Underpinning this gendered process was a neotraditional gender ideology, a belief that physiology dictates that men are to be the strong providers and protectors and women the beautiful loving caretakers. A powerful force in the new Russia, this gender neotraditionalism has been part and parcel of the nationalism that came later to Russia than to other Soviet republics, but was essential to the push for the democratization of Russia. As elsewhere (Yuval-Davis 1991), gender is an organizing strategy for nationalism. In Russia, this neotraditional gender ideology draws upon pre — and anti-Soviet beliefs and practices advocating women’s roles as mothers and homemakers, not unlike (nor unconnected to) the nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity” exalted in the West (Lyon 2003). It also references earlier Russian Orthodox articulations of women’s roles, such as the sixteenth-century text the Domostroi, about how the home is to be run by an obedient wife for the worship of God incarnate in the husbandd9 Although these ideas about family life were more fantasy than reality (Lyon 2007), a reprint of the Domostroi was one of the most purchased books in the early 1990s. These beliefs about gender also drew from more recent global sources, such as from fantasies of 1950s American traditional gender roles (Zvinkliene 1999). The gender ideology is traditional—embracing the privatization and domestication of women’s lives (Attwood 1996)—and also new in that it responds to the impact of communism and exists in a new more interconnected world, where gender ideologies can more easily cross borders (Johnson and Robinson 2007).
The neotraditional ideology was most persuasive in the 1990s in its call for
women to give up their jobs and return to the home (Vannoy et al. 1999). This call was particularly compelling to women, if they had a choice, exhausted as they were by their double and triple burdens. The promotion of women by gender neotraditionalism to a new, exalted status, at least in theory, was also attractive. It brought stereotypes of “idealized women,” who masterfully resist the state in their “bedrooms and kitchens,” and “little men,” who always need women’s help (Lissyutkina 1999, 171). These ideas were also powerful because Soviet intrusion led the family—including gender roles—to be seen as a haven from the state. Unfortunately, the economic reality of Russia in the 1990s meant no room for such sacrifice. Most women had to work to support themselves and their family.
The dominance of this gender neotraditionalism creates the possibility for unapologetic public sexism, for example, from the ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In an article in the communist Pravda,30 he explained the criticism of Russia by the U. S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as a result of her being a “a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all. . . . Condoleezza Rice needs a company of soldiers. She needs to be taken to barracks where she would be satisfied.” Although taken as a maverick, Zhirinovsky has been elected to the parliament every election since 1993, and he often articulates beliefs held by many others in the society. These beliefs have been illustrated in the public chastisement of women seeking political positions for a wide variety of behaviors based on gender. In one region, a male deputy asked if women entering politics were “preparing to breastfeed the electorate” (Duban 2006, 57—58). Other candidates were publicly slandered for being “loose.” One party campaigned against a woman running for St. Petersburg governor with the slogan “Being Governor Is Not a Woman’s Business.” Summarizing Russian gender neotraditionalism, President Vladimir Putin has asserted that “[w]omen should have one unquestionable privilege—the right to be protected by men.”3!
The dominance of gender neotraditionalism has also meant widespread resistance to feminism and the concept of gender. Under communism, feminism was seen as inherently anti-male, an extreme problem in a society where men are seen as often helpless like children (Lissyutkina 1999). Even the idea of the social construction of gender has been resisted by most women, who believe in essential roles of women and men (Vannoy et al. 1999).
At the same time, some women’s groups, like some women parliamentarians, have been successful by playing upon these neotraditional ideas. The most effective has been the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, a popular and longstanding women’s organization that has inserted itself into military politics (Caiazza 2002). Another group, the Committee of Beslan Mothers, which emerged following Russia’s botched response to the Chechen terrorist siege of a school, has become one of the few outspoken critics of the Putin administration. Acting in the prescribed role as mothers allows them to pretend that they are not political and to seem less threatening.
Small Women’s Movement and Residual State Parafeminism
Within this dominance of gender neotraditionalism, there has been only limited feminist resistance. The Soviet leadership had reacted strongly against dissident feminism, for example, by expelling Tatiana Mamonova in 1980 for her feminist publications. When Gorbachev’s reform spurred the development of some independent and critical organizations, women’s organizations were slow to emerge (Nechemias 1991). The watershed event of what was to become the movement was a gathering of some two hundred women from forty-eight different Soviet women’s groups in Dubna, Russia, in 1991, for what is now called the First Independent Women’s Forum (Sperling 1999; Kay 2000).32 This gathering and a second one a year later were astute and radical in their critique not just of the Soviet regime, but of the economic and political reforms and the exclusion of women from the process of democratization.
Following the first gathering, the movement grew in size. In 1991, there were fifty women’s organizations officially registered; two hundred in 1992; three hundred in 1994, and six hundred in 1998 (Sperling 1999, 18-19). There were many more operating unofficially, having not jumped through the considerable bureaucratic hoops necessary for registration with the Russian Ministry of Justice— perhaps two thousand in 1998 (Abubikirova, Klimenkova, Kotchkina, Regentova, and Troinova 1998, 9). They represented a diversity of activities, from lobbying, holding conferences and seminars, publishing feminist magazines, and conducting research to conducting self-help groups or providing social services for unemployed women, single mothers, and artists (Sperling 1999, 19). These forums also helped the various organizations coordinate themselves, creating a connected movement from what had been disparate organizations. Some of these organizations embraced feminism; most were de facto feminists in their challenge to the status of women, both in their actions and in simply organizing, which challenged “gender climate” in Russia, where women were encouraged to be politically silent (Kay 2000).
Despite the admirable efforts of many activists, however, the women’s movement remains small and fairly powerless. Many of the organizations lasted only a short time; some seemed only to be clever ways for charismatic, English-speaking Russians to support themselves during tough times (see Henderson 2000, 65—82, 2003: Richter 2002; McMahon 2001, 45—68; Sundstrom 2002, 207—29). Almost none of the long-lasting organizations have large constituencies. Finally, although Russia is officially a federalist state, power has been remarkably centralized, especially since Putin’s rise to power, leaving few avenues for even more powerful NGOs.
Similarly, there are some small pockets of a kind of feminism within the state. In 1993, President Yeltsin created the Commission for Women, Family, and Demography under the office of the president. Headed at one time by an activist, the commission was disbanded in 2000. There was also a Department on the Affairs of Women, Family, and Youth within the Ministry of Social Development, but a series of reorganizations moved the department around until 2004, when the department was dissolved, as was a Permanent Roundtable of Women’s NGOs (Duban 2006, 34).33 In 2005, a replacement Coordinating Council on Gender Issues was formed within the new Ministry of Health and Social Development and charged with gender analysis. There are also bodies within both houses of the Federal Assembly to address women’s issues. Within the upper house, the Federation Council, is an Expert Council on Equal Rights and Opportunities of Men and Women, and within the lower house, the Duma, is the Committee on Women, Family, and Youth. In 1997, the Commission on Improving the Status of Women was created to coordinate between the state institutions and NGOs and to monitor for CEDAW, but it appears to have been disbanded in 2004 (Open Society Institute 2007). The new Public Chamber designed by Putin—officially to coordinate between the state and society—includes one feminist, Elena Ershova, the head of the Consortium of Women’s NGOs.
Not only do these organizations come and go depending on political whims, they tend to be within larger weak institutions, not the power ministries. Much as with the Soviet institutions, these post-Soviet entities are also not the kind of women’s policy agencies that promote a comprehensive state feminism. They are predominantly focused on social protection, not advancing women’s rights (Duban 2006, 37). Like their Soviet predecessors, they are parafeminist in their dependence on social norms about women and men.