Parafeminism

This communist approach to gender violence was predicated on a traditional gen­der ideology about women’s and men’s roles in the home and intimate life. So­viet promises of equality were not realized in everyday life. Women faced a dou­ble burden, having to work outside the home as good Soviet citizens while also expected to shoulder the bulk of responsibilities for the home and childrearing. In an economy rife with shortages, procuring goods through long lines at mul­tiple stores and through social networks meant a triple burden. Stalinist control of family life—through laws that complicated divorce, registered children born outside state-sanctioned marriage as fatherless, prohibited homosexuality, and limited abortion to women who had more than one child—clarified the Soviet stance on women’s responsibility to live within and to promote marriage and motherhood.7 Even as these laws were relaxed by later leaders, this underlying gender ideology remained dominant.

An essential part of the reason is that gender, as I am using it in this study, remained unexamined by Soviet authorities (Johnson and Robinson 2007). For Soviet leaders and scholars, equality of women and men did not mean the era­sure of what were presumed to be natural psychological and social differences (Attwood 1997). Teachers and parents were urged to instill traditional norms, including weakness in women and strength in men. That these characteristics were understood to be natural meant that the impact of such gender socializa­tion on encouraging gender violence could be ignored. This kind of doublethink legitimated extensive social policies, but these Soviet policies were seen only as a form of social protectionism for women’s “natural” maternal function. Lim­its on the jobs women could hold (regardless of whether they were or planned to be mothers) and extensive maternity leaves (as wonderful as they might seem to harried American mothers) reinforced gendered assumptions about women’s and men’s domestic responsibilities and solidified women’s status as second-class workers. These policies resulted from the practical problems of how to accom­modate women (who were assumed to have maternal and wifely functions), who were much needed in the labor force (Buckley 1985, 26). The law against sexual compulsion, for example, was a reaction to the problems resulting from women’s mass entry into the workforce during Lenin’s New Economic Policy and was predicated on sexual difference (Juviler 1977, 245; Suchland 2005).

Within this limited understanding, the Soviet commitment to women did ex­tend to the establishment of institutions designed to help women. Revolutionary socialist feminists created a Women’s Department (Zhenotdel) within the Com­munist Party, perhaps the first official women’s institution in the world, yet the primary goal was to recruit women into the party (Lapidus 1977). The founders’ more radical hopes that the department would transform the status of women and their role in families were marginalized and contributed to its abolishment by the 1930s. Founded during the Khrushchev regime and lasting even longer were the women’s councils (zhensoviety), which were designed to help women “harmonize” work and home life, but not by recruiting men as full participants in the home (Racioppi and See 1995). For all these institutions, the goals were driven not by the women participants, but by the party or government with whom they were associated. At the same time, this communist neocorporatism meant almost no non-party, non-state spaces for challenging gender.

These kinds of women’s institutions contrast with the “state feminism” that researchers have found in some industrialized democracies (Stetson and Mazur 1995; Stetson 2002). Like the women’s policy agencies found in some Western European governments, communist women’s institutions claimed to be promot­ing women’s rights and women’s equality (Robinson 1995). They even represent, in some ways, challenges to sex hierarchies in the sense of helping women over­come problems of consumption and reproduction to be better workers. Yet, “they did not accept. . . that the system of oppression operated within the private as well as the public sphere. . . [or understand] the need to change the structure of consumption and reproduction” (207—208). Women’s policy agencies constitute state feminism when they are “effective in promoting women as a group and un­dermining patterns of gender-based inequities in society” (Stetson and Mazur 1995, 2); the communist women’s institutions represent the “state’s usurpation of a parafeminist agenda” (Robinson 1995, 205).

In other words, this Soviet legacy highlights the need to draw some distinc­tions within de facto feminism, that is, actions seeking social or political change to lessen sex/gender hierarchies. Feminisms tend to share three core components: concerted response to problems that women tend to face, an opposition to sex

hierarchies, and the appreciation that gender, if not also sex, is constructed (and thus changeable) (see table 2.1).8 Marxism-Leninism, framed through Engels’s “woman question,” recognized the systemic problems facing women in the bour­geois family and held that bringing women into the workforce and then social­ism would solve these problems. In communist practice, that meant institutions, policies, and organizations to address problems faced by women as they entered into the workforce and other initiatives such as quotas to include women in pub­lic and political life (such that it was). Thus, the Soviet response met the first two components, but the failure to recognize the social construction of gender meant that the critique did not meet the third. The challenge was only to the sex hierar­chy, not the gender hierarchy. Other responses discussed in this book satisfy only the first component, constituting what I call pseudofeminism. While others the­orists may label these responses as antifeminist for their acceptance of sex/gender hierarchies, I have chosen the term pseudofeminist to highlight the falseness of their post-global feminist consensus claims—often couched in global feminist language—to be helping women.