Soviet Women, Francine du Plessix Gray
Kristol, Elizabeth
I n his 1864 novel What Is to Be 1 Done? the Russian utopian socialist N. G. Chernyshevsky set out to depict the ideal marriage between an enlightened "new man" and "new woman" of the future:...
...Soviet Women is a loosely knit collection of vignettes and interviews, spanning the novelist's travels from Moscow through Latvia, Leningrad, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Siberia...
...We can fix any contraindication...
...For men...
...in the West...
...She has a stake, it turns SOVIET WOMEN: WALKING THE TIGHTROPE Francine du Plessix Gray/Doubleday/213 pp...
...It is far more likely, though, that to the extent that Soviet women are martyrs, this is simply because too much is being demanded of them, from too many quarters...
...Gray's assumption that Soviet women are frustrated in this quarter is quaint...
...Many of the women Gray spoke with (of the intelligentsia, that is) have managed to channel their frustrations and dreams into fashion, and the chapter entitled "Why They Dress Up" is the most fascinating section of the book...
...What Soviet women really need, concludes Gray, is a dose of American-style feminism...
...Here they have no clubs, no cars to play with, no decent apartments where one can either be private or receive friends properly . . . " Adds her friend, "And so all our anger and violence are always brought back to the home, the family...
...A Safeway down the street and a microwave in the kitchen are a sure-fire cure for martyrdom, and it is safe to assume that a healthy dose of economic growth would have vastly more transformative power in Soviet women's lives than would the widespread distribution of feminist literature...
...No, no, you see," the woman continues, pirouetting in her new outfit, "life is bleak, and this is one of the few inner joys I can buy, and the girls at work . . . they will be so impressed...
...Underprivileged things...
...Other anecdotal material—presented without disclaimer—is more difficult to evaluate...
...According to one estimate Gray provides, the typical Soviet mother spends forty hours a week on shopping, cooking, and cleaning...
...they "have THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 never had access to our basic feminist texts, and have only caught echoes of the outdated radical voices of the 1960s `movement.' " T here are two key lessons that 1 emerge from Soviet Women...
...And women's right (if not their obligation) to work became central to Soviet notions of citizenship...
...As one woman put it (displaying the typical condescending view of men), "One of the problems is that men are like big children, and in our country they don't have any toys...
...The plight of Soviet women dismays Gray as much for reasons of ideology as compassion...
...This imbalance is predictable (although it would have been nice if the author had made an effort to correct it) given Gray's upbringing in Paris by her Russian mother in what we may assume was a relatively privileged setting...
...Fashion is the stimulant of choice in a country that seems to do everything it can to sap the spirit...
...How can this be...
...one exclaims...
...The first is that whenever government policy concentrates on the workplace and the collective at the expense of the individual and the family, it is inevitably women who are hardest hit...
...Is it true that, among the educated elite of Leningrad, the most common form of "birth control" consists of leaping off an icebox when ones period is three days late...
...Soviet women's "hostile misreading of the Western women's movement" Gray attributes to their "cultural isolation...
...If her cervix gets inflamed, we heal it and put the spiral right back in...
...With options such as this, it would make sense that only five percent of the Soviet population uses birth control...
...expressed her wonder: "Their constant smile, their gallantry—that was the most amazing and impressive part of my trip...
...When essential consumer goods and services are scarce, the burden falls on women to find ingenious ways to put food on the table, and to clothe and educate the children...
...According to Gray, improvement in the conditions of Soviet women and relations between the sexes will hinge on the introduction of new attitudes into that country...
...The book's reporter's-notebook format makes for breezy reading, but the lack of any counterbalancing research or scholarship results in information that is at times dubious...
...If Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope is any indication, the Russian dream has changed little over the years...
...This is not to say that some fine-tuning of attitudes might not be wanted further down the road, and there might even be a role for American-style feminism...
...C ertain impressions seem beyond dispute—for example, that a Soviet woman's lot is not a very happy one (but then again, neither is a Soviet man's...
...But if Soviel Women teaches us anything, it is that the first order of business should be tc make daily life bearable, even pleasurable, as it often is (despite our griping...
...the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women...
...There is no mistaking the patronizing tone of Gray's explanation for this lack of interest in feminism...
...And indeed the women Gray interviewed are unanimous in finding themselves simply too weary to care much about men —creatures who, for all their charms, also manage to impose an additional set of demands...
...Do you think they ever get out of their selfish little brains to notice what we wear...
...Lipovskaya acknowledges that her publication has "a few dozen readers, mostly 'progressive-thinking men.' " From her, Gray learns that feministika is largely a derogatory term in the Soviet Union, and she nearly weeps upon hearing another woman—a "progressive and an outspoken champion of all liberal causes"--casually ask, "Doesn't the very definition of 'feminist' mean a woman who absolutely hates all men...
...She is further confused when she innocently asks them if they are prettying themselves for the men in their lives and watches them explode in laughter...
...19.95 Elizabeth Kristol 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 out, in the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and is shocked to discover discrepancies between its original goals and the contemporary state of affairs in the Soviet Union...
...So decorating your outer surface is like bringing flowers inside of you, it's your only way of cheering up...
...This weariness is compounded by the disdain Soviet women evidence for the actual men in their lives...
...The second is that seemingly frivolous consumer goods and services turn out to play an important function in a society...
...When those can't be found, a Soviet of European origin will do...
...Since clothes are expensive and of poor quality, many women sew their family's clothing themselves...
...The overcrowded state-run child-care system is, according to the women Gray spoke with, a breeding ground for illnesses, forcing mothers either to take time off from work to tend to their sick children—thus jeopardizing their chances for promotion—or to stay at home and forfeit badly needed income...
...The phrase "original Bolshevik ideals" occurs frequently throughout the book, usually in conjunction with disparaging remarks about Stalin (the initial "betrayer" of these ideals) and Brezhnev (whose period of "stagnancy" wrought further damage...
...As the interviews in this book show, it is no trivial matter whether men and women have harmless outlets for their tensions...
...S uffice it to say that all these conditions, taken together, are not conducive to love and romance...
...When Gray raised concerns about this with the head doctor (and Communist party apparatchik) of a maternity clinic in Uzbekistan, she received the appalling response: "In my clinic every single woman can get to use the spiral," boasted the doctor...
...Lenin alone remains untarnished, largely for his scarce and obscure writings on women: to wit...
...Many of those illegal abortions result in the mother's death...
...anything, it seems, but a pure-bred Russian...
...In retrospect, it is also evident that the USSR's commitment to women's equal employment has never been ideological...
...Ideally, every interview should be taken with a large grain of salt, a task beyond the powers of the average American reader who has never set foot in the Soviet Union...
...We Elizabeth Kristol is associate editor at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.0 meet a few party members, a few industrial workers, but primarily artists and intellectuals...
...Gray speculates as to what went wrong and concludes that, after the Revolution, "the government was not willing to implement any communalizing of household tasks, or of effecting that 'radical reeducation' of the male psyche promised in 1917...
...If it causes cysts, we operate on them, and then back in with the spiral...
...This is all believable enough...
...While in Leningrad, Gray meets with Olga Lipovskaya, the editor of one of the few feminist magazines in the Soviet Union...
...Gray is bewildered by the women's near-obsession--especially given their lack of leisure time and discretionary income—with the minutiae of hairstyling, makeup, and clothing...
...Gray would change this state of affairs by importing feminism and urging a different worldview on the Soviet people...
...Still, Gray remains firm in her belief that the-operation-was-a-success-butthe-patient-died...
...The worst offenders in this category involve contraceptives...
...One Soviet visitor to the U.S...
...Is it true that the Soviet Union is awash in Pepsi-Cola and blue jeans, but hasn't yet discovered the tampon...
...For upon the Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik regime became the first government in history to declare women's emancipation as one of its primary goals, and it inscribed it into its constitution...
...the Russian utopian socialist N. G. Chernyshevsky set out to depict the ideal marriage between an enlightened "new man" and "new woman" of the future: husband and wife would occupy separate living quarters, shun all sexual contact, and confine their intercourse (social, that is) to a mutually agreed-upon "neutral" room...
...As one woman puts it: "Everything about us is as drab as our apartment houses...
...The birth control of last resort has always been abortion, and it has been common knowledge for some time now that abortion is rampant in the Soviet Union...
...The two main goals held in common by the women interviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray seem to be: (1) avoiding sex with Russian men, and (2) acquiring an apartment that has more than two rooms...
...Thus the hunt for American-type dzhentlemen...
...41...
...Russian men, she notes, have for too long regarded women as martyrs, a role many Russian women have embraced...
...In comparison, our men's manners are constantly, uncouthly rude...
...when illegal abortions are taken into account, the ratio jumps to five to eight abortions for every birth...
...According to the Soviet Ministry of Health's figures, which include onlylegal abortions, there are two to three abortions for every birth in the Soviet Union...
...There are no attempts to verify any of the assertions made in the course of the interviews, or to examine the extent to which it is safe to generalize from individual experiences...
...According to Gray, the most widely prescribed contraceptive device in the Soviet Union is the notoriously injurious spiral IUD...
...Gray interviewed many women who had already had seven or eight abortions, and calmly spoke of expecting to have two or three more before their childbearing years are over...
...The appeal of Soviet Women is also its drawback...
...Is it true that the maternity wards of Soviet hospitals prohibit husbands from visiting their wives and newborns, on the grounds that Soviet women won't let their husbands see them without proper makeup and hairstyling...
...it has been based, rather on pragmatic, demographic factors—rapid economic growth, labor shortages, and a frequent deficit in the male population...
...Some of the incidents recounted are significant even if they should prove to be the rare exception to the norm...
...Laws ensuring equal pay for equal work—akin to our doomed Equal Rights Amendment—were instantly effected...
...Shopping alone is an aerobic exercise of dashing from store to store in search of basic necessities, followed by a cooling-down period of waiting on long lines...
...Female) readers will be particularly amused to learn that Soviet women idolize American men as paragons of chivalry...
...In the streets, in their homes, as soon as they feel you mightn't like something, they say 'excuse me...
...Over in the States your men have a car, community groups and bars and coffee shops where they can meet their friends...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
