Whereas scarce financial resources can limit this kind of transnational feminist advocacy, the global feminist alliance with human rights organizations, state and non-state development agencies, and large charitable foundations created the opportunity to expand and to distribute much greater amounts of money to local women’s organizations. Around the world, instead of being marginalized to receiving only funds earmarked for feminism, women’s organizations working against gender violence could now receive funds through programs dedicated to development and human rights, a second type of intervention.
In the postcommunist region, the largest program was so-called democracy assistance. The collapse of Soviet power, for many Western observers and policymakers, represented democracy’s victory. These beliefs led international donors to herald a new commitment to funding a global civil society, which they understood as the essential fabric of democracy mediating between the state and family. Estimates for this “democracy industry” are only rough approximations, especially for assistance targeted only to civil society rather than other democracy reforms such as structuring government agencies, but the amounts are unprecedented. By the turn of the millennium, state funding for civil society, mostly from development initiatives, totaled $7 billion, while several more billions had been distributed by Western (primarily U. S.) foundations (Kaldor, Anheier, and
Glasius 2003). Between 1990 and 2002, Russia apparently received some $860 million in democracy assistance from the U. S. and some €800 million from the European Union, perhaps 10 percent of which went to NGOs (Sundstrom 2006, 12-13).
The ability to fund women’s organizing as never before, though, involved tradeoffs for feminist mobilization, tradeoffs that had become evident in earlier development projects in the Global South. As a result of the availability of larger grants and the demands of development agencies for specialized knowledge about women, many women’s organizations, especially in liberalizing regimes, reconstituted themselves as formal nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and were increasingly drawn into the role of technical experts on policy’s impact on women and gender (Alvarez 1999). At first such organizations could maintain or build linkages to broader-based women’s groups and continue the essential feminist activities of advocacy and empowerment. But as such interventions went on, women’s NGOs were increasingly being professionalized or “NGO-ized.” Feminist activists gradually became gender experts, and states, within a new global environment of neoliberal social and economic policies, gradually began to use women’s organizations to provide services that they had given up.
Nonfeminist observers of postcommunist Europe and Eurasia soon found similar problems, as well as others, across civil society as a result of democracy assistance. The once radical democratic movements were “tamed,” de-radicalized into NGOs, often fairly attached to the new states and doing little to deepen democracy (Kaldor 2003, ch. 4; Mendelson and Glenn 2002). This trend was illustrated in the particularly postcommunist phenomenon of “flex organizing,” chameleon-like organizing in which actors shift their organizations between public and private spheres as a tactic to maneuver between constraints of both spheres (Wedel 2001). Such flex organizations or hybrids pose a danger to post-Soviet civil society because they blur the boundaries between public and private that are understood to be essential to a flourishing, autonomous civil society. Anticipating Putin’s moves, observers warned that, with the Soviet history of the party-state co-opting all social organizations, the post-Soviet state may also seek to control the activities and access to the state of NGOs.
The problems of the postcommunist Russian women’s movement were common to the region’s postcommunist civil society. Groups were suspicious of each other, reluctant to share information, and predominantly staffed by elites and their circle, becoming sites for the distribution of Western perks and reinforcing existing hierarchies. In Russia, the result was a weak civil society: Russian citizens were comparatively reluctant to participate in voluntary organizations. By the mid-1990s, the average Russian had 0.65 organizational memberships per person, one of the lowest averages in the world, and the kind of participation by far the most prevalent among Russians was labor union membership (Howard 2003, 65—66, 69). Americans, in contrast, have an average of 3.59 organizational memberships; post-authoritarian Brazilians 2.13.
Feminist observers pointed out that civil society, which across the region remained so much weaker than the male-dominated formal politics or big business, had been feminized, that is, characterized by an overrepresentation of women and associated with reconstructed ideas of femininity (True 2003; Kuenhast and Nechemias 2004; Salmenniemi 2005). The hierarchy between these arenas has reproduced neotraditional gendered assumptions and inequality. Although women have been brought out of the family, they remain relegated to the least public and the weakest sphere, based on assumptions about their affinity for social issues and their greater morality, which, according to these assumptions, should keep them from the less “moral” sphere of power politics (Tohidi 2004). More than just reinscribing this gender ideology, this segregation also represents economic stratification as women, especially those well-educated, had less economic opportunities following communism’s collapse, leaving civil society as often their only real option. But as formal politics became more important in postcommunist contexts, this feminization helped civic activism become the “housework” of politics (Sperling, Ferree, and Risman 2001).
Part of the blame must be attached to domestic factors, such as the communist legacy of compulsory participation, the widespread disappointment with changes since the Soviet collapse (Howard 2003), and the false Soviet claim of “women’s emancipation.” But more blame must be laid on foreign donors because the postcommunist NGOs “often serve the interests of foreign donors more than those of the local population” (Mendelson and Glenn 2002, 3). The global context into which public organizations emerged is structured such that foreign donors are required to be accountable to their home constituents (taxpayers if public or stockholders if private) more than to the societies they profess to serve (Henderson 2003). This leads to a focus on short-term rather than long-term interests. In this context, NGOs, on a grant-seeking treadmill, have responded rationally, pursuing short-term and easily quantifiable projects, undermining the long-term goal of creating sustainable civil society (Hemment 2004a). Some women’s NGOs in the region learned to do a kind of doublespeak, using the feminist “gender talk” required by Western funders when talking to them and employing more traditional gender discourse when working with their constituency (Ishkanian 2004). This “de-coupling” of activist statements from their public actions becomes problematic when their actions reinforce non-democratic commitments (Sundstrom 2006, xv, 171-73)
These problems of postcommunist civil society and of women organizing globally make measuring feminist mobilization quite challenging. Counting women’s NGOs gives no measure of their strength, longevity, or commitment to feminist advocacy (Weldon 2002, 223—24). And comprehensive fieldwork, in a country spread out in eleven time zones, including remote areas in the circumpolar North and Siberia, would require teams of intrepid researchers over a decade. My method is to combine parts of both approaches, using fieldwork to make conservative estimates and then systematically comparing credible third-party lists of organizations involved in various national or international projects to formulate generous estimates (see appendix 2 for details). My in-depth knowledge of Russian activism allows me to assess organizations’ challenge to the sex/gender hierarchy, based on their activities. Though it is unrealistic to expect the development of a mass-based social movement given the Russian and global contexts, successful feminist mobilization requires extending advocacy beyond a limited number of elite NGOs to other types of women’s organizations, even perhaps to those that have a more maternalist justification for their advocacy. Since the proliferation of women’s organizing during the late Soviet period was centered around mothers’ rights, powerful post-Soviet women’s organizing requires newer women’s NGOs to build coalition with these older, more maternalist organizations (Hrycak 2002).