Gender roles in contemporary Russia: Attitudes and expectations among women students

Europe - Asia Studies

Volumn 57, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 429-455

  White, Anne ^a  

^a Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ATTITUDINAL SURVEY; GENDER ROLE; WOMENS STATUS;

EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; RUSSIAN FEDERATION; WORLD;

EID: 20444422899     PISSN: 09668136     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09668130500073449     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Sarah Ashwin, 'Introduction: Gender, State, Society', in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Post-Soviet Russia (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 19.
2. The geographer Rodoman uses the term 'archaisation' to refer to this development, citing other phenomena such as the increased importance of barter and subsistence farming. V. Rodoman, 'Prostranstvennaya polyarizatsiya i pereorientatsiya', in Tatyana Zaslavskaya (ed.), Kuda idet Rossiya? Transformatsiya sotsial'noi sfery i sotsial'naya politika (Moscow, Delo, 1998).
3. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik 2002 (Moscow, Goskomstat, 2002), pp. 125, 127.
4. A. G. Vishnevsky (ed.), Naselenie Rossii 2002 (Moscow, Tsentr demografii i ekologii cheloveka, Izdatel'stvo KDU, 2004), p. 46.
5. See for example Anne White, Small-Town Russia: Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities. A Portrait of the Intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999-2000 (London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 40-41, 112;
6. E. Kalabikhina (ed.), Gendernye voprosy v Rossii v kontse XX veka, published together with the shorter, English-language report Gender Issues in Transition: Urban and Rural Russia (Moscow, Akisflat, 2004), p. 57.
7. Vishnevsky (ed.), Naselenie Rossii 2002, pp. 55, 57.
8. S. I. Golod, XX vek i tendentsii seksual'nykh otnoshenii v Rossii (St Petersburg, Aleteiya, 1996), cited in T. A. Dolbik-Vorobei, 'Studencheskaya molodezh' o problemakh braka i rozhdaemosti', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2003, 11, p. 79.
9. See for example Simon Clarke, New Forms of Employment and Household Survival Strategies (Coventry, University of Warwick, Centre for Comparative Labour Studies and Moscow, ISITO, 1999), pp. 35-37, 52.
10. V. V. Petukhov, E. I. Pakhomova & N. N. Sedova, 'Prava cheloveka i diskriminatsionnye praktiki v sovremennoi Rossii', Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost', 2003, 5, pp. 40-48.
11. M. K. Gorshkov & N. E. Tikhonova (eds), Zhenshchina novoi Rossii: Kakaya ona? Kak zhivet? K chemu stremitsya? (Moscow, Rossiiskaya politicheskaya entsiklopediya, 2002), p. 106.
12. N. E. Tikhonova, Fenomen gorodskoi bedhosti v sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow, Letnii Sad, 2003), p. 243. In a panel survey of 105 poor households in Moscow, Vladikavkaz and Voronezh, the wife was the main breadwinner in a third in 1990 and a half in 2000.
13. There is quite a lot of research which suggests that middle-aged women do want to work. See White, Small-Town Russia, ch. 5, and, for example, S. Ashwin & E. Bowers, 'Do Russian Women Want to Work?', in Mary Buckley (ed.), Post-Soviet Women: from the Baltic to Central Asia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997);
14. G. Shirokalova, 'Gorozhane i selyane v rezul'tate reform 90-kh godov', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2002, 2, p. 79 (suggesting that only one in six women in Nizhny Novgorod region would definitely like to be a housewife);
15. E. Zdravomyslova, 'Problems of Becoming a Housewife', in A. Rotkirch & E. Haavio-Mannila (eds), Women's Voices in Russia Today (Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1996), suggesting that middle-aged and older women in St Petersburg find it very difficult to adapt to not working (though it is easier for younger women);
16. I. I. Chernova, 'Zhenshchiny i rabota: mneniya rossiyan i kanadtsev', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 1999, 12, p. 111, suggesting that over 90% of Russians think women should work to support their families;
17. Kalabikhina (ed.), Gendernye voprosy, pp. 45-47. Kalabikhina did, however, find that some types of woman were attracted by the housewife model: very young girls who imagined life in terms of TV serials, late middle-aged and 'tired' respondents, non-ethnic Russian women and some of the housewives themselves (p. 45).
18. For evidence that young women want to work see Sarah Ashwin, '"A Woman is Everything": The Reproduction of Soviet Ideals of Womanhood in Post-communist Russia', in Al Rainnie, Adrian Smith & Adam Swain (eds), Work, Employment and Transition: Restructuring Livelihoods in Postcommunism (London, Routledge, 2002), pp. 121-123.
19. White, Small-Town Russia, p. 26.
20. Ibid., pp. 125-127.
21. Ibid.;
22. Vyacheslav Glazychev, Glubinnaya Rossiya: 2000-2002 (Moscow, Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2003).
23. Among the most useful English-language sources are Mary Buckley (ed.), Post-Soviet Women: from the Baltic to Central Asia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997)
24. and Dana Vannoy et al., Marriages in Russia: Couples During the Economic Transition (Westport, CT and London, Praeger, 1999). A long bibliography of 1990s Russian sources is provided in Kalabikhina (ed.), Gendernye voprosy, pp. 119-129.
25. Ibid., pp. 45-47.
26. Ibid., p. 80.
27. Gorshkov & Tikhonova (eds), Zhenshchina novoi Rossii.
28. Ibid., pp. 44-47.
29. Ibid., p. 113.
30. L. V. Kartseva, 'Model' sem'i v usloviyakh transformatsii rossiiskogo obshchestva', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2003, 7, pp. 92-100.
31. Ibid., pp. 98, 96.
32. L. P. Bogdanova & A. S. Shchukina, 'Grazhdanskii brak v sovremennoi demograficheskoi situatsii', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2003, 7, p. 103.
33. S. V. Skutneva, 'Gendernye aspekty zhiznennogo samoopredeleniya molodezhi', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2003, 11, p. 76.
34. Ibid., p. 77.
35. Tikhonova, Fenomen gorodskoi bednosti, p. 263.
36. www.monitoring ru, ROMIR survey of 17 April 2003, 'Kto v dome khozyain?'.
37. Students were given the questionnaires at lectures and invited to complete them in their own time; 122 questionnaires were received. Those discarded were incomplete, completed by men, late or, in one case, so normative as to be completely uninformative. The questionnaires were in Russian; all translations are my own. I am very much indebted to Professor Lubov' Tsurikova of the Voronezh State University English Department for helping with the wording and format of the Russian questionnaire and for distributing and collecting the questionnaire forms.
38. Hakim, however, implies that rather than being unusually progressive in their convictions, students are merely inexperienced (in Spain and the UK), and this makes them exceptionally idealistic and egalitarian with reference to family models, compared with the rest of the population. By extension, at least some of these idealistic students might be expected to become more conservative after graduation, rather than to become leaders of (radical) opinion. On the other hand, within her older cohorts, many of whom were young at the height of second wave feminism, higher levels of education do correlate with more egalitarian views. It is this generation of educated women whose experience is perhaps most comparable with that of Russian young women today; see Catherine Hakim, Models of the Family in Modern Societies: Ideals and Realities (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003), pp. 93-94.
39. To have surveyed men from another university department would have introduced problems of comparability; one would expect language students to be particularly 'Westernised', and it was this attribute which made them especially worthy of study.
40. The Pedagogical University questionnaire and associated interviews were for a project on labour migration as a livelihood strategy. For the proportion of students from different localities at different universities see Gosudarstvennaya sluzhba zanyatosti: Departament Federal'noi Gosudarstvennoi Sluzhby zanyatosti naseleniya po Voronezhskoi oblasti, Otdel sotsial'noekonomicheskikh issledovanii i prognoza rynka truda, Rezul'taty issledovanii, 1999, 2000, 2003.
41. There were, however, some fairly substantial differences, which limit the usefulness of the data: half the Bath students were male; about 1/6 were studying social sciences, not languages; and a similar proportion had non-British or dual nationality. Hence the Bath data have been used only sparingly.
42. See for example Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990);
43. Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
44. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika (London, Collins, 1987), p. 117.
45. See Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman.
46. Social status was determined from the students' descriptions of their parents'jobs. Naturally this is a somewhat imprecise exercise. I have counted every parent who seemed to match the description of worker or farmer or, alternatively, entrepreneur or professional employed in the private sector. Possibly, but by no means certainly, households headed by entrepreneurs are more likely to hold 'non-Soviet' views, or at least to be able to purchase goods (foreign holidays, magazines) which open up new intellectual horizons. The range of income even among the entrepreneurs was probably rather great. Despite the fact that the essentialists contained a disproportionate number of both Voronezhites and working-class students, there is no correspondence between worker parentage and Voronezh residence; in fact, just under 20% of the Voronezh students had parents who were workers, compared with 30% among the whole sample.
47. However, the four students who said that women possessed two or more 'masculine' qualities (for example, rationality, persistence, independence, unwillingness to accept an inferior position) were all from the 'constructivist' group (2.1 B) except for one, and even this woman should possibly have ticked 2.1 B, since she later stated her belief that men got jobs more easily because they were brought up to aim for success.
48. Marx was answering a questionnaire, widespread in school playgrounds, which was given to him by his daughter (Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman, p. 8). I first encountered references to Marx's answers when I myself was a student at Voronezh University at the end of the Brezhnev era (1981-82).
49. See for example M. Burawoy, P. Krotov & T. Lytkina, 'Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia', Ethnography, 1, 1, 2000, pp. 43-65;
50. M. Kiblitskaya, 'Russia's Female Breadwinners', in Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society.
51. It is of course hard to say whether certain adjectives, such as 'romantic' or 'reserved', were seen as praiseworthy, blameworthy or neutral. Moreover, it might also be true that some virtues were more highly regarded than others: for example 'kindness' might be more praiseworthy than 'pragmatism'.
52. Lynne Attwood, 'Young People's Attitudes Towards Sex Roles and Sexuality', in Hilary Pilkington (ed.), Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 135.
53. Ibid., p. 136-137.
54. The Pedagogical University statements were: 'It's good if a young childless woman is able to stay at home and her husband can afford to keep her. Women who don't get married will always feel unfulfilled and such women deserve to be pitied. Women who don't have children will always feel unfulfilled and such women deserve to be pitied. Even if the wife works, the husband should still be considered the family's main provider. It does not matter if a wife has a low salary (for example a teacher's salary), because the husband should provide for the family. A family's place of residence should depend primarily on the husband's workplace'.
55. Calculated from data in 'Tendentsii na rynke truda v 2001 godu', Voprosy statistiki, 2002, 9, pp. 5, 8 and 10. In the same month, 8.5% of working-age women were unemployed, according to survey data (Ibid.).
56. She would also include the assumption that the husband should be the breadwinner; see Ashwin, 'Introduction: Gender, State and Society', p. 21.
57. The sample seems to have been about 120-130. L. P. Bogdanova & A. S. Shchukina, 'Grazhdanskii brak v sovremennoi demograficheskoi situatsii', Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya, 2003, 7, pp. 101, 103-104.
58. Olga Issoupova, 'From Duty to Pleasure? Motherhood in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia', in Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society.
59. Some 18 were fully agreed and 10 were unsure.
60. The ranking of students and their allocation to quartiles was based on the sum of the students' opinions about seven of the eight essentialist statements, i.e. all minus the 'bosses' question, plus their answer to Q. 2.1 (with 2 points for (A) and 0 points for (B) or (C)). The top quartile was 25 students whose total point score was 9-15. The bottom 'quartile' was 24 students whose point score was 0-3. Nine students scored 0.
61. The comparison is between the percentage of students of each type of background among the 'most neo-traditionalist' group (14 students either wholly agreeing with both assertions about housewives, or wholly with one and partly with the other), and the 'completely opposed to neo-traditionalism' group, those 52 students completely denying both of the assertions that women should stay at home.
62. In Figure 8, 96 sets of home-town peers were considered, excluding data about peers in non-Russian Tbilisi, Baku, Samarkand and Groznyi, but including peers in ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In Figure 9, the 'home older' category is based on the answers of 50 respondents who were not from Voronezh or Tbilisi, Samarkand, Baku or Groznyi. Voronezh answers are from all 100 respondents. The Russian students were asked to complete a table with the different social groups as column headings and the statements as row headings. A tick stood for 'agree', a question mark for 'don't know' and a blank for 'disagree'. While neat and economical of space, this turned out to be an unsatisfactory arrangement and it would have been better to have had a more conventional arrangement, as in the English version of the questionnaire. In the final analysis it seemed unwise to include the question marks ('don't know') with reference to peers and elders, because there were relatively few of these. Probably many blank spaces indicated 'don't know' rather than 'no'. Only ticks and other positive comments have therefore been counted towards the totals for peers in this analysis. The students' responses about their own opinions were often fuller and more nuanced, sometimes with verbal comments, and the 'don't know' reply was more clearly distinguishable from 'disagree'. This is why 'don't know' question marks have been counted (as half points) when quantifying the respondents' own opinions.
63. The reference here is only to the State University students, who were asked about other people's views as well as their own.