The aspect of the double burden which Soviet women considered to be the most difficult was routine domestic labor such as cleaning, washing, and cooking. One despairing woman interviewed in Moscow said that “housework will continue to impede and hinder women’s progress for the next hundred years.”152
Yet, however much women claimed to dislike this work, they still did it (if the statistics are to be believed). As Zoia Iankova emphasizes, women took on even their difficult tasks voluntarily: “The Soviet woman’s choice of activities is made freely, consciously, on the basis of her internal motives and needs.”153 There is of course no explicit discussion of whether any of the motives and needs in question were masochistic in nature. But the expression this sociologist uses to describe a woman’s domestic chores is psychologically revealing: “domashnii trud po obsluzhivaniiu sem’i,” literally, “domestic labor for servicing the family.”154 The somewhat slavish overtone in Iankova’s oft-repeated “obsluzhivanie” (servicing) is evidently intended, for at one point she quotes Lenin’s writings of 1919 on the topic: “housekeeping is, in the majority of cases, the most unproductive, the most preposterous [samim dikim] and the most onerous work [samim tiazhkim trudom] that a woman performs.”155 “A woman continues to remain a domestic slave [domashnei rabynei], despite all the emancipating laws, for trivial housekeeping tasks press upon her, stifle her, stupefy and humiliate her.”156 Lenin complained that not enough efforts had been made in the new Soviet Russia to release women from their “condition of a domestic slave.”157 The expressions “domestic slave” (“domashniaia rabynia”) and “domestic slavery” (“domashnee rabstvo”) seem to have been favorites of Lenin’s.158 Such words were of course spoken by a connoisseur of Russian slave soul. Lenin seems, however, to have gotten his idea from Friedrich Engels, who had expounded on “the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife” which supposedly characterized the bourgeois family.159
A woman interviewed in the late 1970s in Moscow declared that “some way has to be found to lighten women’s household tasks.” Yet this same woman passively accepted her husband’s idleness:
Of course my husband has more free time. After dinner when I’m busy with the baby and other things he sits and reads and rests. But we never argue about that. Since I have to take care of the baby I might as well do the other chores as well.160
From a Western viewpoint this admission reads somewhat like a Jewish mother joke. But it is no joke at all. It is a factual description of a Russian woman’s masochistic attitude. A similar attitude was expressed by the wife of a Stakhanovite fitter in 1936:
I help my husband in every possible way. I try to be cheerful and do not make him worry about taking care of the home. I assume most of the chores myself. At the same time I try to help my husband by advising him.161
In this case the husband was no idler, but an accomplished shock worker. For the husband to sacrifice himself to the state, however, does not lessen the sacrifice the woman was herself making to the husband.
The increased participation of women in the workforce during the Soviet period clearly was not matched by an increased contribution of men in the domestic area. The sociologist N. G. Iurkevich expressed some indignation at this state of affairs:
If women had remained within the family, in order to produce the same quantity of material wealth it would have been necessary for men to work almost twice as much. From this point of view it is possible to say that women liberated men from half of their heavy work. Why, then, should some men not wish, in their turn, to take upon themselves half of “light” women’s work?162
A possible answer: because men are not as masochistic as women. I am sure that Iurkevich would not have anticipated such an answer to what was no doubt intended as merely a rhetorical question (the rhetoric being accomplished with a gentle laugh at men’s alleged physical prowess). But the very possibility of lesser masochism of men in the relations between the sexes (or its logical equivalent, greater masochism of women in such relations) was never given serious consideration by either Soviet or Western scholars.
To characterize Soviet Russian women as masochistic because they, for the most part, accepted their double burden, is not to deny that other factors contributed to their double burden. At the economic level, a history of labor shortages in the Soviet Union has to be taken into account. At the ideological level, there was an ongoing double glorification, as it were, of female participation in the workforce and heroism in the domestic sphere, pushing every Soviet woman to be a super-woman.163 And of course feminist scholars have pointed to the sexist male psyche.
The Male Ego and the Male Organ
Russian women have always understood the potentially harmful consequences of undermining male authority. Much of Russian female masochism is in the service of pampering the Russian male ego, and this pampering, in turn, can help elicit altruism from the man who is likely to be the biological father of a woman’s children. For a variety of reasons—all of them ultimately deriving from an underlying biological-Darwinian cause—the normal heterosexual woman anywhere does not want to be a single mother.164 Even Murphy Brown would like to have a good man. The majority of adults in Russia, as everywhere else, are married. Other things being equal, the woman who receives assistance in rearing offspring will be more successful at replicating genes than the woman who does not.
Assuming that the stability of a marriage is worth something to a woman, it should not be altogether surprising that she takes steps aimed at maintaining that stability. One step she can take is to avoid attempting to put constraints on her husband’s freedom of action and independence (one Leningrad study showed that men are significantly more likely to value freedom of action than women).165 Another step a woman can take is to avoid being dominant. Iankova found that women were dominant (i.e., made the major decisions and acted as head of the family) in 33.3 percent of the unstable marriages in a Moscow sample, but that they were dominant in only 7.4 percent of the most stable marriages.166 Iankova also found that 75 percent of marital conflicts broke out in families where the wife was the “leader.”167 Psychologist Valerii Maksimenko found that, in “families in crisis” in Soviet urban areas, it was usually the wife who held the purse strings.168
Male, not female dominance was considered the norm, especially by men. The typical Soviet Russian male, although he may not have been the despot that ruled the pre-Bolshevik extended peasant family, liked to think that he was in charge of his wife and children. He may not in fact have been in charge, and there may have been real equality, or division of authority into various spheres of action. But his sense of moral authority (“vlast’,” “glavenstvo”) in the family was important to him.169 As a result, Soviet women often found themselves walking what Susan Allott called “the tightrope between their own self-respect and the demands of the male ego.”170