Gendered Transformation
This privatization of gender violence in the 1990s was part of a larger gendered process across postcommunist societies in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (hereafter the “region”). Although moving the system toward a liberal democracy where markets prevail was portrayed as a gender-neutral process—with the rhetoric of gender-neutral citizens and consumers—the consequences were not neutral because the roots of gender inequality remained within both society and the new forms of political and economic systems (Pateman 1988; Watson 1993). This gendered transformation complicates a campaign against gender violence.
One of the biggest problems in Russia has been the feminization of poverty; not only were most of the new poor adults women, but political decisions created an economy in which women’s contributions are systematically undervalued. The massive changes led to massive upheavals as the GDP per capita dropped precipitously in the early 1990s, surpassing Soviet levels only in the new millennium (Varbanova 2006, 14). In a country where women are more likely to live in singleparent households than anywhere else in the region, the problem is particularly acute for single mothers and their children (19). In 2000, more than one in three children in such households were living in poverty (in contrast to approximately one in four in two-parent households). State subsidies for childcare, maternity leave, and parental sick leave have been cut or permitted to devalue, exacerbating the problem.
In the early years of the transition, women seemed to be suffering in the new labor market much more than men. In societies marked by their high rates of women’s economic activity, women were the first to be laid off and the last hired, a problem dismissed by the Yeltsin administration (Bridger 1999; Einhorn 1993). Now, with more time and better data, the story is more complicated. For example, although there was a precipitous decline in women’s economic activity (either in the labor force or unemployed) from 1989 to 2004, the decline was more extreme for men (-12.7% as compared to -16.3%) (Varbanova 2006, 14). Similarly, men’s unemployment rates have remained slightly higher than women’s (32), but women are much more often classified as economically inactive (22). This difference itself has a lot to do with gender roles: when asked, unemployed women may be more likely to describe themselves as a homemaker (thus economically inactive) than are unemployed men, who are more likely to describe themselves as actively seeking work (i. e., officially unemployed). Women are also often pushed into extended parental leave (because there is no daycare) or into retiring earlier.
Other statistics more clearly point to women’s stratification in the labor market. For example, women are much more likely to be unemployed long term, causing their skills to become obsolete and their chances of reemployment to decrease (Varbanova 2006, 33, 34). The gap between women’s and men’s monthly wages is the largest in the region, at 36 percent in 2003, larger than it was under Soviet rule and most problematic for women twenty to forty years of age (50). There is also significant segregation of women into sectors of the economy that tend to earn less as well as vertical segregation, meaning that the higher status the position is within the sector, the fewer women (Bobylev and Alexandrova 2005). Women are more often found in government jobs or the informal economy, where they make tradeoffs on income or safety.27 Other problems include the increased discrepancy between job specifications and the professional qualifications of women and the prevalence of sexist job advertisements (including appearance requirements for jobs such as clothing salespeople), which appeared first in the early 1990s and continue to today. As a result, most women do not have the economic resources, time, or energy for activism as they struggle to take care of themselves, often their children, and even sometimes their husbands.
These changes in the labor market were accompanied by the commodification of images of women’s bodies and sexuality. The early 1990s witnessed a huge and jarring deluge of pornography (Goscilo 1996). The porn was everywhere, even pinned to the omnipresent kiosks where everyone was buying their food. On the one hand, these reflected the sexual revolution that accompanied the dramatic political and economic changes. Sex in the Soviet Union had been taboo, but burst into the public agenda during Gorbachev’s glasnost, revealing dramatic changes in sexual morality that had begun in the 1960s and ’70s (Kon 1995). The new freedoms included sexual freedoms. They included liberalization of policies toward homosexual individuals who had been hospitalized (and sometimes convinced that they were transsexuals), imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes executed (Essig 1999). For many women, these changes were liberating, freeing them from ubiquitous cultural icons of asexual women and lessening the double standards about women’s sexuality. In 2004, the new freedoms even led to the production and popularity of a Russian Sex and the City, titled, The Balzac Age, or All Men Are Bastards. The dramatic changes have even led to public (albeit fabricated and for men more than women) lesbianism, such as by the young women in the pop group t. A.T. u.
On the other hand, the sexual freedoms represent the expansion of sexual rights for heterosexual men even at the cost of others. Most negative, from the perspective of most global feminists, was the proliferation of images of violence against women in the media (Attwood 1996). As in the West, many of the pornographic images eroticized women’s subordination, portraying women happily and passively submitting to violence, bondage, and even murder. These images link sex and violence and sexualized women while constructing a violent masculinity. Although the amount of pornography has since decreased, the marketing of women and women’s images has become at least as common as it is in the United States. At the very least, this commodification and sexualization of women highlights their differences from the ideal gender-neutral (male) citizen just as citizenship is becoming more meaningful.
More clearly troubling from the perspective of global feminists is the reaction to these changes, what the prominent sexologist Igor Kon (2005) has labeled a “moral panic.” Driven by the new Russian Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church, with support from pro-life advocates, the new “antisexual crusade . . . targets. . . sex education, women’s reproductive rights, and free access to sexuality-related information. The campaign is openly nationalistic, xenophobic, homophobic, . . . anti-Semitic,” and sometimes even violent (111).
Another complicating factor is what the Russians call the demographic crisis; the Russian population is declining precipitously because of decreasing fertility among women and increasing mortality among men. In 1995, the life expectancy of men had dropped from 64 in 1990 to 58, the lowest in the region. While women’s life expectancy has fluctuated only between 72 and 74 years, the men’s life expectancy reached 60 again only in 2003 (Varbanova 2006, 15). For some, men’s disastrous life expectancy has been taken to be a simplistic indicator of men’s inequality vis-a-vis women, but women too face the consequences of these problems, which are driven mostly by increased smoking and alcohol consumption, often spiking after the men become unemployed. Women are left before and after their partners’ early death to deal with increased violence and decreased contributions to the household. Further, it is (ethnically Russian) women who are predominantly blamed for their decisions to have fewer children (even as they reflect rational decisions in the context of the huge upheaval). In 2006, President Putin introduced monetary incentives for Russian women to have more children. Public officials’ and society’s preoccupation with this problem never includes discussions of the solving of it through allowing more non-Russian immigrants from the former Soviet republics because the crisis is seen as one of the ethnic Russian (russkii) nation.
The problems facing women are particularly acute because there are so few women with political power, despite a few notable exceptions such as Irina Khaka — mada or Ella Pamfilova and the surprising and short-lived success of the Women of Russia political movement in the early 1990s (Buckley 1999; Nechemias 2000). The Soviet system had kept up the appearance of gender equality with a one-third quota for the Supreme Soviet as well as local soviets (but not for the legislative and executive bodies with the real power). In the first contested elections in 1990, the proportion of women in the lower house dropped to 5.4 percent. In subsequent elections for the new lower house, the Duma, women have constituted 13.5 percent (1993-95), 10.2 percent (1995-99), and 7.7 percent (1999-2003) despite the fact that women constitute some 53—54 percent of the population and tend to vote more than men (Duban 2006, 55). In the 2003—2007 Duma, women constituted 9.8 percent of all deputies, putting Russia near the bottom of countries around the world.28 Only four of the twenty-nine legislative committees were chaired by women (Duban 2006, 56). In local legislatures, women account for only 10 percent of representatives. This underrepresentation of women has contributed to a very limited impact of women deputies on government policies—only when an issue or the context is nonpartisan and when they articulate their stances from a neotraditional gender ideology (Shevchenko 2007).