of the unemployed. And of these unemployed women, 85 percent have higher or specialized educations. Now the placement officers say they should be cleaners or nurses, the lowest-paid, least prestigious jobs. They say women under 18 or over 45 should not be trained or retrained, because there are no jobs for them. The paradigms of women’s lives are changing. Why should they get a higher education? Most of those losing their jobs are engineers in construction or chemistry, for example.25
Much like current Russian translations of “democracy” and “capitalism,” the extant translation and adaptation of “free speech” also conveys the privileging of men’s desires and value at women’s expense. In the most flamboyant example, the “free speech” of glasnost has led to “freer” representations of sex and sexuality, but, as Helena Goscilo deftly argues in her essay “New Members and Organs: The Politics of Porn,” the new erotica is mainly heterosexual and male-oriented in its focus, projecting for male delectation images of naked or scantily clad, provocatively posed women in all sorts of public fora — television, taxicabs, the mainstream press, commercial advertising.26 Through the media of the new Russian market, sexual freedom is being purveyed as a heterosexist male prerogative, with women enjoined to consume their own commodification as a means of earning value in men’s eyes.27
Again (as I must remind myself), such new contextual developments may forever elicit responses in Russian women that differ from what Western feminists (and especially socialist feminists) may expect or presume. But what is particularly frustrating about this moment in Russian history is that we may feel we recognize these “new” commercial manipulations and social values, that we know best the strategies and consequences of capitalism, and it therefore behooves us to play Cassandra, warning Russian women of the feminine mystique, yellow wallpaper, and Stepford wives to come. We can cite chapter and verse: scholars working from Western models have outlined certain scripts of women’s devaluation and manipulation under capitalism — their designation as consumer and consumable, the commercial exploitation and careful political containment of their images and desires. We seem to anticipate and perhaps even hope that the same sorts of scripts will unfold in a newly capitalist Russia, so that our expertise might be of value and use.
Yet before we presume one kind of oppression and impose solidarity, we might admit the complexity and possible variation of such scripts. Despite the inequities and ravages of capitalism (or, for that matter, the hidden privileges of democracy), women have not only been made its victims and unwitting accomplices, but have managed to work the system to gain political and economic power. Rather than reprise the role of gloomy prophet, we in the West might help Russian women explore this complexity and consider their own potential. Rather than subscribe to the condescending dynamic of developmental politics, we would do best, I think, to serve as collaborators and interlocutors. 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
