women found that their communist male
superiors could be every bit as oppressive as the patriarchs of
the old regime. Paraskeva Ivanova, for example, joined the party
with a desire to become "a valuable cog in the Great Proletarian
Machine for the construction of the future," (213) but eventually
left in disillusionment after being seduced and humiliated by
her superior, Comrade Ganov. He derided her resistance to his
sexual advances arguing that there was "no place for bourgeois
morality in the party," that the family was "obsolete, completely
obsolete." (214) The work of Agrippina Korevanova, an organizer
of women's activities in a residential cooperative, was likewise
hampered by male opponents. First, she was attacked in a dark
alley after "our enemies saw that women had begun to rise up"
(199) Then, after her recovery, she was faced with the obstruction
of the chairman of the cooperative. The women's group managed
to open a communal kitchen, but the board impeded the establishment
of a laundry and kindergarten. Finally, the cooperative imploded
as a result of the bad stewardship of its drunken chairman. These
stories highlight the way in which patriarchal relations persisted
in the public realm, where men continued to behave according to
past norms, even if they occasionally dressed up such behaviour
as being part of the struggle for the new way of life. In this
sense, what Hillyar and McDermid refer to as the "persistence
of peasant patriarchy" (1) within Soviet society can be seen to
be a result not of conscious male organization designed to exclude
women from power, but rather as the unplanned result of individuals
at every level adhering to their accustomed modes of thought and
behaviour within a new environment. |
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The preservation of patriarchal
relations within the revolutionary movement is, as will be seen,
something that is clearly illustrated by the first of the books
under review, Revolutionary Women. The authors of this
work have painstakingly reconstructed the biographies of nearly
1,200 female revolutionaries, from a variety of sources including
autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, document collections, books,
periodicals, and archive material. They organize their material
chronologically into the three phases of the revolution, 1870–1889,
1890–1904, and 1905–1917. This study in "collective
biography" provides details regarding the personal and professional
lives of revolutionary women. It has a particular focus on revolutionary
women workers, who in previous accounts have tended to be presented
as an undifferentiated mass, and deals with women from all the
various strands of the revolutionary movement. The accounts of
the lives provided in the text (and in a more reader-friendly
fashion in the appendices) will no doubt prove very useful to
those wanting to know more about women, and especially female
workers, in the revolutionary movement. Tables summarize the origin,
education, profession, marital status, and political affiliation
of women in the movement, providing clear answers to the questions
of who the female revolutionaries were. The book also provides
a valuable reference point for those with questions about the
nature of women's participation in revolutionary groups. |
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Unfortunately, the potential of
this careful study is limited by the goals the authors set themselves.
In their introduction Hillyar and McDermid complain that despite
the upsurge of interest in revolutionary women within the last
25 years, often historians' accounts seem to concentrate on showing
"why their role was insignificant."(1) In contrast to this, they
aspire in Revolutionary Women to show that women played
an active part in Russia's revolutionary movements. But, despite
this intention, Hillyar and McDermid's account confirms rather
than dispels the impression that women were "handmaidens of an
essentially male revolutionary movement." (1) This is mainly due
to the inherent difficulty of the task the authors set themselves
— even if women were more than "handmaidens," there is no
doubt that men dominated the movement. But Hillyar and McDermid
are also not helped by their habit of special pleading. Comments
such as "these women show that not every working man's wife was
a drag on the labour movement" (57) achieve precisely the opposite
effect to that intended, conveying the impression that women were
indeed generally backward and conservative. |
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At another point they bemoan the
fact that Nadezhda Krupskaia is "depicted more through the life
and work of her husband [Lenin] than as a revolutionary in her
own right." (104) But this is hardly surprising. She and Lenin
were an effective team, and he was the leader of the party to
which she was a devoted and capable servant. Another example of
the authors' tendency to protest too much is provided by their
treatment of the common roles of women within revolutionary groups
such as those of secretary and of keeping, and running safe houses.
Hillyar and McDermid are at pains to stress the importance of
this work, noting, for instance that "Lenin himself greatly valued"
the work of secretaries. (19) They likewise lament the fact that
"while keeping a safe house is deemed a political act, doing the
housework for that house continues to be taken for granted and
considered apolitical." (61) Of course, someone had to do the
cleaning and cooking in the safe houses, but in stressing the
value of this work, Hillyar and McDermid arguably miss the point.
That it was left to women to perform these crucial but low-status
tasks above all reveals the way in which the gender hierarchy
of Russian society was unthinkingly reproduced within revolutionary
movements. |
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The means through which women were
confined to their accustomed secondary role within the revolutionary
movement is potentially the most interesting element of Hillyar
and McDermid's account, but because of their stress on the importance
of women they fail to do it justice. This element of the story
is revealed incidentally in fascinating asides. Thus, for example,
Anna Vol'nova, a revolutionary of the 1880s, was patronized by
her husband and his comrades, even though she declared herself
unafraid of any torture that might be inflicted on her for her
association with the cause. She burnt her chest with cigarettes
in order to prove her point. She was eventually exiled to the
Sakhalin penal colony with her husband, where she died. Such stories
reveal the barriers to being taken seriously that even the most
dedicated female revolutionaries faced. A greater focus on the
way in which such determined activists ended up on the sidelines
would have considerably strengthened the book. For, as Hillyar
and McDermid concede, by 1917 "However essential the part played
by women as workers and professional revolutionaries ... men had
become even more predominant in both the leadership and the membership
of the Bolshevik party." (158) The authors are unable to explain
how this happens, however, because they reject the idea of using
gender analysis "to explain a negative: for example why there
were not more women members or leaders in the revolutionary movement."
( 159) This is all very well, but through their accentuation of
the positive the authors arguably end up in the rather contradictory
position of proclaiming the significance of a group they concede
to be ultimately marginal. |
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In the Shadow of the Revolution,
meanwhile, justifies its claim to highlight a specifically female
side of the revolutionary story, while providing much else besides.
The autobiographies, many of which appear for the first time in
English, are not only socially diverse, but are also drawn from
a variety of genres, including literary memoirs, oral interviews,
personal dossiers, public speeches, and letters to editors. Of
course, some of these accounts were conceived within the strict
codes of Stalinist censorship while others — in particular
the memoirs of émigrés — were not subject to political
constraint. All, however, provide valuable insights. The Stalinist
era was one in which individuals were "expected to refashion their
very selves, by enacting revolutions of their souls."
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Soviet citizens were required to resubmit their biographies at
recurrent periods during their lives, and through such processes
of self-accounting they were required both to demonstrate and
to refine their level of consciousness. Thus, although the life
stories provided in the speeches or personal dossiers cannot be
seen in the same light as the more private accounts, they do provide
a fascinating insight into the process of constructing a Soviet
self. The two thoughtful introductions, one by each editor, reflect
on these issues, Fitzpatrick focusing on the historical context
in which the diaries were written, and Slezkine dealing with the
autobiographies as literary texts, arguing that all of them should
be seen as "artfully arranged compositions." (18) |
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As already mentioned, the stories
presented reveal a great deal about the relationships between
men, women and the revolutionary state, highlighting the various
ways in which gender relations were politicized. For example,
even those women who played the traditional role of housewife
were drawn into the service of the state in the Stalin era. The
book includes two sections containing the accounts of members
of the obshchestvennista movement, which was launched in
1936 with the aim of involving non-working wives in voluntary
unpaid activity at their husbands' enterprises. As well as being
involved in such tasks as smartening up barracks, organizing canteens,
and carrying out informal inspection work, the obshchestvennitsy
were expected to regulate their husbands' behaviour: "good workers
were not absent or late and wives had to check this bad practice."
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This was an ingenious way of bringing even non-working women into
the party's ambit, as their accounts reveal. N. P. Ivanova, for
example, had been far from an ideal Soviet citizen prior to her
involvement in the movement: "I remember how difficult it was
to pronounce the new words. Once I got the Control Commission
and the Central Revision Commission mixed up. It went on in this
way for a long time .... I began to gossip out of spite. It was
I, for example, who started the rumor that our women activists
who were working in their barracks had brought lice from there."(423)
She is redeemed, however, by becoming "absorbed by the work,"
and at the end of her speech shows herself to be properly integrated
into public life: "Now I'm the one reading the newspaper to my
husband."(423) The movement also underlined the fact that the
care provided to husbands by their wives was not a private matter
proceeding from the love between them, but a form of public service.
A. M. Poliakova, the wife of a Stakhanovite blacksmith, notes,
for example, that "if a wife welcomes her husband home with love
and tenderness, if she respects him and talks to him, then the
husband will go back to work in a good mood and think only about
his work. It is obvious that in this case his labor productivity
will increase." (362) The obshchestvennista movement thus
ensured that even love was mobilized in the public interest. This
is just one of the many examples that could have been given regarding
the way in which the autobiographies highlight the particular
character of the Soviet gender order. |
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In addition to revealing much about
the gender dynamics of the early Soviet period, the book is also
a hugely compelling read, containing all the tragedy and drama
of a literary classic. Reading back-to-back, the stories have
the effect of plunging the reader into the dizzying world in which,
as the émigré Irina Elenevskaia put it, "the most basic
concepts of right and wrong were changing." (135) The juxtaposition
of the self-congratulatory accounts of the 'winners' (Stakhonovites
and the like) with the sombre tales of 'losers' (those unfortunate
enough to be designated as enemies of the people) heightens this
effect, with the former celebrating their happy lives and cheering
on the fight against the losers, and the latter mocking the claims
of the regime with their tales of hunger, injustice, and cruelty.
In this way, the stories show exactly what the forging of a new
morality and society entailed. |
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Most of this is sobering. Princess
Sofia Volkonskaia, who rescued her husband from a Bolshevik prison
before leaving Russia to enjoy "the bitter fruits of defeat,"
(165) comments in the course of her tale that "there is no sight
so ugly as the human beast in its moments of triumph," (155) and
the stories provide many examples to support this maxim. In the
moral flux of revolutionary times, the powerful were given free
reign to indulge their worst instincts, and many of the autobiographies
detail the tragic consequences of this. One particularly dramatic
example is provided by the story of a dispossessed daughter of
a so-called kulak (rich peasant), Maria Belskaia. Despite her
father's history as a partisan, his industrious family is banished
by an envious and incompetent kolkhoz chairman, who eventually
brings ruin to a thriving collective farm. They are treated with
pitiless cruelty by the village soviet who, after confiscating
all their possessions, turn them out hungry and barefoot into
the snow. Belskaia is scathing about the "loafers and jealous
nobodies" who are the authors of their downfall, arguing that
"all they had ever done was to eat people alive through envy and
run errands for the enemies of the people." (223) Her story underlines
the way in which, in the context of state-sponsored terror, everyday
spite and envy acquired the power to wreck lives. "Jealous nobodies"
were transformed into a dangerous menace, as the comments of another
daughter of a kulak reveal: "In 1929 dad was dekulakized. Even
though he had been on the committee of the poor, someone complained
that he was rich .... In 1937 the 'black raven' [police van] kept
making its rounds. All those who got denounced were taken away."
(242) |
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The stories of the victors, meanwhile,
reveal the way in which morality was transformed so that denunciation
became a normal, and even heroic, act. Kulaks and enemies of the
people became non-people who could be liquidated without remorse.
The account of Pasha Angelina, the famous Stakhanovite tractor
driver, provides a perfect illustration of the way in which extraordinary
acts of cruelty were justified and normalized by the language
of class struggle: "the kulaks stood between us and the good life,
and no amount of persuasion, constraint or extraordinary taxation
was sufficient to move them out of the way .... I also took part
in the dekulakization campaign. Those were difficult days filled
with tension and fierce class struggle. It was only after defeating
the kulaks and chasing them off the land that we, the poor, felt
truly in charge." (310–11) Meanwhile, other accounts reveal
the way in which pity was discouraged and derided as an inappropriate
weakness in times of struggle. Agrippina Korevanova, for example,
who comes across as a generally humane individual, nevertheless
provides a chilling account of the eviction of "non-toiling" members
from a residential cooperative. One of her associates complains
that a "tenderhearted" member of the brigade is defending the
non-toilers, asking in one case, "Where is she going to go? Why
pry into people's souls?" Korevanova reports herself as asking
in response to this, "whoever let her join the brigade?" (202)
The requirement to expunge sympathy in the interests of class
struggle was not easy for everyone: a young student in a different
story who was sent to take part in the dekulakization campaign
in order to "learn some toughness," (273) eventually committed
suicide as a result of what he was forced to witness. |
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While showing that many people were
able to behave with the expected level of severity, these examples
also reveal that not everyone was swept along by the regime's
Manichean logic. The story of the émigré Valentina Bogdan
one of the "students in the first five year plan," reveals many
small incidences of courage and resistance, from her own underground
church wedding, to the singing of the dekulakized cossacks heard
by her father while he was in prison: "I've never heard such a
beautiful rendition of 'Oh Kuban, Our Land.' One cell started
singing and the whole prison joined in — the very walls were
trembling." (270) Even more impressive are daring comments of
one of her fellow students who, during a lecture on dialectical
materialism minimizing the role of individuals in history, had
the temerity to ask whether the party's extolling of Stalin should
be seen as a deviation from dialectical materialism. Likewise,
during a lecture on the evils of fascist Italy, she pointed out
that the press in Soviet Russia was also controlled by one party.
"I guess that is the way that it is: whoever is in power controls
the press." (269) She was punished for her audacity by being sent
for a year's re-education working at a factory. |
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Various themes have been picked
out for discussion here in order to show the way in which the
autobiographies collected in this volume succeed in recreating
the texture of everyday life in a period of enormous upheaval.
As a result of this success, the book offers richly rewarding
reading to specialists and non-specialists alike. It could also
be used to enliven teaching on a range of historical topics at
a variety of levels — the fact that it contains stories which
illustrate the perspectives of both victors and vanquished is
particularly valuable in this regard. In short, this book is a
gem. |
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The Politics of Gender After
Socialism began its life as the introduction to a companion
volume of case studies, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics
and Everyday Life after Socialism, of which Gal and Kligman
are the coeditors. The book primarily refers to Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech and Slovak Republics,
and the former East Germany. The chapters examine a number of
themes: how public discussions regarding reproduction, childcare
and sexuality are used as a means of reconstituting the relationship
between states and their citizens; how economic restructuring
in the region is impacting on men and women and influencing the
relations between them; and how conceptions of gender influence
policy formation, and whether gender categories are relevant to
civil society and political mobilization. |
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The book contains many stimulating
arguments that go a long way to justify its claims regarding the
importance of gendered analysis. For example, the authors' discussion
of the way in which reproductive discourses are employed in order
to signal the boundaries of nationhood or political communities,
and to highlight the nature of the relationship between states
and their citizens, clearly makes an important contribution to
the understanding of post-communist politics. The authors do not
claim any originality in highlighting this issue, but they do
usefully draw together different experiences from the region,
showing that in virtually all the countries they consider that
reproduction became a bone of contention. The way in which the
issue was politicized depended on the situation. The Serbian state,
for example, stirred up fears of their nation being over-run by
backward and dangerously fecund Albanians (with well-known tragic
results), while in Poland the debate about abortion was linked
to the wider question of the desirable level of Roman Catholic
influence on state policy. In all cases, the debates served wider
political purposes. |
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The third chapter, which considers
"dilemmas of public and private" is the most interesting. It contains
a stimulating discussion of the public-private distinction in
which the authors argue that the exact nature of the distinction
varies according to the interactional situation in which it is
applied. Furthermore, they highlight the fact that the distinction
is "fractal," which means that it is "recursively applicable ...
and therefore can be nested. That is, whatever the local, historically
specific content of the dichotomy, the distinction between public
and private can be reproduced repeatedly by projecting it onto
a narrower context or a broader one." (41) This definition serves
the authors well in their discussion of the communist era. Thus,
for example, they do not fall into the trap of seeing the private
sphere as the only site of authenticity in the communist era,
but show the way in which public and private were inextricably
intertwined. As they put it: |
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The nested interdependencies of work, time and materials,
as well as the ever-present bureaucracies of state socialism
assured that everyone participated to some extent among the
"they" who ruled as well as the "we" who suffered .... Everyone
was to some extent complicit in the system of patronage, lying,
theft, hedging and duplicity through which the system operated.
(51)
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This chapter also contains a convincing account of the impact
on communist state policies on gender relations, the nature of
which was outlined above. |
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The strength of this chapter is
the way it combines sophisticated theoretical discussion with
concrete examples, and this is a general merit of the book. The
weaknesses of the chapter likewise highlight the faults of the
book as a whole. These are most visible in the discussion of employment
trends in the post-communist era, which is far less convincing
than what precedes it. The authors make big generalizations regarding
changes in the gender composition of employment without adequate
evidence to support their claims, in some cases appearing to base
these on small-scale case studies. For example, they aver that
social work is a "form of mobility for working class women," which
"is becoming an overwhelmingly female profession," and they seem
to imply that the claim applies to the region as a whole. (59)
It is possible that they are correct, but the only support provided
is a reference to one study in Hungary. Their whole discussion
of the changing pattern of occupational segregation in the region
is constructed on a similar basis, so that it is impossible to
be sure of its accuracy. Likewise, the authors assert that "in
most countries of the region, women have been experiencing more
unemployment than men." During the transition era, and while this
statement is not wrong, it is somewhat misleading. (56) As Mike
and Hilary Ingham have shown in their careful analysis of Labour
Force Survey data from across the region, the picture is far more
mixed than is generally acknowledged. In some countries, such
as Poland and the Czech Republic, the unemployment rate of women
has consistently exceeded that of men, but in others, such as
Hungary and Slovenia, proportionally fewer women have been unemployed,
as is also the case in Russia and Latvia. Meanwhile, in Bulgaria
the proportions have been equal.
6
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24 |
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It is in failings such as this that
the book reveals its origins as an introduction. In an opening
statement drawing out the implications of diverse case studies,
some speculation is legitimate. In an independent volume, however,
more is required. There are various points at which it seems the
authors do not have the evidence they require to support their
arguments, leading them to resort to the artful arrangement of
case study conclusions to conceal the gaps in their knowledge.
For example, they illustrate their point regarding the ambiguity
surrounding the autonomy and dependence of post-communist women
with the example of one Budapest journalist. While they insist
that they "do not wish to generalise from a single case," (86)
this is in effect what they do, as no other support for the point
is provided. Some of the arguments of the book are thus rather
tenuous. At the same time, however, the depth provided by the
ethnographic case studies consulted by the authors certainly adds
to the sophistication of the book: the authors' arguments are
always subtle and thought-provoking. Thus, while some of the empirical
claims of the book are not entirely convincing (at least when
applied to the region as a whole), the book provides a rich source
of ideas for future research. As such it will certainly be valuable
to both students and researchers of gender studies, area studies,
and sociology. |
25 |
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The explosion of gender and women's
studies has done a great deal to transform other disciplines,
provoking new questions and opening up new lines of inquiry. How
far do the books under review contribute to this on-going re-evaluation
of what is important and worthy of study? For the reasons mentioned
above, Revolutionary Women does the least to justify its
claim that a focus on women provides new insights into wider issues.
Someone not already interested in women's participation in the
revolution would gain little from this analysis. In the Shadow
of the Revolution, by contrast, would engage those without
a particular interest in questions of gender, and might well sensitize
them to the status of gender as a key organizing principle of
the Soviet system. Gal and Kligman's contribution, does, as mentioned
above, succeed in showing the importance of gendered analysis
to the understanding of the transformation in Central and Eastern
Europe. It is rather more successful in analyzing the impact of
the collapse of communism on gender relations than it is in demonstrating
how the "discourses and practices of gender" are shaping the reconstitution
of states and wider social relations in the region. The latter
is a very difficult task, however, especially since the transformation
of the region is continuing apace. The authors have, nonetheless,
lit the way for the numerous scholars who will no doubt want to
explore this issue further. |
26 |
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Notes
1 Sarah Ashwin,
"Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,"
in Sarah Ashwin, ed., Gender, State and Society in Soviet
and Post-Soviet Russia (London 2000), 1–2.
2 Ashwin, "Gender,"
1–2.
3 Sergei Kukhterin,
"Fathers and Patriarchs in Communist and Post-Communist Russia,"
in Sarah Ashwin, ed., Gender, State and Society in Soviet
and Post-Soviet Russia (London 2000), 85.
4 Jochen Hellbeck,
"Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-era Autobiographical
Texts," Russian Review, 60, 3 (2001), 342.
5 Mary Buckley,
"The Untold Story of Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s," Europe-Asia
Studies, 48, 4 (1996), 573.
6 Mike Ingham and
Hilary Ingham, "Gender and Labour Market Restructuring in Central
and Eastern Europe," in Al Rainne, Adrian Smith, and Adam Swain,
eds., Work, Employment and Transition: Testructuring Livelihoods
in Post-Communism (London 2002), 175.
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