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RUSSIAN WOMEN: TWO TYPES

    OF CAREER-MAKING

        Olga Zdravomyslova
For most people, personal success is associated with both professional achievements and family. However, for Russian women these two components have long become synonymous to conflict. In Soviet times, attempts to solve this conflict led to forming and promotion of paradigmatic "working woman" type. Society did not require much of such a "working woman" as a professional, and a "working woman" herself was supposed to give little thought to how she could achieve any professional success.
Opposing women's professional career to their family life is not uniquely Russian feature. Wherever we find this paradigm, the archetype of career is strongly associated with marital status of women: a married woman makes her career at home, and an unmarried woman develops professionally. In 1991-1994 we conducted societal studies to help evaluate nation-specific extents of this paradigm and its openness to change over time. We covered with our surveys Russia and several European countries: West and East Germany, Poland, Hungary. A questionnaire developed together with German sociologists addressed married and lone mothers of pre-school children, and married fathers of the same category.
In Russia, we surveyed 800 respondents. All of them were governmental employees. The total number of respondents was 6,000. Following are some of the results obtained through this study.
The study showed that professional interests were highly considered among European urban women who had incorporated them into their cultural model. Of women successfully managing both family and professional activities, some named family, and some named career as their priority. Another result was that unmarried women felt necessary to be engaged not just in professional activities, but in progressive career building. On the other hand, family or professional preferences, dependence of these preferences on respondents' marital status, and prevalence of twofold career orientation significantly varied from country to country.
For instance, in West Germany men accepted the idea of equality more than elsewhere. And West-German women felt more inclined to active performance and competition with men in every sphere of life: family, professional, or political. Moreover, social orientation did not depend much on respondents' marital status.
In East Germany and Poland, all respondents felt inclined to combine professional and wife's roles. They felt competitive to men in any professional field, while admitting themselves somewhat inferior in spheres of politics. In their turn, husbands turned out to be slightly persistent in their traditional spheres of domination (i.e., political and professional), while eager to reduce their wives' influence in family affairs. Therefore, in these regions men also seem to be oriented rather toward spouse equality than traditional male dominance. In Hungary we observed something utterly different: both men and women obviously prefer traditional ways of everything: at home, at work, or in social life.
As for Russia, we became witnesses to a situation rather queer and ambiguous. In general, Russians' attitudes were closer to those of Hungarians than to German model. But in Russia we also observed sheer disagreement in opinions between both male and female respondents and females differing in marital status. In Germany or Poland, unmarried women could be mostly classified as "self-making, independent-thinking, career-oriented" type. In Russia, respondents' answers suggested that married and lone women's outlooks differed so appallingly no other nation could ever imagine. That was the first to impress.
The second queer impression was that in Russia an archetype of career-making woman had not formed yet. It seemed as alien to our national mind as an archetype of a house-keeping wife. Both types, however, were fallible to many considerations. Both characters -- a business woman and a housewife -- were perceived from a view-point of the same old "working wife and mother" growing more and more incapable of managing her rapidly changing life. In environments like this, every business-oriented woman, either married or not, has to fight against predominant public resistance to the idea of career-making female. Moreover, being unmarried makes things even worse. So, shall not we search for whatever reasons cause this situation?

SOCIAL INFERIORITY COMPLEX

Questionnaires filled by Russian respondents suggest that many unmarried women feel that they live inadequately. To be precise, they are forced to feel their inadequacy and compensate for it through professional career. In fact, they have to overwork to provide suitable living conditions for themselves and their children. They may like their worksites -- and most respondents expressed, at least, some degree of engagement in how their organizations do. But most unmarried respondents felt forced to professional development because they had been denied more favorable choice of family living. Thus, 33% of women in married and 27% in unmarried subpopulations responded that their work means "everything" or "a lot" to them, while the option of "mere time for money" attitude collected 42% of married and 47.3% of lone mothers' voices.
Public opinion is traditionally oppressive of lone women. Wide public tends to approve "regular" complete families only. Almost 100% respondents stated their attitude to legal marriage to be "unconditionally positive". At the same time, 33.3% married and 23.6% unmarried respondents regarded unmarried couples as "unconditionally negative", and 33.3% married and 21.8% unmarried were of the same opinion of incomplete families. One-third of married respondents felt that lone mothers should not have any privileges in employment-related issues in situation of job deficiency. One of four unmarried respondents stated she had suffered from public hostility in some way.
In 1992, E. Mezentseva studied social attitudes of executives, both men and women, in major Russian communities. On studying their responses, she came to the following conclusion:"The status of being unmarried is mostly perceived by female respondents not as opening opportunities for professional progress, but rather as a negative factor. Most executives feel that a lone woman is also a deficient employee: she cannot concentrate on performing her job properly because all her thoughts are given to how she could make her a decent party. That is why, feel managers, an unmarried woman wastes her work time either hanging on telephone calling her mates-to-be and complaining to her girl-friends or trying to seduce her male colleagues. Unwed girls, to managerial opinion, are no more than additional factor of instability hazardous to working environments."
And here is a confession made by a recently divorced woman:"I don't have friends anymore among those who are still married. Some of them used to be my friends back in school and university times. But today they hate to see me, they can't stand me visiting them -- as though I might rob them of their husbands, their families. And then -- they hate to see that I'm free at last. So, now I have new friends, and they are my kind -- women all by themselves."
The same air of social non-acceptance or partial acceptance is also visible in unmarried respondents' answers. For instance, among negative consequences of their professional progress, unmarried women name "troubles caused by managers and colleagues" much more frequently (27%) than married (18%). 35% of unmarried fail to keep work and family interests in balance (27% for married). 31% of unmarried percept their life as "acceptable", while in married the percentage is 38%. The "unsatisfactory" response is obtained in 20 and 22 per cent cases correspondingly. Anyway, the most shocking answers are to the question: "Do you feel you are a good mother?" "No," is the reply of 58% of lone mothers, while in married only 9% feel so.
On the contrary, in family oriented unmarried women, only 3% feel unsatisfied with themselves as mothers. However, other indicators, such as overall satisfaction with life, workplace and environmental attitudes, national-scale prospects, and valuation of current changes are much lower within this unmarried subpopulation.
There is no doubt that career-oriented unmarried women are better suited for managing "this life" and its consequences, but for their choice of career they have to pay with constant feeling of being inefficient mothers. And this results in false perception of their inferiority as being unmarried and guilt before their children.

MARITAL STATUS, STRATEGY OF LIVING AND SOCIAL CHANGES

In comparison to professionally oriented married women, single professionally oriented women, on average, have managed to adapt to recent social changes quite fairly. In some ways, they even do better than their married counterparts: in bringing up their children the way they like; in adapting to competitive market environments; in planning their life independently. Marital status of professionally oriented women turned to have much less impact on their adaptability to critical social and economic conditions than we had initially supposed. And now we come to the most interesting conclusion.
Social and economic crisis has produced minimal negative impact on married, family oriented women who feel most at ease because nothing has actually changed in their lives. Professionally oriented women, regardless to their marital status, are more anxious. But that is career oriented women -- both married and single -- who have demonstrated maximum adaptability to changes. This fact makes us think that this subpopulation will produce women of a new professionally successful modern archetype.
And finally, single women of family orientation feel deeply depressed. Their state of mind is good described in published results of 1992 survey of incomplete urban families: "When asked, 'How do you plan your budget in new economic conditions?', most female respondents of incomplete families answered that they see the only possible way to survive in saving on everything."
Our study has also demonstrated Russian women to be either consistent housewives or equally consistent career-makers. In other words, above-mentioned "working woman" archetype has subdivided into two classes: of those preferring home, and those preferring professional development. The idea of combining both statuses is either neglected or less successful than in other countries. 14% of Russian female respondents feel that they "fail completely" in sustaining balance between family and professional interests (while in other nations the frequence of this response ranges from 0.4% to 4.0%).
In transitional period of reshaping Russian economy to meet requirements of competitive market model, professional and housewife's roles of women have become even more contradictory. In some sense, a woman faces a choice when she must adopt one role or another. And the intrinsic reason for such a situation lies in background of Russian gender relations rooted in long traditions. Traditional ways retain their influence and importance, in spite of decades of "nourished equality", and readily produce conflicts and contradictions.
Rather characteristic is that, in European survey of 1991, Russian women were negative leaders among respondents to the question of "overall satisfaction". The answer "absolutely unsatisfied" was as frequent as 8% in Russian respondents, while in other countries this type of response could be found in singular cases. The same 8% of Russian women found themselves "highly satisfied" with their lives, while in other countries the figure was two-three times higher. Answers of Russian respondents were unique in every particular way related to their family living. Thus, Russian respondents dominate among those "absolutely unsatisfied" with their husbands' input in raising children and housekeeping. Finally, Russian women demonstrated extremely low satisfaction with their marriage. As many as 9% perceive their relations with spouses as "completely unsatisfactory". In other countries, we scarcely find this type of responses at all.

THE UNIQUE RUSSIAN EXPERIENCE

What lies behind the unique feature of Russian experience -- total women's employment through several generations? Let us turn to interviews below and search for explications of how Russian women percept matters of employment and professional education and development, together with changes in those perceptions from generation to generation.

Mother (b. 1942):

"My mom's life was very hard. Her only interest was in how she could feed us, get us some clothes, in how she could raise us. I didn't want any professional education. After school, I applied for some job at the Central Studio of Documentary Films. My decision then was rather spontaneous -- the only reason was that my mom had once worked there. That's how I became a film-editor. It never brought me enough money. Never thought that I would stay in this for the rest of my life ... Yes, I always wanted my daughter to pursue some education in whatever field; actually, I never knew what she might want to become. I'd have preferred her to attend the History and Archives Institute, because I knew students there were mostly girls, then good company, some homeliness in the air of it. But so it happened that she chose the University."

Daughter (b. 1969):

"My parents had no idea that I was going to study philosophy at the University. I never thought of it myself. I just happened to come to the University and saw that they have a Department of Philosophy there. When enrolling there I had no Idea of what Philosophy is, I mean, in Soviet Union, not to tell about what it would be like -- to be a student of the University -- or what I would do after my graduation. It was just that being a philosopher seemed like something fabulously great, interesting and promising. Until recently I'd never had any money problems at all. It was in last two years when I discovered about money's existence, and that I have to earn my living -- and it was to my great great surprise."
The interviews above illustrate three categories of working women. Grandmother, mother and daughter are typical representatives of three succeeding generations of women born and raised in the Soviet Union.
The elder generation -- grandmothers -- had to work hard and gave little thought of professional choice or education. They simply worked to survive and provide for children. The mother -- being of the second generation -- did not choose her profession two. She got and held a job where she could find it -- seemingly, through some acquaintances of her own mother. Now, the daughter -- the third and younger generation -- also has chosen not a profession as practical means of future sustenance and prospective "business", but rather a studentship in the most prestigious university of the country. All she wants is education as an entrance fee to what she thinks to be "an interesting life".
Therefore, the conclusion is that neither engagement in work processes characteristic to elder women, nor choice of education made by their daughters and granddaughters may be considered resulting from deliberate professional orientation. This peculiarity in modern girls' social self-perception is aptly described by M.Arutyunyan: "In self-identification process, girls use to interpret the question 'Who am I?' mostly as 'Am I attractive?', while in boys' interpretation, 'Who am I?' usually means 'What is my social standing?', 'Can I influence society?' or 'Can I attain high ranks in it?'. Therefore, woman's self-esteem still suffers most from failure in roles of beloved, wife, mother."
I.Bulantseva, in her 1993 study of so-called "new Russian" families,1 observed: "Parents expect their daughters to be married and produce offsprings by 25. The dominating opinion is that 'for a woman, meeting a good husband is everything, and as for an interesting profession, it may sometimes be helpful, of course.' At the same time, parents usually view future of their sons as something absolutely different: 'By 25, no family. Many business activities, many interesting things, fine education, good company."
Other grounds for our statement that this kind of stereotypical role pre-determination actually exists in Russia may be found in G.Sillaste's description of the phenomenon of "low popularity of women - leaders among Russian women." No wonder that political careers of female leaders who advanced in "perestroika" period now suffer dramatic decline. The reason is that these politicians break "implicit rules" and thus are rejected by wide public. It means, in turn, that in Russian society acceptance of untraditional behavior ("all women have to work") worked out through three or four generations combines with almost universal acceptance of traditional role model in family, professional and political spheres.
T.Zaslavskaya also emphasizes these peculiarities of public opinion: "Once the Center for Public Opinion Studies had been instituted, we asked Trud2 subscribers to check the themes they find interesting for further survey and discussion from among those proposed. The list included the entry, "women in government". Readers' responses suggested we should exclude the subject as obviously irrelevant."
Russian women's experience may be considered unique because it has clearly demonstrated essentially traditional society to be highly resistant to any attempt of introducing radical changes. Therefore, today we seem to deal not with a new patriarchal renaissance (a popular term of referring to current state of women's placement in society) but rather with dramatically deepened and increased contradictions inherited from the Soviet past.

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