Russian women do all the heavy work
Soviet men should stop selling cabbage pies — and help their women build the railroads, such is the message from “Trud,” the Soviet Union’s trade union newspaper. “Practically every branch of industry is in urgent need of men,” it complained — but the male half of the workforce is out seeking easy jobs, secure in the knowledge that women will tackle the rough work. “Trud” described how, in the southern republic of Uzbekistan, the task of operating giant construction cranes is almost exclusively allotted to females.
Women make up half the workers in foundries and brick kilns — and it is they who outnumber representatives of the “stronger sex” in road and railway construction.
The October Revolution provided women with equality, but the cen-turies-old tradition of male chauvinism, which thrives throughout the Soviet Union to this day, has a stranglehold on real emancipation. “What Westerners don’t understand is that we Russians are Eastern,” explains a blonde, blue-eyed engineer in his thirties. “We lived under the Tartars for 300 years. So we treated our women like Eastfem men should.”
But many women feel the time has come to throw off the Tartar yoke. The once distant rumblings of female discontent have grown more
insistent in the last few years. “Women do everything a man wouldn’t,” says Marina, an attractive Muscovite actress in her late 20s.
"They collect the dustbins ... and build the roads, but don’t drive on them. And while I’m jumping up and down on my washing in a bowl at week-ends, the men are out in the courtyards playing dominoes.”
Soviet scholars have calculated that the average mother works 41 hours a week at the office and few hours at home. The average Soviet husband, however, helps less with the housework today than he did 60 years ago. Women make up most of the workforce in the U.S.S.R., and wives are generally more highly educated than their husbands, yet the notion that men are naturally superior to women persists — and not only in the home. Mikhail Gorbachev’s appeal to be “more bold in promoting women to management posts” resulted in a flurry of articles in the Govern-ment-controlled press asking why Soviet women rarely struggle beyond the lower echelons of management. “Research indicates that a woman’s potential in management is insufficiently exploited,” admitted two Soviet economists in a recent commentary in the national newspaper “Socialist Industry.” “Women possess equal-
ity at work and in education, but no-one is in any hurry to promote them. There has been practically no progress in job promotion for women over the past decade. In fact, statistics show a definite trend: the higher the post, the fewer the women.” Much of the blame undoubtedly lies with the men. A local Ukranian party boss wrote to “Pravda” earlier this, year regretting that many women were held back in their careers by the “blind jealousy” or inferiority complexes of men.
When Anna Melnik was put forward as a candidate for the chairmanship of a collective farm, the usual objections were raised: “What can one expect from a woman?” said one. “She’ll be bound to make a mess of it,” added another.
Against ail the odds, Anna got the job — succeeding a male chairman “who preferred drinking bouts to business,” and order has now been restored on the farm.
Tatyana, a collective farm worker in the Ukraine, was not so lucky. She was forced to turn down a management post involving longer hours when her husband stuck to his conviction that “all the work at home must be
done by the woman.”
The solution for women would seem to lie in overcoming what one researcher in Moscow’s trades union school calls “the negative outlook of men in choosing and promoting (female) personnel to top posts.” Some male managers, he says, “are inclined to grant women the role of boss only when it comes to washing, cleaning and cooking.”
But at least one commentator insists that women themselves are at fault. “(Women) have grown too accustomed to the traditional division of labour: men give the commands and women carry them out,” he says, adding that this is why seven out of ten female college students prefer traditionally female professions such as nursing and teaching.
Irina, a slim, smartly dressed 23-year-old, is already resigned to a lowgrade teaching post: “How can I be ambitious?” she shrugs. “I’m getting married soon and then I’ll have a child. You can’t mix a family with a career.”
Leading Soviet sociologist Professor Igor Bestu-zhev-Lada admits that it is this attitude which contributes to the dearth of female managers. Women
are actually afraid of promotion because of their responsibility to their children, he says. The Soviet media has aired two proposals for the overworked mother or frustrated career woman. The first is to register housework as a full-time official job complete with
wage and pension. The second involves employing a small army of "professional mothers” whose duty would be to brear as many babies for the country as possible — leaving their childless sisters free to help run it. Copyright London Observer Service.
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Press, 3 February 1986, Page 8
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851Russian women do all the heavy work Press, 3 February 1986, Page 8
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