Reading Journal 10

(On the Canadian Woman Studies journal on soviet women and Baranskaya's A Week Like Any Other.)

If one reads the short biography at the beginning of the book, and notices the almost extreme attention to practical details, one might suspect A Week Like Any Other to be almost autobiographical. Without reading the biography, one might instead (or also?) suspect it was written by a Canadian mother: the overall pattern of relationship is very familiar to my generation, not directly, but from watching each other's parents as we grew up. Among my friends' families, those with both parents as full-time professionals, having been in love at one point and mostly maintaining that through waves of wrinkles and the occasional larger doubts, the father doing more to help the mother than the previous generation, but the mother still struggling under the weight of the majority of domestic responsibility combined with a confusing mix of pressures at work. Not only are there the "normal" stresses of work: looming deadlines and the thought of not being able to make them, fierce competition for shared resources, being unprepared for meetings, the extra stress of slip-ups like being late or misplacing important things, etc.; but also the questionnaire has Olya's female coworkers up-in-arms about whether the state would have them have more children while at the same time she almost aborted Gulka (the second of her two children) and is always worried about accidentally becoming pregnant again. Like the Canadian mothers I've seen, she bears this all as well as possible without complaining, and it drives her to two breakdowns. Not massive ones in a medical sense, perhaps, but still ones she is not able to control: she laughs maniacally to the point of tears at Lusya's finding of the graph Olya had lost, and the next day--the first of two supposed days of rest she looks forward to--she breaks down crying in front of her children and husband (when he decides he has done his share of the day's myriad chores) and cannot figure out how she could have let herself make such a scene.

It's what Kollontai had feared for the Soviet woman, and sought to remedy. What happened?

There are the children's crèche and kindergarten for Gulka and Kotka, respectively, but Dima and Olya are both aware of their lower-than-desirable quality, and for what reason: the norm is set at twenty-eight children for one supervisor and assistant. (Baranskaya's assertion here through Olya's narration that whoever set the norm obviously had never had children, or could pay for better care of them, seems to set the tone for the story as an expositive one, to some extent showing life as it is and asking for a critical look at it, hoping the state might help in some way: Lusya's comments during the questionnaire debate reflect the latter; the questionnaire itself, the former.) But the ideas of household chores, particularly mending, cooking, and cleaning, being outsourced to specialized labourers is not played out here, at least not positively. The only one of those we see is Dima's eating from a canteen, and this is always portrayed negatively: the food is never as good as Olya's.

So what's the solution? Baranskaya seems to suggest the need for a general slowdown--Muscovites are always rude and in a hurry in the few portrayals we get of them--but the question of how family life ought to work seems to be left unanswerable to some degree: the only people who have the right to come up with an answer, the working parents themselves, have very little time to think about it. Dima has a little more than Olya, and his suggestion is to throw out her career and beef up his, so that they can live better and she can spend more time with the children. After a little bit of rebuttal from Olya he admits, "Maybe I'm being selfish, I don't know. Let's drop it." (p. 60) But in the end, Olya's belt hook is still not sown back on--a recurring to-do item mentioned usually twice a day in the novella: she must finally do it today, then right before falling asleep, dammit, she has forgotten again and is much too tired to get out of bed to do it now--and the unanswered/unanswerable question, "What is the matter with me?" (p. 62) reverberates with the reader as the story comes to an end.


While the Canadian Woman Studies journal was good to read after writing the above for its inclusion of the purpose of Baranskaya's short story (in the article "Contemporary Soviet Women Writers"), it was more interesting as a divergence from our normal readings in that it included Western feminists trying to grapple with Russian culture. The articles "Soviet Women - A Canadian View" and "Sex Role Education in the USSR" were especially demonstrative of this. The former article seemed to be something of a cornerstone passage, outlining the basic conundrum of free-yet-doubly-burdened women in Russia, and that Western feminism and Russian feminism are two very different things. Broadly, at first interaction, the former cannot fathom the oversight of the sex-gender separation and total-equality discussions in the latter, and the latter sees these topics as much less relevant in the context of socialism and anyone pushing them to be radicals who are not actually looking out for women's best interests.
I think the two do have something to offer each other, however, given the journal issue's existence, but also on some specifics within the issues mentioned above.

For me, these points of possible learning occur at certain statements that seem to pop out of an otherwise levelly written essay. Reiter and Luxton stick to description with some helpful analysis for the first few paragraphs, and then seemingly out of nowhere insert this: "At the same time, the concept of women and men having different natures fosters a celebration of femininity as pretty and weak." (p. 27) First of all, "natures" here and earlier on the page seems to be too strong a word, carrying connotations of being on the same level as "human nature." Secondly, their quote of Kaidash contradicts this: "the indispensability of each sex" (Ibid., emphasis mine) hardly makes sense if one assumes a framework of dominance a la Kollontai's Thirty-Two Pages. Finally, while I agree that it's important to emphasize similarities between the sexes in the context of broken gender relations (i.e., when needed), I believe that God created two different genders to show different aspects of the divine nature in a way that is humbling to both men and women as they observe one another. And far be it from me to take this to mean we should celebrate "femininity as pretty and weak"! On the absolute contrary, anyone who attended the Global Citizenship Conference at Laurier last year and was present at the mock beauty pageant had it laid out for them if they didn't realize it before: "every day" women are strong--they have to be to survive--even or especially in the contexts wherein we might consider them powerless. For a woman to have any other supposedly contradictory quality amidst this--be it prettiness, or caring, understanding, wisdom, ...--ought to amaze us, and this strength alone, never mind "strength, plus...," is the femininity that was celebrated at the GCC. Indeed, this is exactly what is painted for the reader in detail in Baranskaya's story. So I think the Western framework would be enriched here. The examples given are true, no doubt (the letters from Russian women on p. 15 attest to this) but the cause and effect link is assumed rather than demonstrated--count me as a counterexample in that I loathe the beauty contests too. But it's all moot unless we can learn to celebrate positive human qualities in a person regardless of their gender, because despite the existence of two sexes (not to mention the sexuality of more complicated persons) neither creating boxes based on tendencies nor pretending that all tendencies are socially constructed will help us help each other become what we were meant to be. And we certainly can't predetermine what that is based on gender or anything else--this is the joy of life's journey.

"Over-emancipation" is quoted multiple times as the common Russian analysis of the Soviet women's problem. To me it feels almost like a tongue-in-cheek way of describing it: since "emancipation" has meant the freedom to become overburdened, rather than the freedom to have a balance of burden, it's facetiously accurate language to use. But Canadian criticism of it would seem to follow from the view that a woman with children who stays at home is in chains: "The measures proposed [to ease the double burden]...are all designed to keep women in harness--married and primarily responsible for the children." (p. 29) Perhaps that's somewhat valid: admittedly maternity leave wins out over paternity leave almost always. (p. 28) My question for both paradigms, then, is: why can't the family, and the role of both mother and father, be valued in such a way that joint leave is considered the best option and the norm? (I can probably answer that: Because it's too expensive.) But socially speaking, I would love to live in a world where whether you were a man, woman, single, married, had many children, were childless, were dedicated to a career, or worked part time (at a "paid" job or at home), or not at all (if circumstances prevented you from working), you would be valued and considered worth talking to, sharing food with, listening to, supporting, and spending time with in general; that you would be given respect. Why should stay-at-home dads be applauded but "traditional" moms be considered weak and trampled-upon, or those who try to do it all be considered stupid and undeserving? The social structures do need to be in place to allow this choice to actually be free, but I think this just brings us to the problem of general economic inequality (cf. the woman who wrote in on p. 15 again).

The Russian feminist voice could also learn from this. The household work imbalance in a marriage (well illustrated by Baranskaya) needs to be more seriously questioned. Also, and relatedly, it feels like in some cases they have taken the gender role separation too far: the rhetoric behind "How can she play football, and still expect a man to help her?" seems to have created some artificial division. There are countless things that both men and women can do, and do well, but they fall to one or the other rather than being negotiated on an individual basis or being tackled jointly. But individual choices are still based on socialization to an extent--which is where Pearson's article comes in.

The author presents a much fuller picture than the previous article of gender stereotype socialization and its practical effects, and the resulting argument is much more robust and productive in the end. To me both halves of the article seem to lend support to two statements: "If playing a supportive role is only honoured when it is done by a woman, then no amount of legal and economic equality will make any difference," (p. 94) and "there must be more women at the highest levels of Soviet power where they can impose some of those human qualities of compassion and understanding, of which they have learned to be proud." (p. 95, emphasis in original) But perhaps it would be easiest to start by replacing the notions of "the 'ideal' man and the 'ideal' woman" (p. 95) with something more helpful, like specific roles that men and women both step into: why not discuss the ideal coworker, teammate, friend, parent, sibling, housemate, child, babysitter, student, civic leader, project supervisor, spouse, lover, stranger, teacher, research assistant, etc., if ideals are a good way of framing a classroom discussion? Maybe then Russian men and women would be able to appreciate other and become better equipped to help shape one another towards becoming "ideal" human beings.