Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine

Drawn from various disciplines and a broad spectrum of research interests, these essays reflect on the challenging issues confronting women in Ukraine today. The contributors are an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars from gender studies, feminist theory, history, anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and literature. Among the issues they address are: the impact of migration, education, early socialization of gender roles, the role of the media in perpetuating and shaping negative stereotypes, the gendered nature of language, women and the media, literature by women, and local appropriation of gender and feminist theory. Each author offers a fresh and unique perspective on the current process of survival strategies and postcommunist identity reconstruction among Ukrainian women in their current climate of patriarchalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857451194

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CHAPTER 1

Turning Oppression into Opportunity

An Introduction

Marian J. Rubchak

Women hold up half the sky

—Chinese proverb

In their introductory chapter to Living Gender under Communism, Janet Johnson and Jean Robinson note that the Soviet era had witnessed gender, which was simultaneously promoted in the rhetoric on motherhood and denied in the rhetoric on the ‘woman question’ and women’s equality (2007).¹ There are parallels to be drawn here between Soviet discourse and that of today’s Ukraine. Much of the latter’s rhetoric on women projects the image of an empowered berehynia (guardian) as progenitor, custodian of family values, and national identity,² whereas women’s true equality remains contested.

Notwithstanding such correlations between then and now, significant differences also remain to be explored. With Ukraine’s chain of historical memory having been deliberately obscured during the Soviet era, the nation lost almost three-quarters of a century in its evolution to an open democratic society. In 1991 independence unsealed the communist borders, eliminated Soviet proscriptions, and revealed a gateway for contacts with the west. The ensuing exchange released a flow of information, and resources for establishing, coordinating, and sustaining gender-friendly programs, while fostering conditions in which new gender formations might materialize and multiply. In this postcommunist space, weaker, often contradictory social pressures on negotiating gender and disseminating its message have replaced the dictatorial state regulations that once circumscribed personal agency (Johnson and Robinson 2007: 8–9). Yet, neotraditional societal values, foregrounding the idea that women are products of nature, without any intervention from culture and society, impose their own constraints on the dynamics of gender construction. This volume explores such contradictory impulses—individual freedom to determine one’s gender, and societal impediments to a multiplicity of new gender constructions.

An early indicator of the shifting mood of opinion on women’s rights might have been observed in the ranks of the intellectual elite with the appearance of an article titled Does Ukrainian Literary Scholarship Need a Feminist School? in 1991.³ It was the product of one of Ukraine’s earliest post-Soviet proponents of feminism, Solomea Pavlychko. Two years later her initiative provided the stimulus for a team of talented women to launch the country’s first self-styled feminist magazine titled Piata Pora (Fifth Season). It created a sensation, yet for all of its bold initiative—and it was bold for the time and the place—this feminist journal did not lack for paradoxes. Articles on equal rights and opportunities intermingled with references to women in essentialist roles, and warnings about the dangers of publicly active women losing their femininity. This caution, versions of which I heard repeatedly during my numerous visits to Ukraine, brought to mind something I read in an article written by Dmytro Vydrin, titled: Woman, Glamour and Politics. In a discussion devoted to female politicians, the author argued: When a man enters politics he leaves behind his principles, but when a woman enters politics she leaves behind her womanhood (2007). In the second issue, published in March 1993, Piata Pora continued to exhibit the unmistakable signs of evolving into yet another traditional women’s magazine. In an attempt to sustain their agenda of publishing a feminist journal, its editors featured articles on notable women in history and female contributions to literature and art, yet alongside these pieces examples of neotraditional values competed for space. Whatever the initial intent of the journal’s founders, it soon became obvious that this grand feminist experiment was fated for extinction. They had managed to bring out a second issue, but in so doing the founders exhausted their financial resources and were unsuccessful in attracting further funding. Despite this setback, their dream of spreading the feminist gospel did not die with the journal’s demise.

In May 1994, for the first time Ukrainian readers were able to read serialized selections in translation from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. They were published in the widely circulated magazine Ukraina, prior to the release of a two-volume edition of the entire translated work later that year (13–14).⁴ It was hoped that this celebrated feminist publication would soon become the cornerstone of an east-west feminist ideological bridge. As Tatiana Zhurzhenko noted in her contribution to this volume, however, that cornerstone had already been laid—not in Ukraine, but in the North American Ukrainian diaspora. There, studies on Ukrainian feminism had a somewhat earlier start, with the publication of Feminists Despite Themselves, by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, in 1988, followed by writings of others. Those early works returned an important piece of history to Ukraine, and scholarly collaboration was eagerly anticipated as a result. It quickly became apparent however, that at least for a time this would be a dichotomous relationship, with feminism being viewed through a bifocal lens, until the respective sides were able to reconcile their dissimilar historical and cultural experiences.

The following year, 1995, as if to send a signal that a genuine window of opportunity for mainstreaming gender politics was finally opened, women in Ukraine prepared to participate in the Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing. Meanwhile, pressed by skillful negotiations on the part of a resolute group of female activists, the Ukrainian government scheduled a path-breaking event in Kyiv on 12 July 1995. For the first time in the nation’s history the parliament (Verkhovna Rada) convened a special hearing on discrimination against women. Although billed as an historical breakthrough in elevating women’s issues to the highest political level, in point of fact the hearing functioned as a showcase of the country’s progress in complying with the 1979 UN Convention On Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women, one of several international women’s rights treaties to which Soviet Ukraine was a signatory. As Tatiana Zhurzhenko reminds us: the Ukrainian government, bound by its international obligations, found itself compelled to cooperate with Ukrainian women’s groups in developing national programs (2004: 37). Dignitaries from Ukraine and abroad were in attendance at this historic public show of compliance.

The majority of speakers were female activists, members of women’s associations, NGOs, and the government. In the course of their appeals for gender equality, a number of them characterized authentic Ukrainian women as irrevocably bound to gender-specific roles irrespective of their public accomplishments. Their presentations underscored the persistence with which most of Ukraine’s women embrace the traditional model of separate spheres yet, all too comfortable with this accommodation, they simply collude in their own subordination. Their extremely low numbers in Ukraine’s post-Soviet leadership positions, and virtual confinement to traditional female agendas when they do come to office, attest to the continuing tenacity of patriarchal values in Ukraine. Although the dominant discourse on women’s issues offers the illusion of empowered womanhood, in fact it functions as an effective agent of acculturation to values designed to serve a male power structure. This deception carries immense appeal for Ukrainian women, however; it lulls them into a false sense of their superior worth, even as it relegates them to the status of a second sex.

During the hearing, many of the participants pressed their demands for justice with phrases such as: allowing women to be women, accompanied by references to women as reproducers of the nation, its culture, and its moral values. The Janus-like attribute of their calls for special concessions on the one hand, and demands for equal rights and opportunities on the other, created an uneasy discursive alliance throughout the proceedings. It also evoked ridiculous relics of the pervasive sexism, causing men to declare that women cannot cook soup with one hand and run the affairs of a country with the other. One male legislator went so far as to suggest that gender injustice might be eliminated if women were to elect appropriate men to advocate on their behalf (Ukrainian Observer, 26 March 2007).⁵

On 9 June 2004, large segments of a second hearing sounded like déjàvu all over again. The same maternalist language, the same tired references to women’s beauty and charm heard nine years earlier, reverberated throughout the hall. To be fair, faint echoes of new concerns also found their way into the discourse—appeals for ending violence against women, and certain practical suggestions for resolving the gender justice impasse. Unfortunately for the women’s cause, the latter continue to resist implementation.

Although these initial attempts at securing equal rights proved disappointing, not all of the women’s demands went unnoticed, as a third hearing on 21 November 2006 confirmed. Contrary to the first two women-dominated sessions, on this occasion both speakers and guests consisted of men and women in roughly equal numbers. Two discrete subjects were scheduled for deliberation: violence against women during the morning session, and equal rights and opportunities in the afternoon. Except for a single digression, when a lone female participant resurrected the tired old canard of the women’s natural moral superiority,⁶ most of morning’s proceedings concentrated on the alarming rise in the volume of female trafficking, and domestic violence against women.⁷ Participants also took the opportunity to register their formal support of an amendment on equal rights and opportunities to Ukraine’s constitution, ratified at the beginning of the year.⁸

So far so good, I thought, as I looked around at the mixed assembly that morning. Did this indicate that a gender-parity threshold had finally been reached? I thought it might, but my optimism was short lived. What had seemed to represent genuine progress veiled a strong undercurrent of persistent male indifference to women’s rights. As if to underscore this, most of the men who attended the morning session drifted away during the midday break.

Can greater female participation in public life supply a remedy? A small minority of women have begun to establish their presence in various public offices, although their long-standing exclusion from positions of authority still inhibits the ability of most to affect public policy in any significant way. The periodic renaming and downgrading of the one ministerial agency with any formal connection to women’s issues provides us with a credible indicator of their continuing marginalization at these highest levels. In 1995, following the Beijing conference, a Presidential Committee on Women, Maternity, and Childhood was formed in Ukraine, after which it became the Ministry of Family and Youth. The ministry’s sponsorship of such promising events as bringing together government administrators, legislators, and activists in a series of consciousness-raising workshops, training sessions, and seminars resulted in failure to make any substantive gains. This led to a serial reorganization into less influential bodies. In 2005, the committee rose once again to the level of a ministry, named the Ministry of Children, Family, and Youth. In 2006, in yet another name change the body became known as the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sport, but this time it featured only a gender subset and a disproportionate emphasis on sport.⁹ Apart from political appointments to government offices representing the interests of family and children, the potential for women becoming full partners in the political mainstream remained an elusive dream.

An excerpt from the presidential greeting on International Women’s Day in 2008 indicates what an uphill struggle for gender parity women in transitional Ukraine continue to face:

My dear Ukrainian women, I greet you with this spring celebration, a celebration of women’s beauty which blooms in today’s Ukraine. In my heart I hold only the most tender feelings toward you, as do millions of men in their hearts—men bewitched by you, devoted to you, and grateful for your love. I wish you happiness, love, and offer my assurance that everything in your lives will come out right. … We love, respect, and thank you—our mothers, our wives, our beloveds, our friends, our daughters—all of the most important women in our lives. … On this joyful day of celebrating love and hope I greet you, our most enticing, most beautiful women in the world!¹⁰

So much for progress. For his part, in 2009 Deputy Lytvyn greeted the women with:

A woman’s mission is to bear and raise children, to be the Berehynia [still with us] of the family hearth. No less vital in this day and age is her participation in community life, engagement in business, and show of professionalism in all that she does.

Without you, our beloved women, there would be less light, love, and warmth. You fill our days with brilliant color and help us men to grow finer, inspiring us to noble deeds. You give us strength to become better, more caring, and self-assured—qualities requiring that special feminine tact, intuition, tolerance, and endurance—those amazing traits which men so often tend to lack.

Accept our most profound appreciation, beloved women, for your maternal generosity, intelligence, and support. From the depths of our hearts we wish you, our dear mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, eternal youth, joy, and beauty.¹¹

Failing to recognize such salutations for what they truly are—expressions that traditionalize gender ideology—many of the country’s women are flattered by these public declarations of esteem. They give no hint of understanding that in accepting this sort of patronizing Hallmark salutation as a tribute to them, they forego their own interests as women deserving of equality and respect. To look upon such a greeting as something more than a condescending greeting card message is to diminish all women.

Still, not every woman is of a like mind. Ethnologist, feminist scholar, and one of our contributors, Oksana Kis’, was so incensed by the presidential message that she dispatched a scorching open letter to him, which several internet sites promptly posted.¹² Informed women from all parts of Ukraine joined her in a chorus of condemnation, confirming the fact that at least some women no longer welcome such debasing, saccharine expressions of affection; but the same gesture also had its dark side. Negative responses, perhaps stemming from a misunderstanding of the intent of this open letter, outnumbered the supporting comments, providing additional evidence of how much work still lies ahead.¹³

In Ukraine, the 1995 Beijing Conference had supplied the impetus for a coalescence of women’s organizations. It also acted as an incentive for the passage of early legislation on equal rights and opportunities. Regrettably, although all such changes represent a hopeful beginning, these developments have yet to generate a widely accepted gender-neutral paradigm of a kind that discourages women from fantasizing about their alleged empowerment. The tendency on the part of many to believe in their own centrality is based upon a deeply rooted ancient matriarchal myth of women as guardians of the family hearth. In all likelihood, this position would have been the source of their empowerment in clan life, inasmuch as presiding over such a female domain also indicated the virtual inevitability of a women’s presence at all deliberations. The matriarchal myth it engendered appears to have justified the titular esteem in which Ukraine’s women have always been held.

Although this penchant for identifying with some legendary matriarchal ideal has begun to diminish somewhat, especially among younger women, significant numbers continue to embrace the symbol of some prehistoric female centrality to validate their sense of personal worth. For their part, sexist men persist in turning this cherished ideal to their own purposes by encouraging the atavistic belief.

Chapter Organization

Like their counterparts in many parts of the world, Ukrainian women have suffered from scholarly neglect throughout history. In an attempt to give them a richly-deserved voice, the present collection highlights the various strategies that women in Ukraine employ to claim subjectivity and exert agency, to carve out a measure of social, economic, and political space for themselves in an exceedingly difficult liminal space, constrained in large measure by their own essentialist prejudices.

The contributions to this volume are grouped into three parts—consisting of women’s voices recovered from a variety of in-depth oral interviews, narrative accounts of various facets of women’s choices and gender activity, as well as analytical interpretations from an array of disciplines devoting works to gender and feminism. The chapters were submitted in three languages—English, Ukrainian, and Russian; all appear here in English. Detailed case studies offer compelling evidence of the diversity of female responses to their altered circumstances in a transitional milieu, which resonate with those of women in other postcommunist countries. As such, they represent a noteworthy contribution to the overall body of women’s transcultural narratives, as well as a long-overdue corrective to the history of Ukrainian women

Cinzia Solari draws us into a repartee of female migrant workers, mostly from western Ukraine, as they travel by bus from Italy for a brief visit to their homeland. Her chapter is based upon their experiences in the host country, which the women describe with genial wit and ready humor. Conversely, disparaging remarks about the homeland they are about to enter reveal the dark lens through which they view it. But one cannot escape the feeling that for all their jocular exchanges, these women harbor thoughts about their native land that are far more serious, more problematical, more nuanced than their public jibes suggest. The negative judgments of the present state of Ukrainian society betray a serious disenchantment with this beloved imagined community, which has frustrated their idealized vision of it, yet the same individuals promptly come to its defense in response to outside criticism.

The transition from a totalitarian social order to an open democratic society brought in its wake economic turmoil, the rise of systemic privileges of men over women, and relegation of the latter to their rightful domestic space.¹⁴ Such prejudicial attitudes have resulted in occupational segregation, and severely impede employment prospects for younger women, forcing many of them back into the narrow domestic space they had sought to escape. At the same time, economic hardship for families and a bleak outlook for their children’s future have forced many of the older women into a labor force that, paradoxically, is closed to them. This hapless situation has generated an entire class of female migrant workers, and radically altered traditional family structures. Forced by a grim economic reality to seek their livelihood abroad, women migrants share a conflicted view of Ukraine. Their experiences in the Italian home away from home have brought into stark relief impressions of a homeland left behind in which nothing functions, dirt is everywhere, people are crude, and corruption endemic. For all of its perceived inadequacies, however, external criticism of that dysfunctional homeland still has the power to invoke rapturous expressions of pride in its beauty, its rich history, and its culture. There is a fine irony in the women’s aching desire to return to such a dirty, corrupt homeland, which had relegated them to the realm of the unemployed, forced them to become migrant workers, and labeled them prostitutes for working in a foreign country.

Alexandra Hrycak draws on data accumulated during her ethnographic field research in Ukraine to expand the narrative on the female migration flow from east to west, and to reflect on the temporary migrant life of Ukraine’s males as well. Gender-determined occupations, seasonality of employment opportunities, and different destination sites have resulted in dissimilar experiences for each sex. Men tend to gravitate to Russia (and occasionally to Poland), where they are employed in construction or agriculture—seasonal occupations that virtually preclude the possibility of forming a stable exilic community in a foreign country.

Subverting their former patriarchal reality, as Hrycak makes clear, the migrant women move from care giving at home to the status of primary breadwinners as caregivers abroad. Unlike their male counterparts, female migrant workers find access to employment in relatively stable occupations—mainly in the domestic sphere—occupations that do not depend upon any particular time of the year. The personal contacts that evolve from their close associations with employers, interaction with existing immigrant communities, and new friendships with local men for some, combine to help these women form deep personal connections in the host country. Freed from the patriarchal constraints that regulated their daily lives in Ukraine, the women become increasingly independent, with the result that many attach themselves to their new environment and its distinctive cultural experiences more or less permanently.

Complicating, and more often than not precluding, any potential return is the difficulty, even impossibility, of reintegration. Bad mothers, and failed performance as wives, are accusations that shadow female migrant workers, stigmatizing them as loose women in ways that men working abroad are never labeled. This often leaves those women who have already sacrificed so much for their families with little practical choice but to remain in the receiving country, where they can look forward to a life of low-status, menial work, as opposed to pursuing a career for which they had trained at home. In so doing, they form hybridized diasporas, consisting almost exclusively of women functioning in both binary roles: as primary breadwinner and as those who perform traditional women’s work in order to earn this bread. The transition from one culture to another, and associations with places of both departure and destination, creates a sense of belonging to two discrete worlds. The hybrid feminine space that they create institutionalizes their traditional feminine duties by transforming them into paid employment. From this perspective, the women can imagine new life possibilities. At the same time, emotionally and psychologically they are still tied to that homeland left behind, and many nourish a rosy dream of returning one day—when they finally hear those magical words: Things are much better here, mom. Please come home.

A respondent named Faina had yet another story to tell. She related it to Sarah Phillips in the form of a biographical narrative. Contrary to the female migrants just discussed, this remarkable woman chose to live out her life in her native Ukraine without any expectation of improved circumstances. She made it her mission to help less-fortunate compatriots deal with the harshness of their post-Soviet reality.

The much-touted education, which had benefited millions of Soviet subjects, was the epicenter of discrimination in Faina’s life as a Jew in Soviet-occupied Ukraine. She experienced anti-Semitism in school while growing up, and later in the workplace. Despite the detrimental setbacks, especially as a student, with low grades unfairly given for superior academic achievements and access barred to prestigious universities, Faina was determined to make the most of her severely restricted opportunities. With unswerving commitment to her native country, and the Soviet empire of which it became a part, she chose a life of active membership in the Communist Party, serving with dedication the system that diminished her in so many ways. After the fall of communism, however, she stepped back from this fidelity and declared: Sometimes today I am embarrassed about my party activism—I read Soviet newspapers, and I carried the Soviet reality. It was a false reality, as I have learned. Faina refused to dwell on her misguided decision. A born activist with an unyielding determination to give her life meaning, she transferred her allegiance to the new Ukraine. When not at her regular employment, she threw herself into organizing and leading a self-help network for the indigent and the elderly, with the same dedication that she had brought to her work as a Communist Party activist in the previous life.

The next chapter, by Oksana Kis’, takes us on a journey back to life under communism, as her respondents reflect on Soviet-era experiences accumulated during their long years under communist rule. Kis’ has assembled a diverse set of oral testimonies on loyalty and belonging, from three regions of Ukraine—the east, west, and south. Three key factors left their imprints on the respondents’ mental maps and accounted for their conflicting views of life in the Soviet system: geographical origins, social and ideological acculturation, and ages at the time of incorporation into the USSR. Not unexpectedly, they tell a more complex, more multifaceted, and more nuanced story than their words alone convey. Not infrequently, testimonies can be circumscribed by limits of language, trauma, and memory, by the suppression of cultural memory (Pratt 2009: 3–22), yet each offers a glimpse into the dynamics of loyalty creation, whether through acculturation, some inner sense of commitment, or a conversion.

Kis’’s interviewees were all retired, and beneficiaries of the same Soviet social policies—free education, job security with generous paid vacation time, free housing, healthcare at no cost, and upward mobility, not to mention the sense of community and belonging that a collectivist life offers. The separate experiences of the women on opposite sides of the geographical and political divides created a bipolar world for them. Inasmuch as western Ukraine was not occupied by the Soviets until World War II, and women in the other regions under study here had been part of the USSR since they were children, their responses reflected the different ways in which the respective sides responded to the benefits and their cost in the Soviet system. Interviewees from the eastern and southern regions, living in Soviet-occupied Ukraine throughout their lives, never knew any other existence. They survived Stalin’s reign of terror, witnessed the horrors of an artificially engineered famine that took the lives of millions, and scores of them saw loved ones either sent to prisons with little hope of survival or vanish into Stalin’s infamous camps. Yet they manifested an astonishing capacity for suppressing the negative aspects of communist rule; some were even able to reminisce fondly about the entire Soviet system. We can only speculate on their unarticulated motives; what we do know is that somehow these women are able to subordinate the unspeakable suffering—their own and that of others—to the benefits of social policies that provided upward mobility through education and socially sanctioned opportunities for individual advancement. They could even justify the sacrifices of a few (including parents) as a fair price to pay for the blessings enjoyed by many. Moreover, there were those among them, particularly women from the southern region, who denied altogether the mass suffering imposed by the communist regime. Many of these women dismissed all criticism of Soviet rule, and explained away charges of mass persecutions with not everyone who was punished was innocent as a means of justifying their own fidelity to the system. In the opinion of the author, loyalty to one regime or another—which helps to guide action and furnish identity—was the single most important motivator of the women’s responses, irrespective of their ideological convictions, the age at which they became part of the Soviet system, or even the geography that separated them, although such factors are not to be discounted.

For those individuals in the east and the south, the Soviet demise represented an overwhelming tragedy; it signaled the disintegration of the only culture, the only homeland, they had ever known. To repudiate that existence would have been tantamount to admitting that their lives had been a lie, as Faina eventually did in Sarah Phillips’s chapter. Paradoxically, even as they mourned the loss of that overdetermined time and space, occasionally a note of condemnation slipped into the women’s narratives. It conveyed subtle hints of perceived flaws in a treacherous system, lacking freedom of speech and religion, where regimented life suppressed all personal initiative, all creativity.

For their part, western Ukrainian women—whose pre-Soviet life experience differed so dramatically from that of women in the south and east—displayed an unqualified abhorrence of the communist system. Although they suffered persecution under Polish control, before being forcibly incorporated into the USSR in the 1940s, the use of their native language, freedom of worship, and free speech had not been proscribed—discouraged but not forbidden. And despite having escaped Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, which took countless millions of lives, they leveled much greater criticism at the Soviet regime than their compatriots to the east and south who had suffered under it. Even with their detestation of the communist system, however, their responses betrayed hints of a grudging acknowledgment that at least a small measure of good had come out of that regime. Yet, generally speaking, when they reflected upon their Soviet past, western Ukrainian respondents did not neglect to emphasize the intolerable burden of human suffering that had made the Soviet entitlements possible. In their eyes the loss of personal freedoms and coerced lifestyle that accompanied incorporation into the Soviet system represented an unsupportable price to pay for the benefits it offered. For them, independence signaled the end of a detested tyrannical system, a welcome relief from a half century of oppression, the absence of basic human rights, and imposition of a foreign (Russian) tongue. Above all, it meant the restoration of a cherished homeland, accompanied by a renewed affirmation of their Ukrainian national identity; no entitlements could compensate for the loss of such precious freedoms.

Multiplicities of Gender

Victoria Haydenko opens the second section in this volume by reminding us that gender typing begins at an early age in a child’s life—formally at the preschool and primary school levels. She analyzes stereotyping patterns in primers and observances of children’s holidays, and brings into relief some of the same obstacles that Oksamytna identifies in her responses to Taran’s questions in the third section. Haydenko, especially, underscores the dearth of suitable teaching materials. Most of those authorized for use in preschool and primary school education reinforce the very gender stereotyping that they purportedly seek to refute. She offers a convincing illustration of the difficulties in circumventing such stereotypes, with her description of a New Year’s Day fairy tale about an idealized fictional country called Divmalia. In it girls and boys study