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Does Women's Day Still Matter?

womens-day

Who celebrates International Women’s Day anymore?

100 years since its inception, the venerable event could use a lift.

While it remains an official national holiday in Russia, time and government cooptation have dulled its radical roots as it transformed into an apolitical celebration of femininity and spring time – a sort of Eastern European Mother’s Day.

What’s more, many, especially on the right, consider it a weird anachronism left over from communist times.

Of course, the real anachronism is the growing lag between men and women in earnings, rights, social power and political representation since 1989. And that’s why the purpose of Women’s Day – the empowerment and liberation of women – remains more vital today than ever, especially in eastern Europe and Russia.

Even under the USSR’s avowed dedication to female equality, Soviet women chafed under the double burdens of full time work and full time housewifery. Also, they tended to be over-represented in the lesser paying professions.

Yet nothing could have prepared them for the catastrophic changes that took place after 1991, when economic crisis and a popular shift to the right that continues today conspired to roll back the clock. Not to mention the explosion of women trafficking from Eastern Europe (notoriously celebrated by Anne Applebaum).

poland-antiabortion

For all the euphoric talk of post-communist freedom and liberation, abortion and employment rights have been systematically curtailed in virtually all post-Communist countries.

In her scholarly article Feminism and Post Communism, Nanette Funk writes that

In virtually all post-communist countries, there is a tendency towards a re-positioning of women away from the workplace and into the family. Women are thus 64% of the unemployed in the former GDR, 80% in the former Soviet Union, and 60% in Bulgaria” (Funk, 1993)

Indeed, one of the biggest tragedies/crimes of post-Soviet Russia has been the massive ‘feminisation of poverty’:

A 1998 paper found that

Unemployment and employment discrimination against women in Russia have reached epidemic proportions. Throughout Russia, women on average represent two-thirds of the unemployed, while in some provinces they account for more than 90 percent of the unemployed. Women in Moscow, for example, represent 78 percent of the city’s out-of-work residents. They also make up a large part of a new category to which Russians have only recently been introduced: the working poor”.

Since then, Putin’s governments, with their emphasis of pro-natalist politics and macho posturing, have hardly become renowned for their feminist stance.

As late as 2001, Suzanne LaFont argues in her paper titled ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Women in the Post Communist States that ‘democracy, rather than diminishing gender discrimination, has widened the gender gap through declines in women’s political representation and increases in women’s unemployment and underemployment’.

However, there have been some hopeful signs.

kyrgyz-motherFor example, despite continued hardships, the Central Asian ‘Stans’ have seen some improvements in women’s rights and equality, where the otherwise ruthless regimes have enacted progressive measures like quotas in the face of opposition from traditional religious and social forces.

And, despite containing such cringe-inducing lines as “March 8 today is a bright, joyous spring holiday [that reminds us that] we will always value in woman her original qualities – tenderness, elegance, charm”, Putin’s March 8 address sounded some of the right notes, including an emphasis on

The framework of the struggle for the interests of women, for their equal rights with men. In this connection and in this sense we in Russia have yet very much to do – both in the sphere of the protection of maternity and childhood and in the sphere of women’s access to various kinds of activities, equal pay, equal labour conditions. I must say it frankly – we have something to work on here still.

Hopefully one day soon Women’s Day will accomplish its goals and indeed become an anachronism, in Russia and elsewhere. Until then, it acts as a vital reminder to hold his –and society’s – feet to the fire.

 

Author

Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin was born in Murmansk, Russia and grew up there and in Britain. He graduated from Harvard University with a thesis on American democracy promotion in Russia. Vadim's articles about Russia have appeared in The Nation, Dissent Magazine, and The Moscow Times. He is currently researching a comparative study of post-Soviet and post-Apartheid nostalgia.
Areas of Focus:
USSR; US-Russia Relations; Culture and Society; Media; Civil Society; Politics; Espionage; Oligarchs

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