Keywords: gender system, USSR, woman's fate
N. L. Pushkareva
GENDER SYSTEM OF SOVIET RUSSIA
AND THE FATES OF RUSSIAN WOMEN
The position of women in Soviet Russia(1917-1991) was determined by a unique gender order - a system of social interactions between the sexes, organized according to formal and informal rules. This order was formed and imposed by the state, and therefore can be called étacratic (from the French.etat- state) . It was the Soviet state that for more than seventy years was an institution that carried out gender regulation through coercive policies and acted as the dominant (hegemonic) agent of control of gender relations in a society of the Soviet and, as I believe, post-Soviet type.
The creation of a “new woman” and a “new man”, new relations between the sexes began in the very first days of Soviet power and subsequently occurred within the framework of the policy of involving women in social production and political life, state regulation of the family, the formation and changes in official discourses interpreting femininity and masculinity. Modern Russian and foreign sociologists of everyday life, studying the transformation of gender relations, distinguish four periods in the history of women in Soviet Russia and the history of changes in the gender structure. They cover seven Soviet and at least two post-Soviet decades (that is, 1917-1991 and 1991-2007).
1st stage- from the end of 1917 to the end of the 1920s. and the collapse of NEP - the period of women's councils and Bolshevik experimentation in the field of sexuality and family and marriage relations. Within the framework of this “Bolshevik” period, the women’s issue was resolved through “dispersal” (defamilization) and the political mobilization of women.
Carrying out their unique social experiment, the Bolsheviks, who came to power in the fall of 1917, meant by “solving the women's issue”, first of all, the speedy “communist education” of women, attracting them into the party ranks with their further promotion to government positions. Using later (already Stalinist rhetoric), it was necessary to “increase the activity of women in the struggle of the working class for socialism, to put this force into action.” However, the bulk of women in Russia at that time were not only politically passive, but also simply illiterate. Many women were simply “members of workers’ families,” that is, they were not incorporated into labor collectives, and therefore did not succumb to calls to join the Bolshevik Party, to follow its slogans (for example, to send their children to the created kindergartens, which were considered “sprouts of the true communism" in order to go to work themselves). Among the women of the twenties there were many deserters from the labor front. Women were considered a backward element simply because they were the stronghold of the traditional family and private life. Sister of the leader of the revolution, A.I. Elizarova, argued that “the entire struggle of the working class, even in St. Petersburg - the most cultural working center, with the most developed workers, was greatly weakened and paralyzed by the female element, both female workers and, especially, workers’ wives”; she was echoed by A.M. Kollontai, who even called female workers “a large politically backward group that needs to be mobilized urgently”<...>In order to defend her yet unconquered rights in life, a woman has to do much more to herself. educational work than a man."
For the “political education” of women, already at the height of the Civil War in October 1919, “women’s departments” were created at all party organizations, and a special state apparatus was formed to work among women - “women’s councils”. The first head of the Department for Work Among Women was I.F. Armand (autumn 1919), after her untimely death - A.M. Kollontai, and then A.N. Samoilova. “Strengthen local women’s departments with workers! - insisted the ideologists of that time. - Conduct work energetically through agitation, and where this does not help - by party reprimand against those party members and candidates who have not yet outlived the old views. When recruiting children to schools, strive to attract as many girls as possible.” To a certain extent, organizations such as women's councils taught women the ability to act in the public sphere. Women's departments and women's councils were based on the principles of delegation of women from certain social groups (peasant women, workers) and structures (plants, factories, etc.). Those who worked in women's councils were called “delegates” and were called upon to protect the interests of women. The main goal of the women's departments was the same ideological processing of human material, the introduction of communist ideas into the consciousness of the majority of women, and not the protection of women's own interests in the modern sense.
Behind this desire - to advance women ideologically - there was no malicious intent of the Bolsheviks. Then it was believed that disagreement with communist ideas could arise only from the “darkness” of consciousness, a lack of understanding of “one’s own happiness.” At the same time, the creation of any societies fraught with the danger of distracting working women and peasant women from party goals was strictly condemned. Women had to be “politically mobilized” in the right direction, to become Soviet citizens who shared ideological principles, using the ironic words of Andrei Platonov, to be “thin and exhausted, so as not to distract people from mutual communism.”
IN legal region, the Soviet state was forced in any way to combine the old patriarchal attitudes (to ensure consideration and control of the “human factor” of the female sex) and new ideologies about gender equality. It is no coincidence that the legal equality of men and women was already enshrined in the first Soviet Constitution of 1918. But this equality did not become equality of opportunity; the lines of the Constitution could not be translated into reality and remained only a text for all “citizens of both sexes of the Russian Socialist Federative Federation” Soviet Republic who turned eighteen years old by election day” (Chapter 13. Paragraph 64). Famous words of V.I. Lenin’s statement that not a single state and not a single democratic legislation “did for women even half of what the Soviet government did in the very first months of its existence,” were fair only with regard to the right of women to “go and choose.” The representation of women in higher and local government bodies remained negligible; only one (A.M. Kollontai) was elected to the highest level - the People's Commissar for Charity Affairs.
In the name of achieving actual equality between men and women in the family sphere in the early 1920s. A number of important and unique events were held. Thus, already on December 18 and December 19, 1917, the decrees “On civil marriage, children and the maintenance of civil status books” and “On divorce” were adopted. The draft decree on civil marriage was drawn up by the outstanding feminist and revolutionary A.M. Kollon-tai. The first marriage registered by the Soviet authorities in the new Russia was precisely her marriage - a rich “bourgeoisie” by birth and the revolutionary sailor P.E. who was in love with her. Dybenko (who was almost half the age of A.M. Kollontai). Adopted in the very first month as urgent (due to demographic importance), these decrees formed the basis of a separate family law act adopted on October 22, 1918 - the “Code of Laws on Civil Status, Marriage, Family and Guardianship Law”. He argued that “marriage is a private matter of the spouses,” declared all old church registry books to have no legal significance and introduced civil registration books to replace them.
In contrast to the pre-revolutionary rules, husband and wife, according to the Code of 1918, were completely equal in their rights to choose their place of residence and surname - those who got married could take both the husband’s surname and the wife’s surname, combine them together and be called a double surname. Divorce in the conditions of that time was simplified to the extreme. The Code did not impose obligations on spouses to live together and be faithful. Issues regarding alimony were to be resolved by the social security departments of the people's commissariats, guided by the degree of need and ability of the applicants to work. At the same time, the law equalized the status of legitimate and illegitimate children, and also fixed the possibility of establishing paternity in court (three months before the release of the burden - Article 140). Even if the defendant brought witnesses indicating that at the time of the alleged conception the plaintiff was cohabiting with each of them and it was difficult to determine the father of the child, the court could impose an obligation to collect alimony from all these alleged fathers in shared proportions.
The 1918 Marriage Code was in effect for eight years. The implementation of the provisions adopted in it took place against the background of not only complex disruptions, restructuring and restructuring of various areas of social life, but also the general cultural backwardness of the Russian population, the instability of life, and general psychological disorientation. The old administrative bodies were liquidated, and the population did not have confidence in the new ones. The result of the efforts of Bolshevik ideologists to politically mobilize individuals and their orientation towards the speedy approach of a communist paradise was the de-familization of social life and the primitivization of moral norms. Having separated the church from the state and recognizing church weddings as unimportant, the new government established its control over the marriages of individuals, and began to dictate new norms for regulating private life. Year after year, the family sphere became politicized; ethacratic marriage order, in which it was the state that usurped the right to sanction (instead of the church) the conclusion of marriage bonds and interfere in the lives of families. As a social institution, marriage could exist without the participation of the state; as an agreement that must be sanctioned - no, since it was the state that became the only source of legal initiative. Polygamy was prohibited even for persons professing Islam. Orthodox marriage norms were ridiculed as a manifestation of political backwardness. This caused bewilderment and indignation among foreign lawyers.
The first Code was in force for eight years, the new one - the Code on Marriage, Family and Guardianship of 1926 - gave legal significance to de facto marital relations (unregistered cohabitation) and, from a legal point of view, defended the interests of women. An entry about paternity in the child's birth certificate was made based on their written application (no evidence was required - the alleged father was only offered the opportunity to challenge this action of the mother through the court within a year, thus the presumption of maternal correctness was guaranteed by law). Earlier than anywhere else in Europe, in Soviet Russia in 1920, a woman’s right to an abortion was recorded (that is, women’s reproductive rights were regulated by law), the code confirmed it. Children born in marriage and those born out of wedlock became equal in rights. Pregnant and nursing mothers were protected by law and were given the right to paid leave - and the ideologists of Marxist feminism never tired of talking about this as a real achievement. The principle of community of family property was introduced, regardless of whether the marriage was only actual or officially registered (in court practice, a woman’s work in the household was increasingly equated to a man’s work in obtaining a livelihood).
Divorce through the courts was cancelled; divorce was introduced by postcard sent to the registry office by one of the spouses. Getting a divorce in Russia at that time became easier than signing out of the house register; the average duration of newly concluded marriages was eight months, many marriages were dissolved the day after registration. Suffice it to recall the novel “The Golden Calf”: “Just recently, the Stargorod registry office sent me a notice that my marriage with citizen Gritsatsueva was dissolved at the request of her and that I was given a premarital surname - O. Bender.”
A woman of that time - a “mobilized worker” and a “mobilized mother” - was, of course, under the protection of the state. “Separation of the kitchen from the marriage - great reform, no less important than the separation of church and state, at least in the historical fate of women,” believed A.M. Kollontai. Motherhood appeared in her articles, as well as in the works of other ideologists of that time, as a “socialist duty”, because according to the Bolshevik gender project it was assumed that the educational functions of parents would be transferred to Soviet communal institutions, therefore, only one thing was expected from a woman - readiness to give birth.
“There is no need to ‘mourn’ over the disappearance of individual farming, because a woman’s life will become richer, fuller, more joyful and freer from this,” A.M. believed. Kollontai. In the twenties, the paternalistic role, the role of the father-patriarch, should (ideally) be taken on by the state. Allegorically, this was constantly emphasized in the works of activists of the women's movement of that time, in their statements that the socialist state will always support a single mother, regardless of the presence or absence of marriage ties; A.M.’s book is almost entirely devoted to this topic. Kollontai “Family and the communist state.” “The task is not to make individual life easier, our task is to build a social life. Now it’s better to suffer with old washcloths, irons, frying pans, so that all available means and strength are used to set up public institutions - canteens, nurseries, kindergartens,” ideological magazines convinced women. Meanwhile, the woman-mother as an individual, as a woman in fact, was not interested in the fatherland. Her emotional connection with her husband was forcibly destroyed (the economic base of the family was destroyed along with the destruction of private property).
The process of state mobilization of women in the service of Soviet construction in Soviet historiography was idealized and viewed as the emancipation of women and the solution to the “women’s question,” while neither those who elected nor those elected could have a decisive influence on the process of political decision-making. The growth of literacy and education of the female population, liberation from economic dependence in the family were, to be honest, important results of this policy, but we should not forget that liberation from patriarchal dependence and “cultivation” presupposed political mobilization, indoctrination of women, which the gender contract between the worker-mother and the state made it simply undeniable.
2nd stage- late 1920s - mid 1950s. - conceptualized as "totalitarian androgyny" an attempt to create a sexless “Soviet man.” This period can be spoken of as a time of almost undivided (with the exception of a small layer of the metropolitan nomenklatura) dominance of the ethocratic contract “working mother”. This was a period of severe economic mobilization of women. which naturally led to the cultivation of asexuality. The best expression of the desire for totalitarian androgyny was the cliche “Soviet man” - a concept that did not exclude, but rather presupposed essentialism and sexism.
In the period under review, there is a “great turning point” - 1929-1934, which corresponds to a traditionalist rollback in the policy of family and marriage relations. The beginning of this period corresponds to the first five-year plans for industrialization and collectivization, and is then marked by the official declaration that the women's question in the Soviet Union has been "settled." This meant, in particular, the liquidation of all women’s departments and women’s councils, which by the early 1930s. were closed along with many other public organizations who allegedly fulfilled their purpose (Anti-Fascist Committee, Society of Political Prisoners, etc.). The remaining and newly created women's associations were not even formally independent organizations and existed exclusively as “drive belts” of party policy. Among them is a movement formed “from above” for women to master male professions (tractor drivers, pilots, public transport drivers). “The involvement of women in the environment of social production” (as Lenin dreamed of) turned into drawing them into the sphere of non-female labor. They worked as combine operators in the countryside, construction workers and railway workers in the city, and drove cars - never becoming the personal chauffeurs of the party bosses. They were drivers of trams, trucks, and crane operators.
Forced to work intensively outside the home, women did not have the opportunity to pay sufficient attention to themselves, their family, and children. Nevertheless, the Soviet press tried to convince women - who gradually turned, in the words of the writer Andrei Platonov, into “comrades with a special device” - how important it was for these “devices” to produce many children, and they, she swore while still alive then, but forever the childless wife of leader N.K. Krupskaya, will certainly become “objects of universal concern.” The upbringing of children in Russia at that time was increasingly moving away from the family and maternal: the absolute majority of them grew up in nurseries and kindergartens (the payment for maintenance in which was, however, meager).
The 1930s are considered a period of “great retreat” from revolutionary policies towards the family, a “step back”, a return to traditionalist norms. However, this is not entirely true. Firstly, government policy supported precisely new family - the first cell of Soviet society, a family that subordinated the regime of its life to the requirements of the Soviet labor collective. Secondly, in the village still a policy of women's emancipation was pursued: peasant women were encouraged to free themselves from the tyranny of husbands and fathers, to defend their status as independent collective farmers, equal to men. It is no coincidence that the collective farmers themselves confidently repeated: “collective farms have given us complete economic independence from men - father, husband, father-in-law,” “a woman is now an independent person in all respects.” In connection with the growing increase in divorces and the flight of husbands, single mothers constituted a significant social category both in cities and in rural areas, which day after day learned independent activities outside the home. Some learned this while working in production, while others interacted with the authorities, bombarding local authorities with requests for help in finding a missing spouse who does not pay alimony. Industrialization was accompanied by new housing policies that influenced marriage patterns. Housing issue during large-scale migration rural population into cities and the reshuffling of the urban population was resolved through the mass communalization of housing. Communal houses in reality remained only a utopia and Bolshevik Manilovism - in a crippled form, this idea was realized in the system of workers' barracks and dormitories.
In “commune houses” and communal apartments, a woman’s place was “typically female”: no one tried to “accustom” her husband to cooking, all household chores were distributed among female neighbors. Describing the dormitory for chemistry students, I. Ilf and E. Petrov recalled: “The pink house with a mezzanine is something between a housing association and a feudal village... The rooms were similar to pencil cases, with the only difference that in addition to pencils and pens, there were people and Primus stoves here.” Desire for comfort in the home, reluctance to share details family life were considered as a manifestation of individualism and “bourgeois” egoism. Communal apartments have become symbols of everyday control and surveillance of the private sphere; the family as a private sphere ceased to exist. At the same time, the concept of a woman’s maternal and marital duty entered into the circulation of ideological and political manipulation. It is no coincidence that housekeepers appeared in the houses of party functionaries at that time. They served as maids and looked after the master's children. These were young and not so young women, as a rule, who came from villages, expelled from their homes by hunger and lack of rights.
The 30s were the time of the active offensive of the Soviet state in all areas of the private sector. Of course, privacy could not be destroyed, but it became marginalized and became subject to surveillance. Freedom of movement turned out to be limited: in 1932, the passport system and the “propiska” system were introduced in the USSR. At the same time, in the public discourse of the thirties, sexuality was associated with reproduction. In 1935, the production of contraceptives ceased in the USSR, the culture of contraception ceased to develop, and fiction cultivated images strong men, who did not delve into the experiences of their wives and considered the latter as an object of satisfaction of sexual desires, almost as “bed accessory”.
In order to “educate” women and strengthen the family, a law was passed in 1936 that made divorce difficult (this story continued: from 1944, divorce became generally possible only through the court), abortions were prohibited (except for the so-called “ abortions for medical reasons"). In modern feminist discourse, such actions are regarded as a defeat of women in their reproductive rights. All these actions were a naive attempt by a totalitarian state to reverse the downward trend in the birth rate, but the paradoxical result of the cruelty shown to women was not an increase, but a decrease in the birth rate. According to one American researcher of Russian realities, the authorities treated a woman as something between a generator and a cow: a woman was expected to work like a machine in production and “give birth like a cow” at home.
The response of Russian women to strictness and prohibitions was passive resistance - tricks with the help of which the weak tried to “defend themselves and defend their rights to each other, as well as to the strong.<...>These strategies are a set of ways that allow a person who is tasked with receiving orders, rather than giving them, to achieve what he wants." Some followed the path of passive adaptation (say, strengthening the family for individual survival or participating in signing collective written complaints and denunciations), others took an active one, trying to occupy key positions in the social hierarchy through marriage with nomenklatura workers or through participation in movement of Stakhanovkas, social activists.
The most expressive phenomenon in Russian women's history of the pre-war period was the “Movement of Social Women”, which was, in fact, a society controlled from above by the wives of executives. It clearly demonstrated the traditionalist component of gender policy, which presupposed the glorification of status wives as the support of the husband, family and, ultimately, the state.
A special period of this stage was the Great Patriotic War. Wartime was characterized by special forms of gender mobilization, because during the war, women began to engage in those completely unfeminine, but well-paid activities that had previously been performed only or predominantly by men. These were not only difficult and harmful productions for women, but also various administrative positions. After the end of the war, in 1945, women were nevertheless forced out of all those spheres where they, by chance, found leadership (primarily from the posts of directors, heads of workshops, production facilities) - this was facilitated by the increase in the “symbolic value” of men , which were not enough for everyone.
The traditional functions of the division of labor between the sexes were successfully revived and were mobilized in conditions of constant shortages of consumer goods. Women knitted, sewed, cooked, organized life in an economy of scarcity: they “procured” goods. Men had their own specialization in demand: their skills in traditionally male types of housekeeping (repair, carpentry, etc.) “came to life,” but women’s labor contribution to family life was incomparably higher.
3rd stage- from the mid-1950s to the beginning of “perestroika” - began during the “thaw” period and continued throughout Brezhnev’s long twenty years. The fresh wind of political liberalization was familiar the emerging crisis of the ethcratic gender order, erosion of its central image - the “working mother”, if only because women began to be expected to be more involved in household chores. The ethcratic nature of the Soviet gender order persisted in the 1950s and into the 1970s: the state continued to regulate almost everything: employment, social policy regarding the family and women, and formed official discourses interpreting femininity and masculinity . However, it was with the political “thaw” that changes in gender policy entered the life of the country, a partial restoration of the importance of private life, and the formation of discourses opposing the official one accelerated.
The mid-1950s, when the criminalization of abortion was abolished and thus marked the liberalization of state reproductive policy, can be considered the symbolic boundary between the second and third stages of gender policy in the USSR. The state finally gave medical institutions and the family (primarily women) the functions of control over childbirth policy. But this policy was not supported by sexuality education and the availability of reliable contraceptives. The decriminalization of abortion did not yet mean its disappearance as a means of contraception; moreover, medical abortion became a widespread experience and the main way to control reproduction and family planning. In the official discourse, abortion was hushed up; in medical practices it became a symbol of punishment for women (hormonal contraceptives and IUDs were not purchased in the West, vacuum abortions in the early stages were prohibited, and anesthesia and pain relief were used to a limited extent until the mid-1980s) . In essence, all this was a punishment for those women who refused to fulfill their “women’s duty” and give birth to a child, although the reason for the spread of such a peculiar abortion culture could also be the elementary illiteracy of Russian doctors.
Intergenerational connections, especially between women, became the backbone of any family. In fact, in the second half of the 20th century. It was matrifocality that became typical (young families living with the wife’s parents) and, using the expression of A. Rothkirch, “extended motherhood”, in other words - the institutionalization of the role grandmothers, Without them (women of the older generation), the child had to be sent to nurseries, kindergartens, and after-school groups for a long time, since otherwise the family would have difficulty making ends meet: a non-working mother raising children was the exception rather than the rule .
The time in question (Khrushchev and Brezhnev) is a time of many positive changes in the position of Soviet women, a time of mass housing construction, partial “rehabilitation” of personal life. Despite all the irony embedded in the lexeme “Khrushchev”, it was the mass individualization of housing, as opposed to Stalin’s communal apartments, that opened up new opportunities in arranging personal life in the early 1960s. The family became increasingly autonomous; raising children, organizing everyday life, and intimate feelings went beyond the constant control of the spies.
It was the period of “thaw” and stagnation that became the time for the deployment of state assistance to divorced women and single mothers. The state actively implemented a pronatal social policy and transmitted ideological guidelines that identified “proper femininity” with motherhood. Numerous, but insignificant in value, benefits for pregnant women and mothers in the 1970-1980s. were intended not only to stimulate childbearing - they defined the “ideology of motherhood” as the natural destiny of women. It was at this time that the gender regime was finally formalized, in which the status of “working mother” was declared an achievable ideal. This status also shaped the dominant gender composition. Among the measures that could change the situation of falling birth rates, the impact on public opinion, propaganda of early marriages, undesirability of divorces and increasing the size of families.
At the same time, in conditions of demographic decline, the problem of combining two roles - mother and worker - gradually began to be recognized in public discourse in terms of the excessive “masculinization” of women and the need to overcome it through. “the return of a woman to the family.” To change the situation, it was proposed to develop the service sector, industrialize everyday life, and strengthen the mechanization of the household. Privatization families gave rise to (neo)traditionalist interpretations of the female role, which presupposed restrictions on women’s participation in the public sphere.
Meanwhile, in the context of the naturalization of the female role - namely, the promotion of the ideology of motherhood as a natural destiny - the social infrastructure (medical, preschool institutions, consumer services) turned out to be inappropriate to the needs of the family. All this helped to develop individual strategies for adapting to such structural problems. Women began to actively use social networks - friends, relatives, various family connections, primarily intergenerational ones. Without the grandmother, it became impossible to raise the child. That's when it became everyday practice.
The ideal Soviet woman half a century or a quarter century ago is a woman oriented towards family and motherhood, but at the same time working in Soviet enterprises and institutions (not for the sake of a professional career, for the sake of supporting the family - without a second income, the mother’s income , the family could not survive). Women workers devoted 2-2.5 times more time to housework than men, and accordingly had less time to increase their qualifications and develop personal potential. Women's occupations formed the basis of the household and absorbed so much non-working time that they formed a kind of second shift for women.
The crisis of the ethacratic gender order manifested itself in the problematization of the Soviet male role. The feminization of men was subjected to unexpected and sharp criticism; alarmist sentiments were heard in the press regarding their early mortality, poorer adaptability to life’s difficulties, high level morbidity due to the prevalence of industrial injuries, the prevalence of bad habits, and alcoholism. The liberal slogan “Take care of men!”, coined by sociologist B.Ts. Urlanis and became widespread in the late 1960s. , victimized the Soviet man, presenting him as a victim of a different (than a woman) physiology, social modernization and specific life circumstances.
Liberal-critical discourse of the 1960s-1980s. offered several models of “men for all seasons”. Among the normative examples of that time - the “Russian nobleman” (even better - the Decembrist, a man of honor, this was the time of passion for the books of B.Sh. Okudzhava, N.Ya. Eidelman, Yu.M. Lotman); “Soviet warrior” who defended the Motherland on the fronts of the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars (the Brezhnev era greatly contributed to the actualization of this image, since Leonid Ilyich himself was a war veteran and since 1965 the country began to celebrate May 9 with special solemnity ); as well as the romanticized “Western cowboy” (whose image was shaped by the rare Western films that made their way onto our screens). These ideals were unattainable; they were not provided by the structural possibilities of the then official publicity. “True masculinity” (if such exists at all as a general ideal) could take the form of male friendship (“A friend is always ready to give up a place in a boat and a circle.” - in this song the lyrical hero “gave in” to a friend even his beloved), true professionalism ( to increase which men always had time, which women, exhausted by constant care for loved ones, did not have), and sometimes - romanticized deviations (casual relationships, parallel families, etc.). Next to each of these heroes of his time there was always the one who created the background and context for him, the “strange woman” (I remember that was the name of the popular movie with I. Kupchenko in leading role). It was she who was responsible for strict and systematic control over the health of her spouse or lover, was responsible for the health of the family, for the correct lifestyle - for herself, her children and her husband.
Last, 4th stage coincides with the beginning of political and economic reforms, “perestroika” in the mid-1980s. And continues to this day. The past quarter century has embraced many events and changes; partial liberalization and erosion of the old gender order gave rise to a new traditionalism in public official discourse and the continuation of a newfound tendency towards complementarity of gender roles in everyday practices. No matter how offensive it may be for the powers that be to realize this, no matter how much they rely on church traditions in their projects, in the era of the Internet, total control over the everyday private life of citizens is largely lost. These processes are accompanied by a natural transformation of the demographic model, and in this they are similar to the processes in developed countries The West, where there is also an emphasis on late marriages, small families, and “delayed” parenthood. By the beginning of the 1990s. unregistered de facto marriages have become an undeniably acceptable social norm, and society’s tolerance for them is growing. At the same time, the abolition of strict state control over family and women, which was characteristic of the early 1990s, was replaced in the early 2000s. convulsive attempts to increase the number of children (the number of births in each individual family), to force women to agree to perform the educational function at home and to refuse self-realization outside it.
During the period of these socio-political transformations, the state lost its decisive role in constructing the gender order. In place of the old gender politics, conflicting public discourses (both oriented toward neotraditionalism and those sharply criticizing it) and new everyday practices arose. New gender roles have emerged, new interpretations of femininity and masculinity, and new actors taking part in the “production of gender.” The crisis of the old Soviet projects of masculinity and femininity is the last phase of the ethcratic gender order. On the right it is criticized by Orthodox traditionalists, on the left - by supporters of the feminist understanding of equal rights, each side offers its own projects for reforming the previous gender composition. The current gender order inherits some features of the late Soviet one; for Soviet history- as we noticed - he showed variability caused by changing political constellations. Some processes (raising the age of marriage, the independence of women, the birth of “new fatherhood” with its concern for the younger generation) are obviously common to all of Europe, others (orientation towards traditionalism, an increase in the layer of sponsored women and at the same time the strength, if not inescapability, of the “working mother” contract) is rooted in the history of Russian everyday life.
The gender order - historically given patterns of power relations between men and women - takes shape in certain societies at the institutional, ideological, symbolic and everyday levels. Cm.: Cornell R.Gender and Power. Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. N. Y.: Stanford University Press, 1987. pp. 98-99.
The etacracy system presupposes strong nationalization in the production sphere, class-stratified stratification of a hierarchical type, in which the position of individuals and groups is determined by their nomenklatura or other rank assigned by state authorities, the absence of civil society, the rule of law and the presence of a citizenship system, partyocracy, militarization of the economy (Radaev V.V., Shkaratan O.I. Social stratification. M.: Aspectpress, 1996. P. 260).
Lapidus G.Women in Soviet society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. R. 54-94; Blackher F.The Soviet Woman in Family and Society. New York; 1986;Toronto,Buckley M. 1989;Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,Atwood L. The New Soviet Man and Woman. Bloomington
: Indiana University Press, 1990; Russian gender order: a sociological approach / Ed. E. Zdravomyslova, A. Temkina. St. Petersburg: European University Publishing House, 2007. For more details see:Buckley. M Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. 1989.
Ann Arbor ( : The University of Michigan Press,In 1926, women made up 75% of all illiterate people, claimed an American journalist, a contemporary of the events described., KingsburyBuckley. S
Fairchild Factory, Family and Woman in the Soviet Union. New York: AMS Press, 1935. R. 169).
Motivation was provided by prominent Bolshevik ideologists; see, for example: Kollontai AM.
Women's work in evolution
National economy
A.M. Kollontai wrote: “I did not intend to legalize our relationship, but Pavel’s arguments - “if we get married, we will be together until our last breath” - shook me. The moral prestige of the People's Commissars was also important. A civil marriage would put an end to all the whisperings and smiles behind our backs..." (quoted from: Bezelyansky Yu. Eros in the uniform of a diplomat // Aka. Faith. Hope. Love. Women's portraits. M.: Raduga, 2001 ).
At first, the husband’s right to take his wife’s surname was not essential for the survival of the family, but was rather a realization of the idea of equal rights for women. But later - with the consolidation of the policy of state anti-Semitism, that is, in the 1930-1950s - this right acquired an important meaning, since in the case of differences in ethnic origin it gave the opportunity to choose for each spouse and for their children of the surname that gave the best life chances (that is, Russian, an example of this is the Mironova-Menaker family, the surname of the famous actor is Andrei Mironov).
For more details see: Goykhbarg A.G.
Marriage, family and guardianship law of the Soviet Republic. M., 1920.
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Pushkareva N.L., Kazmina O.E. Marriage in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia // Family ties. Models for assembly. Book 1 / Ed. S.A. Ushakina. M.: New Literary Review, 2004. pp. 185-219. Collection of laws of the RSFSR. M., 1926. No. 82; Boshko V.I. Essays on Soviet
family law. Kyiv: Gospolitizdat of the Ukrainian SSR, 1952. P. 60-61.
Genkin D.M., Novitsky I.B., Rabinovich N.V. History of Soviet civil law. 1917-1947. M.: Legal. Publishing house of the USSR Ministry of Justice, 1949. P. 436.
2000. Borodina A.V., Borodin D.Yu.
Baba or comrade? The ideal of the new Soviet woman in the 20s - 30s. // Women's and gender studies at Tver State University. Tver: Tver State University, pp. 45-51. Zdravomyslova EA, Temkina AA.Soviet ethacratic gender order // Social history. 2003. Special issue on gender history;. Goldman W Women, the State and Revolution.
Golod S.I. Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
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Krupskaya N.K.
I wish you success in your work! // A woman in the country of the Soviets is an equal citizen. M.: Partizdat, 1938. pp. 122-123.Goldman W. Women, the State and Revolution. Women, the State and Revolution. Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Clements B.E.// The Birth of the New Soviet Woman/ Bolshe-vik Culture: Experiment and Order in Russian Revolution A. Gleason, P. Kenez, R. Stites (Eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989. P. 220. To the leader, teacher and friend of the collective farmers! Letter from collective farmers of the collective farm “12th October” in Tarasovsky district Rostov region
// Collective farmer. 1937. No. 11. P. 10.
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Denisova L.N.
Russian peasant woman in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. M.: New Chronograph, 2011. PUSHKAREVA, Natalya Lvovna
Gender theory and
historical knowledge Annotation: The first publication in Russian historiography outlining the history of the formation of women's and gender studies - an interdisciplinary area
scientific knowledge , which influenced the science of the past in Europe, the USA, and Russia. The author of the book is professor, doctor historical sciences Natalya Lvovna Pushkareva was one of the first to introduce the topic “history of women” into our science, becoming, in fact, its founder and one of the leaders. Her list of works includes such popular and frequently cited books as “Women Ancient Rus'"(1989), "Women of Russia and Europe on the threshold of the New Age" (1996); " Private life Russian woman in pre-industrial Russia: bride, wife, mistress" (1997), highly appreciated by Western
scientific world
“Women in Russian history from the 10th to the 20th Century” (1997; 2nd ed. 1999), “And these are evil, mortal sins...” (Love, eroticism and sexual ethics in pre-industrial Russia X, first half of the 19th century) ( 1999), “Russian woman: history and modernity” (2002).
PREFACE
PART ONE
WOMEN'S STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SCIENCES
“Living colors of love - for the female sex and for the Fatherland”
1. The idea of “women’s history” in Russian pre-revolutionary historiography (1800-1917)
2. Issues of “women’s history” in the works of Soviet researchers (1917-1985)
The birth of “women’s history” (historical feminology)
3. The prenatal period and the pangs of childbirth: general scientific premises of historical feminology and its institutionalization in Western science
4. Main directions of historical feminology in the West
5. What has “historical feminology” achieved in the West?
Unnoticed revolution (Historical feminology in Russia, 1980–2000: state and prospects)
1. 1980s: the beginning of “labor pains”?
2. What happened in the mid-80s: the beginning of recognition of the “women’s theme” in the system of historical sciences in Russia
3. Reasons for the lack of popularity of the “female theme” in our historical science today
4. Latest developments in the field of Russian “women’s history”: directions and methods of scientific research (1986-2000)
PART TWO123
GENDER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SCIENCES
Ideological origins of the gender concept
1. The dominance of biological determinism
2. Why was the marriage of Marxism and feminism an unhappy one?
3. First doubts about the “obvious” Concept of T. Kuhn
4 Modernism of the late 20th century: from theories of social construction (60s) to the gender concept (70s) in sociology
5. Theoretical foundations of the gender concept in psychology
What is "gender"? (Basic concepts, representatives, analytical approaches)
1. What is “gender”: the first definitions of the concept
2. They were the first: some feminist concepts of gender
3. How are gender stereotypes, norms, and identities created and recreated?
From "women's studies" to "gender studies", from historical feminology to gender history
1. “Gender is a useful category of historical analysis”
2. Postmodernism, poststructuralism and “plurality of stories”
3. Linguistic turn. Male and female discourses
4. Gender history: subject and meaning
5. Gender examination of social phenomena as a method of deepening historical vision: the historiographical situation of the 90s.
6. Prospects for a gender approach in research national history
Gender history as a “field of intersection” of history and gender linguistics
1. From the theory of “word as action” to the theories of “genderlect”
2. “A language created by men” and “You misunderstood me” (two directions in feminist linguistics in the West)
3. Results of research by Russian gender linguists relevant to gender history
4. Is the female language of Russian folk culture so “inaudible”?
5. Male and female languages of nonverbal communication
Gender psychology and history. Individual and collective memory in the light of the concepts of gender psychology
1. Memory as a psychological concept. Individual and collective memory. Multiple types of memory
2. Gender component in developmental psychology, psychology of emotions and cognitive psychology
3. Gender characteristics of collective memory
4. Types of narratives as tools for analyzing collective memory
5. Gender characteristics of memorization through the eyes of psychologists studying the individual memory of modern men and women
Gender characteristics of writing and reading. Gender aspect of autobiographical memory as a history of the subjective
1. “Writing is acting.” The concept of "letters"
2. Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and the phenomenon of “women’s writing”
3. The originality of women's oral and writing– continuation of gender expectations and stereotypes (the process of “doing gender” in text creation)
4. The phenomenon of women's reading" and the tasks of studying texts written by women
5. Autobiographical memory of the individual. “Women’s autobiographies” for “men’s history”?
6. Some results of the study of early Russian women's autobiographies
Gender studies as a “field of intersection” of history and ethnological disciplines (social anthropology, ethnography)
1. How it all began (prehistory of feminist ethnology and sources of its appearance: early XIX- late 60s XX century)
2. The beginning of the feminist project in ethnology and social anthropology. Separation of the concepts of “sex” and “gender” (1970-1980s)
3. The content of the feminist project in ethnology in the late 1980s - 2000
4. Other methods humanities, used by feminist anthropology
5. Original approaches and updated methods in feminist ethnological research at the turn of the century
Prospects for gender studies in the system of historical sciences in Russia (instead of a conclusion)
APPLICATION
1. What is “feminism”
2. Feminism in Russia
3. Gender studies
Course program
I. Women's and Gender Studies in History
Women's Studies in History or Historical Feminology
II. Gender history. Methodology and techniques
Pointer
N. L. Pushkareva
Motherhood as a socio-historical phenomenon
(Review of foreign research on the history of European motherhood)
The study of motherhood as a socio-cultural phenomenon with its own features and characteristics different nations has its own history in Western science. Almost all scientists in different European countries, who in one way or another turned to the history of the family, church and family law, also touched upon the problems of the history of parenthood, and therefore motherhood. However, until the emergence of new approaches to the study of historical psychology and social history, which modern specialists rightly associate with the French Annales school, the topic “history of motherhood” was not recognized as independent and valuable in its own right by the world scientific community. It was included as a component in ethnological and psychological, medical and, partly, legal research, but no one spoke of it as interdisciplinary and unusually relevant.
The first steps towards changing this situation were made by publications on the history of childhood, for it was they who made it possible to look at the history of parenthood differently - to raise new questions aimed at identifying certain general cultural and historical models of motherhood in Europe that corresponded to certain time periods.
In the classic work of the French historian, one of the founders of the Annales school, Philippe Ariès, who was subjected to fair criticism on the part of medievalists of all countries - primarily for the very controversial conclusion about the absence in the Middle Ages of “an idea of childhood and its value for a person” - not much attention was paid to the issue of specific functions and the importance of father and mother in the life of a child in the pre-industrial era. In a certain sense, this fact followed from the author’s very concept of the first phases of the history of childhood: the early medieval, when children were “not noticed” and “often abandoned,” and the late medieval, when, according to him, the attitude towards children was marked by “ambivalence,” the assumption of the child to the life of adults, but without recognizing any of his own rights.
The concept of F. Ariès caused a storm of controversy on the pages of books and magazines, but there were also scientists who generally agreed with the French researcher (for example, in England and the USA, respectively, L. Stone and L. De Maus). It is curious, however, that both they and their critics (let’s name E. Shorter) agreed that the “emergence” of maternal love at the beginning of modern times became a kind of “motor”, “source of movement” in changes in family life and everyday life of children (for example, L. Pollock believed that “until the 17th century there was no concept of childhood and motherhood”). Moreover, each of the researchers saw in the “emergence of maternal love”, of course, only one, albeit the most important, factor. Other accompanying ones were listed as “the spread of systematic secularism, schooling" (F. Ariès), "the spread of psychological and medical knowledge", "the development of bourgeois society" (E. Shorter), "the complication of the emotional world of people, the emergence of an indefinable spirit of goodwill" (including parents who have become able to better understand their children and satisfy their needs, as L. De Maus and, especially, E. Shorter believed).
On the contrary, psychologist Jerome Kagan saw the opposite relationship: the emergence of a new attitude towards the child, in particular maternal love, he believed, was the result of a change in the model of family life and the role of the child in society: with increasing life expectancy, children began to be increasingly seen as additional working hands in the family, breadwinners and maintainers in old age, and from here new emotions arose in relation to them.
Publications by F. Aries, L. De Maus, E. Shorter and J. Kagan opened the topic of “childhood history.” Their followers from different countries responded to it with an avalanche of publications, restoring the “child’s world” to times long gone, analyzing the understanding of infancy and adolescence in those days. Many works turned out to be related to the problem of perception of childhood and, in connection with it, motherhood in the Middle Ages. The main conclusion of medievalists was that the absence in the Middle Ages modern concept motherhood (and in its Western European version) does not mean that it did not exist at all. And the task of scientists was to identify how views on motherhood and maternal love changed in different historical eras, among different peoples (it is only significant that even in the most generalizing works - such as, for example, the “Social History of Childhood” appeared in the early 1990s - there was no place for Eastern Europe and, especially, Russia: there were no trained specialists).
In the course of research undertaken, including by medievalists from different countries, a number of observations about child-parent relationships and their content in the pre-industrial era turned out to be very significant. Of undoubted interest was, for example, the work of the German literary critic D. Richter, who analyzed the fairy tales of various European peoples (including the collections of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm) precisely from the point of view of how they reflect the relationship between parents and children, their stages and dynamics. A number of other German researchers proved that before the beginning of the modern era there was no clear division of games into “children’s” and “adults”: everyone played together. With the development of society, emphasized, for example, D. Elshenbroich, the function of play in education was left to mothers alone (and only when it came to children). The “gap” and alienation between a child and an adult (expressed, among other things, in the absence of joint games) grew simultaneously with the modernization of society.
Another topic of “childhood specialists” was the study of parenthood, including the history of parental (and, therefore, maternal) love. And here, the observation of a number of researchers of school and school education in the early modern period, who persistently denied the cruelty of parents, and mothers first of all, turned out to be important, cited facts of the opposite nature - the desire of parents to protect their children who were subjected (during training by masters, teachers in schools) to physical influence .
Very promising direction in the study of childhood and the related plot of mother-child relationships, it turned out to be the publication of excerpts from primary sources, selected on the topic “Children and their parents over three centuries” (the American L. Pollock was the responsible editor), since it made it possible to “go” to the topic of interest to familists the topic of children's ideas about their parents. Finally, specialists in the “history of childhood”, who considered it not only as a sociohistorical and sociocultural, but also a socio-confessional construct, came close to studying parenthood in this aspect, including, therefore, motherhood (the study should be considered especially successful in this aspect C. J. Sommersville, the final chapter of which was an analysis of parental feelings through the prism of Puritan individualism of the 17th century). But only since the end of the 1970s the study of fatherhood, motherhood and the dynamics of their changes in history began to be institutionalized as an independent research area.
It is not surprising that in androcentric societies and scientific communities, which most scientific institutions and universities in Europe and the USA have always been and still are, the close attention of scientists turned out to be paid primarily to paternity rather than motherhood. Fatherhood was seen as an exclusively social phenomenon that changed its appearance in different historical eras. In a collection of works published in Stuttgart under the leadership of Professor H. von Tellenbach (“The Image of the Father and Fatherhood in Myth and History”), it was emphasized that it has always been a “creative principle” and a source of authority. The purpose of the authors of the collection was to study ideas about fatherhood in the works of ancient authors, in the New Testament; they did not aim to compare views on fatherhood and motherhood, since they considered motherhood to be a “sociobiological” phenomenon rather than a completely “social” fatherhood.
Somewhat later, historians involved in the study of paternity strongly emphasized that “fatherly love” was - in comparison with maternal love - something “outside the norm”, and even in the works of women historians (for example, K. Opitz) it was considered mainly in categories of male frustrations when describing death or other forms of loss of children. It is noteworthy that for the entire subsequent twenty-five years, the study of the history of fatherhood continued in polemics with the study of the history of motherhood, in the context of a struggle with imaginary “mills”: that is, in the constant assertion of the right of this topic “to its own history” (although not a single feminist has ever disagreed with this argued).
To a very large extent, interest in the “history of motherhood” arose as a consequence of the strengthening of the cultural-anthropological direction in medieval studies, primarily in attempts to re-cover the history of the family and issues of historical demography. True, in the works of cultural anthropologists of the new (by the 1980s - already the second) generation of the Annales school, women still appeared more often as “wives”, “widows”, and in relation to the 18th century - as “friends” and “like-minded people”. J.-L. Flandren in France, L. Stone in England, R. Trumbach in the USA developed the history family relations in France, Belgium, England and other European countries in the Middle Ages, but women as mothers appeared in these books primarily in the context of references to the circumstances of everyday life of that time, the conception and birth of children, and their breastfeeding. That is, interest in the “history of motherhood” was initially not similar to interest in the “history of fatherhood.” Motherhood was seen as a “natural” and even “biological” predestination of a woman as a mother. To a certain extent, this approach was dictated by the sources: the researchers seemed to follow the preachers, theologians, didactics, and writers of the Middle Ages, for whom this particular distribution of emphasis was obvious.
The same obviousness seemed to be the “timekeeping” of child-parent (and in particular, child-mother) relationships, the division of the “history of childhood” (and, consequently, the history of parenthood) into two eras: “before” the 18th century. both the Enlightenment era and “after” (there were researchers who denied this statement, but they were in the minority). The fact that “after” the Enlightenment era, the upbringing of children and the attitude of mothers towards them became different was not disputed by almost anyone, in any country (the most consistent defender of this idea was and remains E. Shorter - but his peremptory and harshness is constantly disputed: dozens have been written articles that prove that even before the notorious 18th century, the attitude of mothers towards their children could be both tender and sympathetic). At the same time, almost all modern foreign scientists are ready to agree that a clear definition of maternal and paternal roles in the current understanding of this word is a phenomenon that accompanied mid-18th century V. the birth of “an individualized and intimateized family of the bourgeois type, truly nuclear (due to its isolation and separation).”
A wide range of sources of personal origin (letters, autobiographies, memoirs - that is, the so-called ego-documents) allowed specialists in the history of modern times to pose questions that reveal individual psychology representatives of different social strata. The strengthening of the biographical direction and method in the system of historical sciences gave another impetus to the study of motherhood. In essence, this was a reorientation from the positivist collection of facts about childhood and parenthood to the study of the history of interaction between children and parents, that is, what parents thought about their childhood and their children, how they sought to take into account mistakes and achievements personal experience in raising children. A similar approach also included an analysis of children’s assessments of parents and, above all (since this was better represented in the sources) of mothers. In response to the call to deepen and develop the biographical direction in social sciences began to publish personal sources written by women; Among them there were even such rare ones as, for example, the memoirs of a Danish midwife of the late 17th century. early XVIII centuries.
In the works of the German researcher Irena Hardach-Pincke, who analyzed dozens of autobiographies, favorably received by scientific criticism, Messrs. from the point of view of their informativeness on the “history of childhood,” her favorite idea was affirmed about the constant “balancing” of the relationship between mother and child (at the time she was considering) “between fear/intimidation and love.” In the collection of documents collected and published by her, a special chapter was devoted to the images of parents in the biographies of grown-up children and, consequently, to the assessments by the children themselves of the care and affection shown towards them, punishments and their cruelty, love, respect, etc. The image of the mother in autobiography XVIII literature V. acted most often as an image of a “mediator” between children and the head of the family. Even closer to the topic we are considering was the work of I. Hardach-Pinke’s compatriot A. Cleaver, whose task included the analysis of more than “female” (and, what is especially valuable, “maternal”!) texts, which allowed the author to consider how they influenced the real maternal behavior and “ideal” (literary) self-expression of the authors of these texts; everyday speech practices - “everyday profane, political and philosophical discourses” at the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries. In a recently published collection of articles, “Maternal Instinct: Perspectives on Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain,” the authors attempted to link and compare social expectations (iconic maternity) and reality and came to the conclusion that “the polarization of motherhood and sexuality ended precisely at the beginning of the 20th century.”
Medievalists, on the other hand, were more likely to focus on the study of specific, traditional and, so to speak, “materially tangible” aspects of medieval parenthood. These topics were, first of all, topics related to the history of medicine. Therefore, one of the most developed questions was the question of how parents performed the functions of house doctors in the early Middle Ages. Directly related to the “maternal” theme were other aspects of the history of medicine (obstetrics and assistance during difficult births) and, in particular, micropediatrics (women’s responsibility for the survival of children and the care of mothers for babies, features of breastfeeding and the diet of nursing mothers and hired wet nurses) . It is worth noting the unusually informative “Chronology of Events in the History of Childbirth,” compiled in the late 1980s. J. Levitt and which was an appendix to her book “Childbirth in America,” which traces the entire history of medicine from the point of view of significant advances in the birth of children from the year until the middle of the 20th century. (the first successful caesarean section, after which both mother and child survived; the first translation of one or another medical treatise; the first experiences of listening to the fetus in the womb, etc.).
Quite popular in the late 's - early 's. Problems of historical demography related to motherhood also arose: the fertility and sterility of women, the frequency of intergenetic intervals, the number of children in families, the survival of children, the duration of fertile age. Somewhat apart - due to the unusual way the question was posed - stood in the historiography of the turn of the 1980s. work by V. Fields on the diet of children by mothers (after breastfeeding) in the 18th - 19th centuries. . To a certain extent, this topic was also touched upon by those who studied the so-called structures of everyday life - everyday life, the peculiarities of the way of life of different peoples, in different historical eras. But, of course, both demographers and historians of everyday life (we are talking about them, not ethnographers) touched on the topic of motherhood, as a rule, in passing.
A very noticeable direction in the study of medieval motherhood was the study of the legal aspects of the topic, because - according to the most prominent French researcher of social history J. Delumeau - motherhood and fatherhood of the early Middle Ages in general were “represented mainly in the form of legal institutions.” It is noteworthy that, for example, in German historiography these subjects turned out to be worked out very thoroughly and in relation to different historical eras: some of the scientists - following K. Marx - analyzed legal aspects motherhood from the standpoint of contrasting the “private” and “public” spheres, others - following V. Wulf from the standpoint of their inextricable connection, reflection and display, exploitation of one or another ideologically acceptable idea in the legal sphere. Feminists in Germany and the United States, analyzing the current situation, forced a discussion on the need for “positive discrimination of a woman-mother” (that is, her special rights that a man cannot have - this, in fact, was the subject of a whole collection of articles on the history of legal protection of motherhood from the years to the 20th century, published under the editorship of G. Bock and P. Ten), posing the general problem as the problem of “mother’s rights - human rights.” It is not surprising that the most well-founded works on these issues were written by specialists in the history of modern times, since by the beginning of the 20th century. The legal consciousness of people in European countries has reached recognition of the need for such “legislative regulation of reproductive issues.”
A huge step forward in the study of the “history of motherhood” was the emergence in the 1960s of a special direction in the humanities, called “women’s studies”. As is known, it united the interests of economists and lawyers, psychologists and sociologists, teachers and literary scholars. Supporters of this trend in history set the goal of “restoring historical justice” and “making visible” not only eminent and high-brow heroes, but also heroines of the past, and not by some kind of addition, adding a “female enzyme” to an already written history, but by writing “another history" - specifically female and, one might say, "gynocentric".
The implementation of this task turned out to be easier for modernists (that is, specialists in the history of Europe after the year, and especially in the 19th century), whose task included studying the early forms of women’s political struggle for equality and, in general, for their rights. The “maternal theme” immediately found itself at the center of feminist discourse in all European countries - as emphasized by A.T. Allen, the author of the monograph “Feminism and Motherhood in Germany,” - since she personally confronted “maternalism” (the concept of the traditional nature of maternal duty and the “specialness” of a woman’s status in connection with its existence) and feminism with its idea of a woman’s equal right to self-realization in any sphere, including non-family, raising the problem of the existence of “gender-neutral equality in relation to parenthood”. From this topic was born the topic of the formation and awareness of women of their gender identity, which by the mid-s won the attention of the readership in France, Germany, England and other countries. In particular, in German science it was in the late 1980s and early 2000s. the opinion has been established that “the concept of motherhood is relatively new” and its formation is directly related to the formation of the ideology of the burghers, that is, it dates back to the 17th century. . Even more widespread was and remained the point of view according to which maternal identity began to be recognized by women simultaneously with the awareness of (and as part of) female identity (and this process was associated with the second half of the 18th century).
Of course, it was impossible to reveal the topic of awareness and acceptance of any ideologeme (in this case, “good motherhood”) without the ego-documents already mentioned above (thus, in German historiography, for example, a study appeared that recreated women’s, including maternal, identity based on a comprehensive analysis of women's letters). Next in line were pedagogical books from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, which oriented mothers toward “correct” upbringing, as well as an analysis of didactic stereotypes in school textbooks, in family and non-family education, in literary fiction. Ultimately, the researchers came to the inevitable conclusion that not only in bygone times, but also in the last century and today, motherhood forms one of the most important “spaces” of a woman’s spiritual and social world (“Frauenraum”) and, therefore, without studying this phenomenon, “the problem of the relationship between different sexual identities cannot only be understood, but even posed.”
At the same time, some of the researchers - primarily E. Badinter - became unwitting successors of F. Aries: insisting on the social predetermination of maternal relationships (and thus arguing with those who considered only fatherhood a truly social institution), they began to see motherhood as an “invention” (invention) of capitalism, and the “invention” for the rich, while the “poor,” in their opinion, continued to “suffer from the lack of positive emotional connections.” Assessing the entire centuries-old history of motherhood until the mid-18th century. as a period of “maternal indifference”, E. Badinter, in the French edition of her study, published under the “telling” title “Love in addition”, attributed to the evidence (“signs”) of this indifference a calm attitude towards the deaths of babies, the prevalence of throwing up “extra” children , refusal to feed them, “selectivity” in relation to children (love for some and deliberate humiliation of others) - that is, in essence, repeated the arguments of F. Aries.
It is noteworthy that in relation to the “turning epoch” - the 16th century. - E. Badinter was categorical, insisting on the absence of any positive changes in the relationship between mothers and children in the era of early liberation (emancipation) of the female personality. Even speaking about the 18th century, the author believed, one should not so much look for rare examples of emotional mutual understanding in families with children, but rather the prevalence of giving them up to raise or shifting all worries about him onto the shoulders of governesses.
At the same time, a number of German historians who studied motherhood in the 19th century considered it such an established and static social institution (let’s cite Iv. Schütze as an example) that they saw in “maternal love until the middle of the 20th century - N.P. rather a form imputed to a woman’s responsibility.” its disciplining" (which only after the Second World War experienced supposedly "strong psychologization and rationalization"). Most specialists in the Middle Ages and early modern times had no doubt that each era, each time had its own understanding of the maternal phenomenon in general and maternal love in particular.
An attempt to understand what were the mechanisms of development of relations between children and parents in the pre-industrial, “pre-Enlightenment” era was made by researchers in the history of mentalities. Most of them easily agreed that maternal love in the Middle Ages was associated with care (for the sick, the poor) and came down to the ability to socialize one’s child in such a way that it would be sufficiently educated and “prepared, for example, for a monastic career,” where the ability showing care similar to a mother's could become a form of human self-realization. Arguing with F. Aries, the researchers insisted that maternal love certainly existed in the pre-industrial period, but the description of the forms of its expression made us see it as a biological instinct rather than a socially and culturally conditioned phenomenon. In this sense, F. Heyer’s work on the history of “femininity” in the late Middle Ages turned out to be a worthy exception to the rule. The author’s task was to study the changing ideas about the “ideal mother” under the influence of the Reformation, the very mechanism for developing such a traditional and persistent belief as the recognition of raising children - in the words of Martin Luther - “the first women's profession.
Researchers of the New Age (modernists), meanwhile, posed somewhat different questions, in particular, they explored the sources of the emergence of a special ideologeme of “maternalism” (the special value of motherhood, the recognition of which should be cultivated in the name of the improvement and reproduction of a race, class, social group - a phenomenon in the middle - the end of the 19th century in Europe, preceding the debate on eugenics), they sought to determine the originality and components of various manifestations of “spiritual motherhood”, that is, to find analogues of maternal relations in politics and state system, study the first forms of women's associations and unions aimed at “protecting motherhood” (for example, in Germany it was the “Bunds fur Mutterschutz” of the second half of the 19th century, which became part of the women's movement).
Thus, researchers were faced with the task of studying motherhood from a historical and psychological point of view - from the point of view of the peculiarities of its perception by different social strata, at different time periods of the past and present. The so-called linguistic turn, which marked the development of a number of humanities in the mid-s. (a sharp increase in attention to terminology and ways of expressing feelings, emotions, events), contributed greatly to an in-depth analysis of maternal discourse in different historical eras, among different peoples, to reflection on the content of concepts, rather than to the collection of a mass of facts. Feminism, the socio-psychological direction in history and social constructivism agreed in defining the main aspect in motherhood of bygone eras as the “aspect of service” (to the spouse, to society). Following the first studies of “sensitive history” written by the French, other countries appeared with their own “histories of feelings”, including those analyzing the features of women’s worldview. Let us especially note among them “The Culture of Sensibility” by J. Barker-Benfield.
Medievalists and, in general, researchers of the pre-industrial period - an era when the home was the most important living space for a person, and “motherhood, unlike fatherhood, gave a woman social significance and value." In a certain sense, it was precisely the importance of a woman as a mother, her ability to become one, which, according to a number of American feminists, was one of the reasons for the rapid development of feminophobic, sexist formulations in the system of written and common law.
Medievalists with clearly expressed feminist views easily linked the history of medieval motherhood with the history of sexuality, since such an interpretation naturally suggested itself when reading medieval penitentials (collections of punishments for sins). They are in latest literature late 's prove that men - the authors of laws and compilers of chronicles in the early Middle Ages diligently “covered up” the importance of motherhood and feeding a child, since they themselves could not perform such functions, and therefore did not highly value their importance. Some of the researchers of motherhood of the pre-industrial era specifically emphasized that only through motherhood and everything associated with it, women of that time lost the status of “victims” and could (through self-realization) feel their own “freedom” and “significance”.
At the same time, researchers of medieval culture and religious anthropology have revealed that the concept of “proper marriage” (in particular, the idea of a “good” and “bad” wife) and the concept of “motherhood” (including ideas of “bad” and “ good" mother) developed simultaneously and, one might say, "went hand in hand." The hypothesis of the medievalists was that awareness of the value of maternal love and maternal education accompanied the entire process of revaluation of values in the concept of family and women in Christianity. The early Middle Ages, they believed, were characterized by a high appreciation of virginity and childlessness, and asceticism in everything, including marital relations. Later, priests and preachers were forced to admit the “dead end” of this path of educating parishioners. Attempts to canonize childless couples, according to, for example, German researchers of the “history of women,” did not meet with understanding among parishioners and, on the contrary, holidays and the saints associated with them, whose lives were marked by parental love and affection, enjoyed special love. Thus, society’s interest in its numerical increase, multiplied by the efforts of preachers who slightly “tweaked” their original concept, became the reason for a change in the perception of motherhood.
An analysis of medieval hagiography has led a number of researchers to the conclusion that from a certain time (in the so-called “high Middle Ages”), care for children began to be constantly present in the text of sermons and took the form of formulated theses about the maternal “duty” and “responsibilities” of women mothers. The special veneration of saints, whose lives were both similar and not similar to the lives of ordinary people, the rapid spread of the cult of the Madonna and her mother, St. Anne, recorded at this time, changed the attitude towards motherhood within the Christian concept. The praise and “honoring” of mothers and motherhood turned into a “general concept” of Catholic preachers in Europe (if we discard regional variations) by the end of the 13th - beginning of the 14th century, (as A. Blamyers pointed out), which had reverse side marginalization and deprivation of those who could not be mothers.
Medievalists, who chose the late Middle Ages as their area of analytical work, showed that it was in the texts of this period that images of mothers with many children appeared, that it was in the fashion of the “high Middle Ages” - as iconography also reflected - that dresses that allowed one to freely bear a child during pregnancy became typical. At the same time, in the penitentiary texts, as colleagues, for example, K. Opitz, noted, prohibitions appeared on the use of any contraceptives and attempts to regulate the number of births (which was absent in the early texts). A very remarkable side of “women’s history” in the Middle Ages, as the Israeli researcher S. Shahar believed, was the weak representation of the maternal theme in the monuments of urban literature: it contained a whole palette of images of “marriage partners”, “good” and “evil” wives and extremely Mothers were rare.
A characteristic feature of the medieval concept of motherhood (based, no doubt, on the general Christian concept of family) was, as noted by a number of European researchers, the “allowance” of the mother only to small child, "baby". Beginning in years, a child, and especially a teenager, should have, according to the findings of researchers, been raised by his father. Taking into account social stratification when analyzing the topic we are considering led to the conclusion that in ancient times, not everyone responded to the “call” of clergy to pay more attention to children, but rather to a greater extent the privileged strata, where maternal responsibilities were perhaps the main ones for women. On the contrary, in an unprivileged environment, motherhood and the experiences associated with it supposedly played a secondary (to say the least) role.
The reflections of “modernist” researchers (that is, those who studied the early modern era in Europe in the 16th - 17th centuries) largely developed the hypotheses of medievalists. From their point of view, the concept of motherhood in modern times was formed not so much by church postulates, but (and to a greater extent!) by secular narrative literature, including didactic properties, and by educated mothers - as, say, the English literary critic K. Moore emphasized - They were brought up at this time not only by the power of their own example, but also by literary example. K. Moore in England, and E. Daunzeroth in Germany (fifteen years before K. Moore's publication) analyzed pedagogical books of the pre-Enlightenment era, showing how, on their basis, stereotypes of perceiving a woman primarily as a future or accomplished mother were formed and reproduced. To the same conclusions - but on the basis of studying the everyday life of different European peoples in the early modern period, their customs and beliefs, including those related to the circumstances of conception, the development of a child in the womb, etc. - came the English researcher O. Houghton, who decisively rejected, by the way, the hypotheses of F. Aries and his followers about the “discovery” of childhood (and, consequently, motherhood as one of the manifestations of the “century of affected individualism,” that is, the 18th century).
Researchers and, especially, researchers of the phenomenon of motherhood, working in the last decade of the 20th century, made a number of its aspects that, it would seem, were known to previous historiography, but were not scientifically articulated, become topical. For example, researchers of various forms of socio-political activity of women and the women's movement of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. drew attention to the use by feminists of the last century of the idea of “spiritual motherhood” as an element of “sisterhood” between like-minded women.
New problems posed in the historical literature of the 1980s include the identification of the second important milestone (after the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century) in the European history of motherhood. According to many, it began in the 1980s, when the term “motherhood” came into use in “European public discourse,” when teachers, social workers, and hygienists started talking about it in all countries, when “motherhood ceased to be just a natural attribute women, but turned into social problem" .
The very concept of motherhood in recent years has gotten rid of the dichotomy imposed by centuries - the classification of all women with children into the categories of either a “bad” or “good” mother, and these categories, “models” and samples have been analyzed in relation to different eras and cultures (here a special role belongs to the English researcher E. Ross). For modernists, research into the concept of a “moral mother”, proposed to the English-speaking society in Victorian era: according to him, a “real”, “moral” mother had to consciously refuse to work outside the family and to participate in social life for the sake of her children.
Historians who studied non-elite strata of society (the poor, workers) contributed to the study of ideas about maternal love and responsibility in these social strata. These researchers (E. Riley, E. Ross, K. Canning) used a completely different range of sources (the press, reports of factory and medical inspectors, etc.) - after all, among the poor there were many illiterate people, and representatives of these social classes did not have enough time , nor the strength to describe my life for posterity. It is not surprising that almost all researchers who took up such topics were specialists in modern history. The rapid development in last years the so-called “oral history”, which made it possible to compensate for the shortcomings of “recorded” history: researchers who used historical and ethnological methods of work (participant observation, direct participation) achieved convincing results, reconstructing the everyday life of women from the working environment for half a century and more back.
Finally, a special topic within the framework of the general problem was the history of motherhood in an immigrant environment, its features and difficulties, which are sometimes not understandable to permanent residents of the country, the problems of ensuring the rights of mothers in extreme conditions(war, post-war devastation). It sounded very poignant in the works of the 1980s. and the theme of the everyday life of mothers in post-war Western European society, directly addressing the issue of “neo-maternalism” (human losses forced most countries to promote images of large, happy mothers), and it is not surprising that half a century later there was a need to analyze the influence of this ideological concept on the life of “simple " person.
Summing up some of the results of the review of foreign publications on the “history of motherhood,” it is probably worth emphasizing that only a small part of the vast sea of literature on this topic is considered here. And first of all - monographic studies. Articles on issues of interest to us, published in such journals as "Gender and History", "Journal of Family History", "Journal of Interdisciplinary History", not to mention the world-famous French "Annals" and German "History and Society", number in the dozens , if not hundreds.
There are far fewer works on the history of Russian motherhood. Perhaps the only book where the theme of motherhood turned out to be “cross-cutting” and passed through all eras, as it were, is the monographic work of J. Hubbs, which is quite pretentious both in terms of the choice and interpretation of sources (which was repeatedly noted in reviews of this book) . The research of this American author persistently emphasized Berdyaev’s idea of the “eternally feminine” in the Russian character and from this point of view (super-anti-feminist!) approached the characterization of certain aspects of elements of family relations typical for Russia, including, for example, “special strength "Mother-son love.
Other works by foreign specialists, on the contrary, were distinguished by their scrupulous elaboration of small and minute details of their chosen topics and high professionalism, but - as a rule - they concerned only a certain time period. Thus, speaking about the works of European and American medievalists, it is difficult to ignore the analytical studies of the American historian working with Russian penance books, editor-in-chief of the Russian Review magazine Eva Levina. The main topic This researcher has been studying the history of sexuality in the countries of the Orthodox faith for a long time, so she touched on the “maternal theme” precisely in the aspect of analyzing Old Slavonic church texts, in which motherhood was considered as the main antithesis of the sexual affectation of women. Approximately the same aspects of medieval motherhood were considered by her colleague and compatriot I. Tire, who has been studying - for several years now - the peculiarities of the life and spiritual life of Moscow queens. Very indirectly, the problems of motherhood were also touched upon by those who set the task of studying the status of the child in Ancient Rus' (M. Sheftel, A. Plakans).
Somewhat more research has been written - as is typical for world historiography in general - on the history of motherhood and, more broadly, parenthood in the 19th century. The most actively studied here were problems related to the history of medicine and obstetrics, as well as the history of street, unwanted, abandoned children. The most fundamental works on the latter issue - and, by the way, those that summarized the greatest amount of material on motherhood itself (albeit only on one of its aspects) - were written by D. Rensel, whose monograph “Mothers of Poverty” was a kind of “discovery of the topic” of motherhood for Russian studies . Another social pole is the relationship between mothers and children in the privileged classes of the 18th-19th centuries. - was reflected in the articles and book of J. Tovrov about the noble families of early industrial Russia.
The main sources of this American researcher were the memoirs and diaries of noblewomen of the Catherine, Pavlovian and Alexander eras, as well as literary works. The topic of the changed content of maternal education - according to the above sources - in - s. has become one of the favorite topics of foreign Slavists, both literary scholars and historians.
Finally, the pre-revolutionary period in the history of Russian motherhood, which turned out to be the least studied in the works of foreign specialists, is currently represented by single articles by A. Lindenmeir and B. Madison on the protection of the rights of working mothers and the significance in this sense of the city’s workers’ insurance law.
Against, Soviet period has always attracted the attention of foreign historians, sociologists and literary scholars. Suffice it to recall that even before the war and in the first post-war years Articles and monographs were published, the authors of which tried to understand and evaluate the uniqueness of the “Bolshevik experiment,” including in the field of family life. In this regard, it is gratifying to note E. Wood’s study “Baba and Comrade,” which was published quite recently. Although the book as a whole is devoted, rather, political history, there is also a section about Everyday life post-revolutionary years and gender transformations of the late 1980s and early 2000s. The researcher managed to treat the legal documents of the times without irony civil war, scrupulously analyze the works of prominent figures of the Bolshevik Party who addressed the topic of motherhood and considered this women’s duty “incomparable” with revolutionary duty, “individual rights” with the issue of “state expediency.”
Most often, motherhood (more precisely, the question of changing attitudes towards it) interested foreign authors precisely as part of the problem of “women's liberation”, the notorious “solution to the women's issue in the USSR”. Particular attention in this sense was drawn to the city’s notorious law banning abortions, and in general to Soviet legislation of the Stalin era, “usability”, the applicability of its articles to everyday life Soviet people pre-war and immediate post-war times. The use of “oral history” materials played a significant role in such studies: it was from the end of the ’s, and especially in the ’s, that foreign sociologists and historians had the opportunity to collect “field material”, oral interviews of Soviet women and build on the basis of such sources of research of a new type.
To a certain extent, a tribute to the fashion for psychoanalytic studies of childhood was a number of publications devoted to the “history of childhood” in Russia in the 20th century, the authors of which also addressed some aspects of mother-child relationships. A common feature of such studies was their obvious positivism, the absence of attempts to connect the collected historical facts With the latest concepts. Overcoming this shortcoming is a feature of the last decade. In addition, the lifting of prohibitions on topics previously discussed orally, but rarely considered scientifically, brought to the forefront researchers who began a comparative study of the life of people in totalitarian states. “Expanded” in a gender aspect, this topic was voiced, for example, in articles whose authors compared the status of women and mothers in Stalinist Russia and fascist Germany.
Thus, an analysis of foreign historiography of motherhood - both Russian and European - leaves no doubt that this topic is multifaceted, interdisciplinary and of interest to scientists from a variety of humanities specialties. However, not only for them.
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Chief Researcher, Head of the Sector for Ethnic and Gender Studies, President of the Russian Association of Women's History Researchers, Head of the Russian national committee at the International Federation of Women's History Researchers, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor
Scientific interests:
theory and methodology of gender studies, ethnology of the Russian family, gender, sexuality, history of the women's movement in Russia, history of Russian traditional life and everyday life, historiography. Having graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University in 1981 and graduate school at the Institute of Ethnography (now the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences), with Since 1987 he has been working at the institute.
PhD thesis:
“The position of women in the family and society of Ancient Rus'” was defended in 1985. Doctoral dissertation: - “Woman in the Russian family: dynamics sociocultural changes X - XIX centuries." in 1997
Since 2001 - Professor at the Department of Russian History (07.00.02)
The main result of the research work Pushkareva N.L. - recognition of the direction of gender studies and women's history (historical feminology) in domestic humanities.
Most of those written by Pushkareva N.L. books and articles are devoted to the history of women in Russia and Europe: Women of Ancient Rus' (1989, 21 pp.), Women of Russia and Europe on the threshold of the New Age (1996, 18 pp.), The private life of women in pre-industrial Russia. (X - early XIX century) (1997, 22 pp.), Russian woman: history and modernity (2002, 33.5 pp.), Gender theory and historical knowledge (2007, 21 pp.) The Association of American Slavists book by Pushkareva N.L. Women in Russian History from the 10th to the 20th Century (New York, 1997, 2nd ed. - 1998, 20 pp.) recommended as tutorial
at US universities.
In 1989, at the XVII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Madrid, Pushkareva N.L. was elected to the International Association of Women's History Researchers (IFIZHI) as a permanent representative - first from the USSR (now from Russia). Since 1997, she has been an expert at a number of foreign foundations and programs, including the VI program of the European Union “Integration and Strengthening the European Scientific Area (Brussels, 2002-2006), the Institute of Social and Gender Policy at the Open Society Foundation, the K. and J. Foundation. MacArthur, Canadian Foundation for Gender Equality.
Reading a course of lectures “Fundamentals of Gender Theory for Historians,” Pushkareva N.L. She taught at universities in the Russian Federation (in Tambov, Ivanovo, Tomsk, Kostroma, etc.), the CIS (in Kharkov, Minsk), as well as foreign ones (in Germany, France, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Hungary). Supervises graduate students and doctoral students. N.L. Pushkareva - Chief Editor electronic journal “Social History” (registered in the RSCI periodical Russian edition ). She is also a member of the editorial boards of such well-known peer-reviewed journals as “Woman in Russian society ”, “Historical psychology and sociology of history”, international yearbook “Aspasia. Yearbook of gender history" (Amsterdam), the magazine "Bulgarian Ethnology" (Sofia), the interdisciplinary yearbook "Gender Studies" (St. Petersburg), the anthology of gender history "Adam and Eve" (Moscow), the expert council of the editorial board book series
“Gender Studies” of the publishing house “Aletheia”, is on the editorial boards and editorial boards of several regional university Bulletins. N.L. Pushkareva is a member of the Interuniversity Scientific Council “Feminology and Gender Studies” from the first days of its creation. In 1996-1999 - Member of the Scientific Council of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, in 1997-2009 - Director of educational and scientific programs, co-organizer of the Russian summer schools
in Women's and Gender Studies. Member of the expert councils of the C. and J. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Foundation (Soros Foundation), the Canadian Foundation for Gender Equality, the editorial and publishing council of the Institute for Social and Gender Policy at the OLF. In 2017, N.L. Pushkareva was awarded by the American Association of Women in Slavic and East European Studies for her many years of dedicated work in creating scientific school
in Women's and Gender Studies.
Since 2002 N.L. Pushkareva heads the Russian Association of Women's History Researchers (RAIZHI, www.rarwh.ru) - a non-profit organization that unites everyone interested in the social role of sex and gender and is part of the International Federation of Women's History Researchers (IFRWH). RAIZHI holds regular conferences and brings together over 400 researchers of women's and gender history in more than 50 cities of the Russian Federation.
N.L. Pushkareva is the author of more than 530 scientific and over 150 popular science publications, including 11 monographs and two dozen collections of scientific articles, in which she acted as a compiler, responsible. editor, author of forewords. More than two hundred works by N.L. Pushkareva have been published in publications or are publications indexed by the RSCI, the number of citations is over 6000. Hirsch index - 41
Monographs and collections of articles:
1. Women of Ancient Rus'. M.: “Mysl”, 1989. 2. Russians: ethnoterritory, settlement, numbers, historical destinies
(XII-XX centuries). M.: IEA RAS, 1995 (co-authored with V.A. Alexandrov and I.V. Vlasova) 2nd edition: M.: IEA RAS, 1998.
