Of the various “female” physiological functions, childbirth was the one most directly related to the double burden. A woman without children did not really have a double burden yet. A sudden increase in a woman’s tasks came with the birth of her first child. As Iankova pointed out, although a wife’s household burdens multiplied enormously at this stage, the husband’s schedule changed relatively little.134
The Double Burden and Masochism
Who imposed the double burden on Soviet women? To speak merely of “dual roles” is to avoid the question of who assigned or accepted those roles.
Generally there was a reluctance to blame anyone personally, including the women who took on the double burden. Rather, it was the fault of the “system,” as in this statement by Leningrad feminist Ekaterina Aleksandrova: “by attracting women to the work place and simultaneously preserving the traditional family, the system deliberately condemned women to dual exploitation, at home and at work.”135 Just how a “system” might “deliberately condemn” women to their double burden is a personification that Aleksandrova does not explain. Later in her paper she blames the “superpatriarchy” created by the Soviet government.
In similar fashion Bonnie Marshall says: “Unfortunately, the women interviewed [in a book about Soviet women] have been programmed by the society to which they belong, so that they take part in their own denigration.” Here “society” is the victimizer, although Marshall is granting that women participated in their victimization as well. Indeed, women even thrived under the patriarchy that oppressed them: “As second class citizens within a patriarchy, women have become accustomed to bad treatment. They have learned to deal with oppression and to thrive under it. Their spirits fail to wither.”136 The women Marshall refers to seem almost proud of what they endure. This comes very close to what psychoanalyst Charles Sarnoff calls “masochistic braggadocio.”137
One of the effects of women’s willingness to work so hard at household-related chores was that men profited in the workplace. Lapidus says: “By freeing males from the performance of routine household and child-care chores, which would otherwise divert time and energy from educational, professional, and political pursuits, women workers in effect advance the occupational mobility of males at the cost of their own.”138 The phrasing here suggests that women were the agents of the behavior which ended up defeating them (“women workers… advance”), that is, they were not forced by men to do what they did. In other words, women engaged in self-defeating behavior, behavior which is masochistic by definition.
Commenting on some of the available statistics, feminist demographer Jo Peers said: “Women’s huge contribution to Soviet power, both in the workforce and in servicing the population at home, brings her unequal rewards in terms of money, time, status and political power.” The Soviet man, meantime, gained greater rewards while remaining “a relative parasite within the home.”139 Again, to look at the language: one who “services” a “parasite” would seem to be someone who is very close to a willing slave.
How did Soviet women feel about their double burden? They certainly noticed it, and many admitted to feeling oppressed by it. To the question of whether it was easy to combine professional and family roles addressed to a group of Moscow working women, 10 percent said “It is very hard,” 10 percent said “It is hard,” and 52 percent said “It is bearable”140—which is to say that a total of 72 percent of the women questioned recognized the difficulty of their double task. In another sample, roughly half to two-thirds of working mothers reported feeling “extremely tired” toward the end of a work day, depending on how many children they had.141
Today these figures would no doubt be larger, given the economic deterioration that has been going on in what used to be the Soviet Union. One estimate has it that, whereas a few years ago women had to stand in line for basic goods an average of ninety minutes per day, more recently they have to stand in line for three hours per day.142 And of course it is primarily women who stand in line. As Kuznetsova points out, the only line in which men predominate is the line for vodka.143
Yet, until rather recently, women have been reluctant to complain about their unfair lot. Old-fashioned smirenie prevailed. True, some resentment was expressed in the Soviet press, even in those media aimed at rural women, that is, at women who had traditionally been most accepting of traditional values.144 But, by Western standards, Soviet Russian women were very accepting of their lot, their sud’ba or dolia. For example, a woman’s marital satisfaction was only very weakly correlated with the extent of her husband’s participation in everyday household activities, according to S. I. Golod’s survey of 500 Leningrad couples.145 In a sample of 1,343 married Moscow women with two children, 85.3 percent actually approved of the extent of their husbands’ participation in shopping, 74.8 percent approved of their husbands’ participation in cooking and washing dishes, and 85.9 percent approved of their husbands’ participation in taking care of the children (from these and similar data Viktor Sysenko drew the entirely fallacious conclusion that urban men were rather active in domestic work).146
Speaking of a group of women interviewed in Moscow in 1978, Carola Hansson and Karen Lidén say this:
Even if the women rarely explained why their situation was unfair, they agreed, almost without exception, that it was. But when we looked for the desire for change, suggestions for solutions, a unified stand among women and a fighting spirit—what did we find? Almost none of these. It may seem callous to ask for struggle and protest in a country where the opportunities for such action are so much more restricted than in ours. But we seldom found even indignation.147
“Their attitude was one of resignation,” the authors add. The most common approach these women took to their double burden was “being able to endure.”
The relevant Russian word here is “terpenie” (patience). Soviet opera singer Galina Vishnevskaia, after living abroad for some years, observed: “No other woman in the world would agree [soglasilas’ by] to live the way our Russian women live. Endless patience [beskonechnoe terpenie] and endurance for dragging everything on to oneself and still, if necessary, forgetting and forgiving everything—that’s what a Russian woman is!”148
“Terpenie” has always been an important lexical item in the mind of the Russian masochist. Tsarist censor and former serf Aleksandr Nikitenko once wrote: “Patience, patience, patience. Wisdom is patience [Mudrost’ est’ terpenie]. There is no evil which people cannot bear. It’s all a matter of getting used to it.”149
A curiously positive attitude toward the double burden was sometimes expressed: “Of course we’re grossly overburdened,” said one Soviet woman interviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray. “But we’re so used to it we wouldn’t give it up for the world. We take such pride in surviving it.”150 This declaration falls, again, into the category of masochistic braggadocio. Gray quotes a proverb that captures this attitude very welclass="underline" “Women can do everything; men can do the rest.”151 Here the very servitude of women is flaunted as omnipotence. There is a slightly sadistic jab at men, but men can appreciate the joke too. Both men and women can smile at this proverb because, from an ontogenetic viewpoint, it allows them to access the threatening memory of the mother’s omnipotence, while at the same time canceling that memory with the reality of the mother’s slavery.