Феминизм по-Советски - On the contradictory version of "feminism" Russia inherited from Soviet Union
Last week, my mom wrote a long post about feminism and other topics, and there was one part in particular that struck me. She wrote about beliefs about female equality in Soviet Union (and post-Soviet Russia - because cultural mores don't change overnight). For the sake of all the non-Russian speakers reading this, I'm going to translate the relevant passage below
For a long, long time, my beliefs [about feminism] were no different from beliefs of people around me, which were a bit a mess. In one phrase, I believed that women [and men] were equal, but [women] were equaler :). Back then, I believed that women deserved equal rights, that "we were smart too," all while believing that, if a man didn't offer me a hand when I got out of the bus, he was clearly a lout who wasn't raised right. Well that and I believed that "a man should support the family," "a man should pay for the woman," that he should "be strong" and "make decisions." Of course, those decisions had to be the decisions I liked :)
It's hard to say how all this started to change. The key moment, undoubtedly, as with all my changing viewpoints, was the move to America. And not even a move itself so much as carefully paying attention to what was going on around me and what was considered "normal." And it's possible that some of it had to do with the pressure of public opinion not being there anymore :) And by "public opinion," I don't mean the opinion of the average person on the street, but all the things that were considered "normal" - so commonly accepted they seemed perfectly natural. Because, remember - back in the day, we thought that there were "bourgeois" values, "vulgar" values, and then there were "moral" values, and we all knew which ones were the "proper" ones. I remember how, back then, you'd often hear women quoting "I have to be strong, but I want to be weak." As if being strong "by choice" was somehow improper...
...But here in America, I learned that it was normal. That it was perfectly okay not to lie on your back during your period - you could exercise, even participate in competitions, and even win first place. That you could work all the way up going into labor, and exercise, too. That you could come to work early, and that wasn't "horror-horror, those poor children." I learned that when someone holds a door behind you, it's much more convenient than when someone opens the door for you.
Little by little, I became more comfortable with being myself, and I realized that I liked it. And eventually, I came to understand what feminism really is. I realized that it was absurd to talk about "equality" and think that a man should cover a woman's bill at a restaurant.
This process of realization has been very, very gradual. I'm not even sure it quite ended.
After I read that, a lot of things I never really thought about suddenly clicked. It helped me identify something I could never quite put into words, the strange contradiction I often found when dealing with women who grew up in Soviet countries and were born before 1980. (It seems to be less common in my generation and younger). While I spent the first 11 years of my life in Russia, my beliefs about human rights, my conceptions of equality have, for the most part, originated here. So I found it baffling when women who took leadership roles complaining that women those days emasculate men. Or how, not too long ago, a successful, accomplished Russian woman told me that it was perfectly natural for women to lose their composure and effectiveness around attractive men because it was a "woman's nature."
When I translated the synopsis for moj_oduvan4ik's novella. I altered the final line a bit. The original Russian line said that the protagonist, who was described in the preceding sentences as facing overwhelming odds, was "just a woman." I changed it to "just an ordinary woman," because I figured that leaving it as is would raise a few eyebrows with the American audience.
The synopsis was originally written for a Russian audience. The fact that moj_oduvan4ik put that line in there without a second thought is quite telling.
For a long, long time, my beliefs [about feminism] were no different from beliefs of people around me, which were a bit a mess. In one phrase, I believed that women [and men] were equal, but [women] were equaler :). Back then, I believed that women deserved equal rights, that "we were smart too," all while believing that, if a man didn't offer me a hand when I got out of the bus, he was clearly a lout who wasn't raised right. Well that and I believed that "a man should support the family," "a man should pay for the woman," that he should "be strong" and "make decisions." Of course, those decisions had to be the decisions I liked :)
It's hard to say how all this started to change. The key moment, undoubtedly, as with all my changing viewpoints, was the move to America. And not even a move itself so much as carefully paying attention to what was going on around me and what was considered "normal." And it's possible that some of it had to do with the pressure of public opinion not being there anymore :) And by "public opinion," I don't mean the opinion of the average person on the street, but all the things that were considered "normal" - so commonly accepted they seemed perfectly natural. Because, remember - back in the day, we thought that there were "bourgeois" values, "vulgar" values, and then there were "moral" values, and we all knew which ones were the "proper" ones. I remember how, back then, you'd often hear women quoting "I have to be strong, but I want to be weak." As if being strong "by choice" was somehow improper...
...But here in America, I learned that it was normal. That it was perfectly okay not to lie on your back during your period - you could exercise, even participate in competitions, and even win first place. That you could work all the way up going into labor, and exercise, too. That you could come to work early, and that wasn't "horror-horror, those poor children." I learned that when someone holds a door behind you, it's much more convenient than when someone opens the door for you.
Little by little, I became more comfortable with being myself, and I realized that I liked it. And eventually, I came to understand what feminism really is. I realized that it was absurd to talk about "equality" and think that a man should cover a woman's bill at a restaurant.
This process of realization has been very, very gradual. I'm not even sure it quite ended.
After I read that, a lot of things I never really thought about suddenly clicked. It helped me identify something I could never quite put into words, the strange contradiction I often found when dealing with women who grew up in Soviet countries and were born before 1980. (It seems to be less common in my generation and younger). While I spent the first 11 years of my life in Russia, my beliefs about human rights, my conceptions of equality have, for the most part, originated here. So I found it baffling when women who took leadership roles complaining that women those days emasculate men. Or how, not too long ago, a successful, accomplished Russian woman told me that it was perfectly natural for women to lose their composure and effectiveness around attractive men because it was a "woman's nature."
When I translated the synopsis for moj_oduvan4ik's novella. I altered the final line a bit. The original Russian line said that the protagonist, who was described in the preceding sentences as facing overwhelming odds, was "just a woman." I changed it to "just an ordinary woman," because I figured that leaving it as is would raise a few eyebrows with the American audience.
The synopsis was originally written for a Russian audience. The fact that moj_oduvan4ik put that line in there without a second thought is quite telling.