In sum, despite the Soviet commitments to women’s emancipation, the new Russia was not a hospitable environment for global feminist activism. While global feminists became united in their shared interest in combating violence against women, the Soviet haphazard and parafeminist response to gender violence gave way, in the 1990s, to the privatization of gender violence, in which the state took even less responsibility to respond to the problem and justified its new position with revised victim-blaming theories. The huge changes in society from the move away from communism left women disempowered as workers and citizens and their imagined bodies sexualized and commodified for heterosexual men, while their actual bodies were busy laboring to support and care for themselves and their families. Neotraditional ideologies about women’s and men’s roles held sway, providing what may be the only respite and source of (limited) authority for women. The women’s movement and state women’s policy agencies, the combination of which political scientists have found to be key to feminist policy reform (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Mazur 2002; Weldon 2002), were fairly weak and only more powerful when they drew upon gender neotraditionalism. Global feminists hoping to foster activism, shape awareness that gender violence constitutes a violation of women’s human rights, and implement progressive reform faced tremendous obstacles in Russia.
CHAPTER THREE