Gorbachev and after
Criticisms of the shortcomings in women's emancipation and complaints that emancipation had gone too far both intensified in the Gorbachev era. At a conference in January 1987, members of the Soviet Women's Committee, an officially sponsored organisation hitherto utterly loyal, launched biting critiques of numerous party policies involving women. The head of the Committee, the former astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, accused the leadership of disregarding women workers' health and implied that men in positions of authority blocked the advance of women. Speakers even referred to infant mortality, a topic so sensitive that for decades no statistical information about it had been published. Noting that the Soviet Union's infant mortality rate exceeded rates in capitalist countries, they blamed the inadequacies of Soviet medical care and environmental pollution.[233] Their statements prepared the way for still more radical critiques. For the first time since 1930, the accusation that the Soviet Union was 'patriarchal' appeared in print. The annual yearbook Women in the USSR, having hitherto celebrated Soviet success in emancipating women, in 1990 offered instead a depressing summary of women's working conditions.
At the same time, the 'back to the home movement' erupted into the open. Male candidates in the election campaign of 1989 repeatedly called for the 'emancipation' of women from the double burden by returning them to the home. Increasingly, political leaders, the media and even the general public embraced the idea that women should withdraw from the workforce. The 'backto the home' movement was usually couched in the language of women's choice: women could be either workers or mothers; it was their choice.[234] But if 'choice' was the language, policy pointed in a different direction. Virtually every policy initiative aimed to encourage women to bear and raise children, rather than help women advance on the job or combat discrimination at the workplace. In 1987, two weeks were added to the period of fully paid maternity leave, extending it from fifty-six to seventy days after the birth, and the period of partially paid maternity leave was extended from one year to eighteen months. Women also gained up to fourteen days' paid leave each year to care for a sick child. Making the pro-natalist intent of such legislation clear, its provisions were introduced gradually, starting in the regions with the lowest birth rates. In the context of Gorbachev's economic reforms, this legislation disadvantaged working women. Generous in principle, the legislation failed to obligate the government to pay for the leaves it decreed. Instead, employers bore the cost of funding maternity-related leaves, as they had for years. Now, however, enterprises had to watch their budgets carefully and consequently, when they laid off workers, women with children were often first to go.[235]
With the fall of Gorbachev, the state completely abandoned the responsibility it had assumed in 1917 as an agent of women's emancipation and social welfare. The results were both positive and negative. Negatives included a dramatic decline in women's standard of living. Millions of women lost their jobs. Poverty became feminised. By the late 1990s, at least a quarter and perhaps as much as half of the Russian population qualified as 'poor' or 'very poor', and over two-thirds of those poor were female. In 1990, responsibility for childcare establishments was transferred from the federal to the local level, with no provision made for funding. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of children in nurseries and kindergartens declined from 9 million to 6 million. The cost of existing places escalated.[236] Such changes raised serious obstacles to women's work outside the home, although some studies suggested that on the whole, women coped better than men in the new economy, and that younger women, presumably unburdened by children, adapted to it successfully.
The quality of life deteriorated. Divorce rates rose, as did rates of mortality. Between 1990 and 1997, women's life expectancy at birth dropped from 74.3 to 72.8; men's dropped even more drastically. The birth rate declined as well, from 13.4 per 1,000 in 1990 to 8.6 per 1,000 in 1997. Between 1991 and 2000, the population of Russia decreased by 3 million.[237] Motherhood itselfbecame more dangerous as a result ofmaternal ill-health and the drastic deterioration ofthe public health system. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of mothers who died during pregnancy or in childbirth rose from 49.3 to 70 for every 100,000 births; by 1998, the number had dropped to 50, still more than twice the average European level of 22. Women's sexuality became commodified: product advertisements featured semi or fully nude women; job advertisements sometimes openly solicited women's sexual services. The traffic in women from the former Soviet Union to Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States became an internationally recognised problem.
On the positive side, the collapse of the Soviet era also ended the state's monopoly on defining women's emancipation and brought new opportunities for women to organise and express themselves. By the mid-i990s, hundreds of women's groups had registered with Russia's Ministry of Justice; countless more operated 'unofficially'. Professional women, theirthinking stimulated by foreign travel and contact with Western feminists, led many of the feminist- oriented organisations. Groups that sought to improve the lot of women adopted a range of strategies, almost none of them permissible in the Soviet period. They organised conferences; campaigned for women candidates and against the war in Chechnya; ran charity events to assist women and children; established support groups for single mothers or women artists and rape crisis centres and domestic violence hotlines; offered retraining opportunities; published journals and newsletters and much, much more. Gender and women's studies centres generated women-oriented scholarship; young scholars began to explore hitherto neglected realms of women's experience. Women writers, more numerous than ever before, experimented with new forms of expression.
The movement scored one of its greatest victories in i992, when the Supreme Soviet considered a bill on the 'Protection of the family, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood' that would have seriously eroded women's civil rights. Had the billbeenpassed, the family ratherthan the individual would have become the basis of many civil rights, such as owning an apartment or a plot of land. The law would have required women with children under fourteen to work no more than thirty-five hours a week. The women's movement successfully mobilised to defeat the bill.[238] But such clear-cut victories were few. Women experienced difficulty placing woman-oriented concerns on the political agenda. The Soviet regime had appropriated the language of women's emancipation, making it difficult to discuss women-related issues. Once quotas for female representation ended, the number of women elected to governing bodies declined precipitously. From over a third of delegates to Republic-level Supreme Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s, the proportion of women dropped to 5.4 per cent in Russia and 7 per cent in Ukraine.[239] Despite the efforts of feminists and other women activists, politics remained a man's game, even as the arena expanded.
234
Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay and Kathryn Pinnick,
235
Judith Shapiro, 'The Industrial Labor Force', in Mary Buckley (ed.),
236
Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch,
238
Valerie Sperling,
239
Mary Buckley, Adaptation of the Soviet Women's Committee: Deputies' Voices from "Women of Russia"', in Mary Buckley (ed.),