Guestblog: Russian working mums

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Love it or hate it, but such is our culture formed under the influence of the years of “socialism” followed by “perestroyka” or whatever it’s called now: most women here do work. Married or unmarried, mums or not – the society expects us to work, just as it expects us to be equal to men in any other way – except, that is, the house work, which remains, largely, our exclusive duty.

Equality of sexes was one of the slogans with which the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, and while eliminating illiteracy in the following years, they paid equal attention to both men and women. Probably, even more to women, since they suffered more from illiteracy during the days when Russia was a monarchy. Pre-revolution Russia was a more or less traditional society, where women were expected to stay at home raising kids while men were bread-winners, and education was considered less important to women than to men. Of course, all this varied from one class to another, but the overall situation more or less resembled that in the contemporary England, France or Germany.

Industrialisation of the 30^s changed things entirely. Women driving trains and buses; women replacing their husbands at the factories during the WWII; later, woman going into space in a spaceship – all this has made feminism in Russia an unnecessary attribute. When I went to college, the girl/guy ratio on our faculty was about 5 to 1, and I studied math! It’s very similar in our medical colleges, while our guys mainly prefer physics, law and polytechnic education. The only sphere where equality never penetrated was our domestic life.

A woman coming home exhausted after a full-time working day is still expected to cook, clean, put a plate on the table in front of her husband, check the school homework done by her kids – you name it. Not that husbands never help – some do and some don’t, but that depends entirely on their own choice. Those who believe that it not the men’s job to do all these things, never will.

I’m one of the luckiest women on the Earth, I believe, because my husband helps me a lot and makes no bones about it. But he is still in the minority, and he tells me that most of his friends “don’t understand” him. What drives me most exasperated is that many women actually accept and even like it this way, and bring up their daughters to be slaves and their sons to be masters. Meaning that we – the women – should mainly blame ourselves for the situation.

Our maternity leave is probably the longest in the world: it lasts three years. The downside? The employers don’t want to employ young women, because they don’t want to have to deal with their maternity leave. Another drawback is that while the husband is the only bread-winner in the family, it’s rather tough to make ends meet. Of course, every mum can go back to work before her three years are over (I went after two years), but it doesn’t solve all the problems.

Various nurseries, kindergartens and the opportunity for kids to stay at school after the lessons are over, if their parents pay for it, definitely help. But the common story is that as soon as the child enters a kindergarten for the first time, he or she starts catching every cold virus within five kilometres, so the mum has to take leave from work over an over again, and her employer goes around all gloom and doom, never missing an opportunity to chew her out.

A lot of help comes from grandmothers. A traditional Russian Granny standing near the oven with a frying pan making pancakes for her grandkids is an image dear to the heart of every Russian, but this is changing rapidly too – the fashion of the recent years telling us all that we should imitate the western ways in everything. More and more grandmothers refuse to have anything to do with their grandkids and prefer to go to work (an old-age pension is a good thing, but a pension + a salary is twice as good) or live “for themselves”. Consequently, a new class of non-working mums is starting to form, especially in the regions where salaries, on average, are higher, and the father can alone provide for the family. Still, such families are relatively rare.

In some regions – mainly those where Islam traditionally dominates – the situation is quite different. While an ethnically Russian family typically has one or two children (and I guess all I wrote above explains that), in Dagestan it’s more likely to see a family with five or six kids, and their mum, most often, will be one of those housewives who stay at home. No wonder – combining such a family with work is tough anyway, and the traditions play their role too. But I don’t know much about those regions, having lived all my life in the predominantly Slavic Saratov oblast. Here, most women still multitask, and I’m one of them.

Irina

Irina Ponomareva has several blogs and her blog about life, work and news in Saratov, Russia can be found here.

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