A Circumstantial Bondage

...Lapidus finds differently...

...I want to thank the Soviet government for the opportunities that women enjoy today," the woman who opened the festivities that year began...

...The lady at the Ogonek party hit a sensitive spot when she noted that in addition to having to work full time, women must continue to fullfill their several traditional domestic roles-leaving them no time to relax and effectively robbing them of their individuality...

...In our leisure time, we are allowed to cook, wash dishes, do the laundry, and take care of our children...

...So we count ourselves among the freest and happiest women in the world...

...In fact, they argue, no feminist movement exists in the USSR because none is needed...

...Unfortunately, the author does not carefully delineate the reforms relating to women instituted during the eight months following the democratic Revolution of February 1917-many of which the Bolsheviks look credit for after their October coup d'etat...

...generous maternity laws...

...Lapidus divides the rest of her history into three periods: from 1917 to 1930...

...But that is not a serious Haw, since the Bolsheviks very shortly were to suppress all feminist tendencies...

...Regrettably, this book largely neglects a critical aspect of the Soviet woman's daily existence-the slave labor camps...

...The routine almost never varied, except in 1968...

...And since the Soviet regime was desperately in need of labor-manual as well as intellectual-that is what it wanted from women...

...In fact, the increasing inadequacy of the child-care network has given rise to the "Babushka" brigade-retired grandmothers who live with their children's families and assume the responsibility for the housework...

...But Lapidus traces its roots to Bolshevik doctrine...

...1 was reminded of that distant, but still pertinent, episode while reading Gail Warshofsky Lapidus' compelling first-hand study of the lot of women under Soviet rule...

...Yet that is not a happy solution...

...Lapidus draws a telling picture of the activities of the notorious Zhenot-dels(Women's Committees...

...But the problems confronting contemporary women have not really changed very much...

...The audience laughed, particularly the men...

...They cite a long list of achievements: broad participation in the labor force...

...these evaporated by the early '30s...

...Only a few, I think, detected the bitterness behind her words...

...Yet in practice their situation was far less frightful: Three Empresses occupied the Russian throne, and a woman, Princess Voron-tzova-Dashkova, was named president of the Academy of Sciences...

...After work, we are permitted to run from store to store, looking for food for our families...

...They were deemed the property of their parents or husbands, were not permitted to pursue careers of their choice, and could not secure passports...

...from 1930 to Stalin's death in 1953...

...Women in Soviet Society is a valuable documentation of the tragic sequence of events that have led to the Soviet woman's present state of circumstantial bondage...

...and from 1953 to the present...

...Communists and some feminists unhappy with conditions in the capitalist West contend that the Bolshevik Revolution gave women complete economic, political, legal, and sexual equality for the first time...

...A vast gulf continued to separate educated aristocratic women from their middle-class counterparts, and a still wider division separated both from their sisters in the villages...

...The pattern at Ogonek magazine, where I worked as a correspondent before coming to this country six years ago, was typical...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, despite being granted the opportunity to work and study, the Soviet woman remained oppressed in her private life...

...public child-care facilities...

...And even those who have not suffered this fate personally have too rarely escaped its shadow...

...liberal family legislation regulating marriage, divorce and abortion...

...A person's value was measured solely in terms of what that person could contribute to the cause...

...Next, they started to join various revolutionary organizations, where they came to be counted among the most eager volunteers-with some even going so far as to create a new branch of revolutionary activity: female terrorism...

...Indeed, this study convincingly shows that the gains they made-the access to educational and professional opportunities, the maternal protective legislation, the organized child-care network-were a direct result of the labor shortage...

...At the end of the century, though, the abolition of serfdom, coupled with the ascendancy of capitalism, wrought deep changes in Russian life and altered the status of women at every level of society...

...It is elaborately observed in offices, factories and collective farms throughout the country...

...Party propagandists not only denounced such "bourgeois influences," they proclaimed the retreat to prerevolutionary values progressive and ideologically correct...

...The "thaw" that followed Stalin's death, to be sure, made life in general in the USSR somewhat more relaxed...

...An untold number of women have themselves been arrested, tortured and exiled to camps in the North or the Far East...

...Freelance writers would join the staff in a large hall forthe occasion...

...in 1944, new family legislation revoked divorce and restored the institution of illegitimacy...

...Personal freedom, individual choice, even so private a matter as family life -all were in principle denied by Bolshevism...

...Thus women have frequently had to bring up their children alone, provide support for them alone, and suffer fears about their imprisoned loved ones alone-lest expressions of anxiety reach the ears of the dread secret police and cause added troubles...

...full access to educational and professional opportunities...

...They have had to perform strenuous physical tasks under harsh conditions that endangered their lives...

...With single-minded efficiency they monitored and destroyed folk traditions and family customs around the country, especially in the Eastern republics...

...The present Soviet regime has not done much to relieve this situation...

...At work, we find that we are no longer discriminated against...

...While the initial denial of every institution Horn the "accursed past" brought forth projects for a new style of life and stimulated talk about "free love...

...True, in a strictly legal sense women had almost no rights in Tsarist Russia...

...By the second half of the 19th century, women began to fight openly for greater freedom and they scored several victories, particularly in the area of education...

...To begin with, she notes, "No discussion of the problem of sexual equality in Soviet society can take the Bolshevik Revolution as its starting point...

...Lenin perhaps summed up the situation best when, as Lapidus tells us, he once declared that the freedom of women in the USSR cannot be isolated from the liberation of the entire society...

...Nor did they have any recourse, technically, against physical or psychic brutality that they might suffer at the hands of their families...

...Gail Lapidus observes that those who "compare the present Soviet reality with the Utopian vision of revolutionary ideology do so only to draw attention to the discrepancy between promise and reality...

...In place of the familiar social order, they enforced new norms of behavior, caring little about the individual tragedies caused in the process...

...Soon, a female staff member would call us to order and the speeches praising the system would get under way...

...Grandma may be a neat unpaid maid, but her presence is usually not appreciated because living quarters are cramped and she might well be sharing a room already overcrowded with her children and grandchildren...

...It would be easy to explain this turn of events as one more reflection of Stalin's ugly personality...

...Worse, step-by-step the regime deprived her of the few things she had earlier won in her struggle for emancipation: In the mid- 1930's abortion was prohibited...

...More often than not at least one relative-a husband, a son, a father-has been in prison or in exile...

...Reviewed by Ludmila Kafanova In the Soviet Union, March 8 has been designated International Women's Day...