To what extent does ‘public man’ and ‘private woman’ still inform the present day gender arrangements in our four countries? A quick look at some statistics62 shows that women have definitely left the doll’s house in terms of education and work, but they are considered less valuable labour in terms of pay:
Work and
education Women in highereducation. Percentage of total Women in the labour market. Percentage of total Women working
part-time Women’s pay as% of men’s pay (average)
Russia 56% 48% ? (very few) 65%
Slovakia 50% 45% 9% 70%
Portugal 59% 45% 16% 76%
Denmark 56% 47% 18% 80%
We can also see changes in the private sphere, for example smaller households, fewer children, and more divorces than in the 19th century. There are new kinds of social rights and public services such as maternity leave and kindergartens in response to double income families. The variation between the countries is greater in these respects than in education and work. Denmark has the smallest households, latest childbirth (but highest fertility rate), and the best social conditions for working women. Fathers participate more in childcare and housework than in any of the other countries (see later chapters). In Russia, we find the earliest childbirth, the lowest fertility rate and the highest divorce rates:
62 The primary sources of statistics in this chapter are the United Nations’ database The Worlds’ Women 2000 and the databases of the World Bank. For Denmark and Portugal, additional information was found in national equality reports: Equality in Denmark (1999) and Portugal: Status of women (1999). For Slovakia and Russia, research assistants and colleagues helped me check national statistics. There are some inaccuracies in the statistics as they are drawn from different sources and the year or the categories may differ slightly. As they are only meant to provide a rough description of these dimensions in the various countries, I found them satisfactory for the purpose. Stein Terje Vikan at UNECE (United Nations’ Economic Commission for Europe) kindly checked the numbers, but was not able to verify all of them.
Family Household size Fertility rate Mother’s age: first child Maternity leave Kindergarten Divorces per 1000 inhabitants /100 marriages
Russia 2.8 1.2 23 1.5 years with
low pay, up to 3 years with no pay. Fathers can take leave but never do.
55% 0-5 years 5.2/74 Slovakia 2.9 1.3 24 28 weeks. Fathers or other relatives can take leave, fathers never do. 62% 3-6 years 1.8/35 Portugal 3.1 1.5 26 17 weeks. Under some circumstances, fathers can take 11 weeks.
35% app. 0-5 years
1.5/23
Denmark 2.1 1.8 30 52 weeks with
app. normal salary. 18 weeks are for the mother, the rest can be shared as the parents wish. In 2000, 58% of fathers took 2 weeks or more. 48% 0-2 years 83% 3-6 years 2.8/37
The biggest difference among the countries concerns women’s participation in politics. In this respect, Denmark stands out while, in the other countries, the political sphere still appears to belong to men:
Politics Women in parliament Women in government
Russia 10% 8% – Moscow region63 15% 10% – Bashkortostan 4% 0 Slovakia 15% 13% Portugal 17% 12% Denmark 39% 28%
The figures show that the preferences for equality models or complementarity models mirror the situation in the countries to a certain degree, especially when it comes to family life and political participation. In Russia, Slovakia and Portugal, women have gained access to some parts of the public sphere (work and education), but are otherwise defined primarily through their family role. In Denmark the split between public and private is increasingly detached from gender dualism.
However, the different historical developments since the gender order of the 19th century and the presence of feminist movements in these countries also inform today’s understanding of what gender equality and gender complementarity are all about.
Concerning Russia, historians seem to agree that the Enlightenment ideas of individualism, rationalism, democracy and human rights had less impact here than in Western Europe, although the ideas were espoused by members of the Russian intelligentsia who, in the 19th century, saw themselves as part of European culture. Russian authors, for instance, were inspired by the French Revolution and the new ideas of equal rights for women.64 The transition from old gender orders to ‘equality’ was rather abrupt in Russia. It took place after the 1917 revolution, within a Marxist framework of interpretation in which individual freedom was considered detrimental to equality. Women’s emancipation was only seen in terms of their economic position: ‘that puts women – as a labour force – on an equal footing with men’. 65 A social and cultural approach to women’s situation was seen as a bourgeois distortion of the ‘woman question’. Thus, the norm of employed mothers was a fact in the Soviet Union several decades earlier than in other industrialised countries, but within a framework in which there was no personal or political freedom. Thus, in the Russian context, equality in fact came to mean ‘sameness’, not ‘equal rights’. By the fall of Communism in 1989, exhausted Russian women longed for the lifestyle of ‘private women’, difference and gender complementarity!
In the other three countries, a suffragette movement arose in the first decades of the 20th century, but with very different fates. In Slovakia, women obtained the right to vote before the Communist takeover in 1948 exposed them to the same Marxist version of gender equality as in the Soviet Union. It has been estimated that Eastern European women work approximately 15 hours more per week than their counterpart in the West.66 In contrast, in Portugal, the
dictatorship reinstated an extreme version of ‘public man’ and ‘private woman’ as of 1926 and kept this anachronistic order alive until the Carnation Coup in 1974. In Denmark, women obtained the right to vote in 1915 and also gained access to work and higher education. However, the norm of ‘public man’ and ‘private woman’ prevailed until after WWII.
The second feminist movement that arose in the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s gave voice to severe criticism of the negative effects of the complementary gender model and argued that the cultural appraisal of ‘the feminine mystique’67 was only a patriarchal polish covering women’s unpaid work, economic dependency and sexual exploitation. Thus, since the 1960s, the majority of Danish women have rejected the complementary family model of the housewife- breadwinner. They have chosen paid work and see social rights and men’s contribution to the household as important elements in their concept of ‘equality’. However, a further difference between Denmark and the other countries is that for different reasons (which will be further discussed in later chapters), the mother figure seems to have been - and still is - more culturally valued in Russia, Slovakia and Portugal. A strong ‘private woman’ is, of course, a better choice than a weak one, thus the advantages of giving up female power in the family in order to claim a position in the public sphere may seem less obvious.
With such different histories and experiences of what it implies to be defined as ‘different’ or ‘equal’, it is not surprising that the project participants found it difficult to understand each other’s perspective. Each party may easily project their own recent history onto the other. For instance, from the Russian perspective, the Danish equality model may be seen as a return to the hard work and the purist norms of the Soviet Union. No wonder the Russian women yearn to be weak and feminine. And behind this coquetry they still hold their powerful family role. From the Danish perspective, the Russian idealisation of gender complementarity and feminine appearance seems like reinventing ‘the feminine mystique’, which modern Western feminism has criticised since the early 1960s. Nordic women certainly do not want to return to the restricted gender roles in which a woman’s greatest asset was her competence as a housewife, and a young girl’s greatest asset was her charm and appearance. It looks like both parties are heading towards the past of the other! In such a projection, however, one can overlook some important aspects. The Russian women’s longing for beauty and a more relaxed life is not
64 Aivazova, S. (1994). Feminism in Russia: Debates from the Past. Women in Russia. A. Posadskaya. London, Verso. This work mentions, for instance, the positive attitude to feminism of the great Russian author Alexander Pushkin, and the lively debates that took place later, in the 1860s, among leading authors about women’s rights.
65 Alexandra Kollontaj, quoted in Ibid. p.160.
66 UNICEF 1999, cited in Haukanes, H. (2001). "Anthropological debates on gender and the post-communist transformation." NORA 9(1): 5-20.
equivalent to the 1950s housewife era in the Western world. In addition to the stronger position in the family, the level of education as well as the fact that Russian and Slovak women did not give up their paid work after 1989 indicate a much more developed work identity than was ever the case in the 1950s in Western Europe. The Danish women’s wish to be economically
independent and their rejection of stereotypical femininity, on the other hand, is not a rejection of beauty and the good life, but a wish for more individuality, personal choice and more
multifaceted gender relationships. This also includes the right to be a sexual subject, not only the prey. In the postmodern era68 identities have become more plural and are increasingly seen as a play with gestures and expressions, more than a representation of a personal and
psychological essence. This also applies to gender.