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 complaints about Western “shortsightedness,” in this instance generalizing and critiquing the model of Marxist feminists:
When we met with Western feminists we were struck by their social frame. They were Marxists. We argued with them so much I even cried. How could I say that the system that did all this to me was good? No one wants to hear about solidarity in this country anymore, because for years it was imposed: solidarity with South Africa, solidarity with Cuba. For Western women socialism was a question of values. They said, “At least the Communists put liberation down on paper.” (55)
At this point in our relations, if Western feminists are to see beyond their nostalgia and Russian women are to hear beyond an alienating political rhetoric, then we all must commit to more historically informed, contextually sensitive ways of seeing, hearing, and speaking. We may even need to devise a language of paraphrase to defuse those political buzzwords (the legacy of American and Soviet cold war rhetoric, the mar-ketspeak of Western developmental politics) that continue to polarize us.
THE CAUSES OF RUSSIAN WOMEN
Indeed, once we examine the political traditions and historical experience of Russian women, we can appreciate that they have had ample cause to critique their own “determined pioneers” and to dismiss Western “nostalgia.” If the category of gender has been promoted at times at the expense of all other categories of identity by Western feminists, it has been a self-erasing or non-category — indeed, a non-term — in Russian and Soviet societies. To be sure, a “woman’s question” was raised in mid-nineteenth-century Russia to protest noblewomen’s unequal legal, political, and economic status and a Russian feminist tradition (under a variety of names) could be said to extend from the 1860s until the October revolution.10 Yet, for the most part, Russian women have eschewed specifically feminist programs for what they believed to be the larger, more urgent causes of populism or socialism or, in the Soviet period, Party loyalty or dissidence. For them the unifying, galvanizing categories of oppression and solidarity were those of class and allegiance or resistance to the state (be it tsarist or Soviet). Although the program (and sometimes even the practice) of women’s equal rights was automatically included in many nineteenth-century revolutionary movements, it remains significant that socialist groups (including the Bolshevik party) denounced any explicitly feminist movement as an exclusionary bourgeois by-product, the self-indulgent agenda of privileged middle- or upper-class women.11 Not unlike women activists in various third world countries, Russian women were historically conditioned to scorn the presumably middle-class bias of feminism and its seemingly extravagant emphasis on individual fulfillment — especially in light of the material hardships and deficits continually plaguing Russian society.
Moreover, while seventy-odd years of Soviet rule certainly legislated the public image of the happy working woman, its less publicized realities shaped very different desires and goals in its female citizens. The “paper rights” issued to Soviet women guaranteed them an equal status and professional access unprecedented (and still unmatched) in the Western world, but, imposed as they were on an uninvolved populace, these laws neither produced nor were the product of a widespread social revolution. The “right to work” was extended more as responsibility than empowerment, and after a rather chaotic period of social experimentation in the 1920s, Soviet women were left with a monstrous double burden: the state tacitly endorsed their traditional assignment of housework and child care but invested minimal resources in supporting and supplying the domestic sphere.12 For all the official rhetoric of equality between the sexes, essentialist notions of men’s and women’s capabilities and roles went unchallenged in daily practice and general social and cultural attitudes, with men and the “masculine” valued as the universal and most accomplished norm, and women and the “feminine” regarded as more limited, secondary, and often second-rate.
Yet, contrary to Western expectations, this double burden and practical inequality did not foment any sizable feminist campaign for a domestic revolution. Instead, the eventual binary opposition of Stalinist state versus society — that determiner of all value — generated an almost inverted scenario. Due to the perils and political compromises of public life and a successful “career” in the Stalinist system, the domestic sphere and family life came to be cherished, even by the women who labored there, as a site of psychological and moral refuge. Indeed, Tolstaia argues that Soviet women, more than Soviet men, were able to “remain human” precisely on account of their domestic attachments: “They tried to protect their own little space from the influence of the state. They locked themselves in with family and children.”13 In direct contrast to the many Western women who struggled to escape a devalued home into a powerful professional and political world, many Soviet women (and men) sought sanctuary and fulfillment in the less monitored world of family and friends, a domestic space that was far more capacious and stimulating than obligatory work or meaningless politics.14 And while the political landscape has changed in the post-Soviet era, I would argue that the moral onus on public life has not diminished, but grown more complex — directed now against ineffectual politicians and unscrupulous businessmen. For Russian women today, the “return to the home” will certainly limit their political clout and professional options, but it may also constitute a kind of self-investment, a long-overdue vacation, even a moral act of dissociation.
In much the same way, this powerful opposition conditioned Soviet women’s very different approach to another Western target — the objectification and commodification of women. Over the years the state promoted political icons of Soviet womanhood (the good mother, the heroic shockworker) that invoked carefully maternal and/or maidenly chaste constructions of femininity; these icons implicitly defined and critiqued “bourgeois” constructions
