No Place for a Woman: Paid Employment, Political Representation and Public Life

Abstract

The gender climate in post-Soviet Russia clearly defined domestic and family roles as the appropriate, primary focus for female attention and activity. This stance is in direct opposition to the tenets of Marxism—Leninism which claimed full and equal participation in economic and political spheres as the major prerequisite for women’s emancipation. Ideologically, this opposition, with its implicit rejection and condemnation of the Soviet past, served only to strengthen the position and popularity of this aspect of the new gender climate. The practical implications were less easily acceptable, however, especially in a society whose families, for at least three generations, had been able to rely on income from two full-time wages and whose women had come to assume that they would have equal rights to education and employment, whether or not they saw the exercise of those rights as immediately desirable.