Vera Dunham, in her very interesting article on the “strong-woman motif” in Russian literature, demonstrates that literary works of the Soviet period reflect these concerns:
The woman’s success must not threaten the male ego. She saved the economy of the country during the war. However, her armor had to be laid down when the man returned. She did not always have to give up her status-gratifying job, but her attitude had to become more humble. In this double posture, she spurs him on should he show a trace of indolence. He must do the same for her. But here, the woman more than the man must know where to stop. The woman must keep deciding between occupational drives and sacrifices for the sake of mellowing marital strains.171
Whether it was in the lyrics of Margarita Aliger, or the postwar kolkhoz prose of Grigory Medynsky, Sergei Voronin, and others, the wife was the one who had to make the “sacrifices.” And the ultimate “sacrifice,” the one a husband was physically incapable of making, was to bear children. Dunham quotes the words of a high-ranking agronomist to her underling husband in a 1950 story by Yuri Kapusto: “Come along, help me out, catch up. I can’t be the boss forever. I’ll be having children.”172
A Soviet Russian man who wished to have power in the family was not inclined to take on household tasks that had been traditionally performed by women. In my opinion this was not so much due to the actual energetic expenditure that would have been required by such labor as to the meaning such labor had in the Russian cultural context.
In Russia domestic labor such as cleaning and cooking is semiotically loaded. It signifies femininity and low status. It is therefore a threat to masculinity and to male authority within the family. A traditional Russian man feels that it is beneath his dignity to cook and clean and shop: “a man often feels embarrassed to do household or household-related chores,” said one woman interviewed in Moscow.173 Both men and women tend to say that such work is for the “weak,” and a man is supposed to be “strong”—not merely in the physical sense (for, again, then he could perfectly well do the work), but in the sense of having power and responsibility, that is, in what some Soviet Russian commentators called the moral (“nravstvennyi”) sense.174
It is one thing for the “strong” man to cede his seat in the metro to a pregnant woman. It is quite another to cook and clean. When the Russian husband does housework, it is typically a grudging service, almost enslavement to his wife. One male respondent, who regarded liberated Soviet women as “cowboys,” wrote in Literaturnaia gazeta that “many self-respecting men do not aspire to absolute rule in the family, but the role of the wife’s orderly [rol’ denshchikov pri suprugakh] does not suit them either.”175
Zoia Iankova says that, although women should not be restricted to the domestic role, they are nonetheless in danger of becoming overly masculinized if they begin to think that equality with men means being identical to them: “…women… become coarse [grubeiut] and acquire masculine patterns of behavior [muzhskie manery povedeniia], including masculine patterns of resolving family conflicts. They lose a preference for the kind of domestic behavior and interpersonal relations that has been tested by the centuries.”176
The modern Soviet woman became a serious threat to the traditional Russian male ego. In one study of two hundred Leningraders the majority of both male and female respondents agreed that “masculinization” and a “domineering effect” (“effekt dominirovaniia”) could be observed in women employed in the workforce.177
Igor’ Kon, in his article on the “masculinization of women” and the “feminization of men” which took place in the wake of massive participation by women in the Soviet workforce, pointed to the “style of thinking, self-assurance, manner of conduct, smoking, etc.” which became more common in women.178 Actress Larisa Malevannaia, attempting to explain why Soviet men were having a hard time finding wives, said, “We’re all the same—trousers, boots, cigarettes, a profession.”179 The pedagogues A. G. Khripkova and D. V. Kolesov said that smoking, loud speech, and other behaviors perceived as masculine were appropriate for women who sought a merely comradely relationship with men, but that such behaviors were harmful to love and marriage.180 The playwright Leonid Zhukhovitskii, in a feisty article that asked “Where are the real men disappearing to?” said that a “strong” wife injures a man’s self-esteem (and that a woman really “wants to be weak” anyway).181
One of the most intimidating “strengths” of the modern Soviet woman was financial. A female respondent to Zhukhovitskii’s article, after describing how she bent over backwards to please her recently alcoholic husband, mentioned in passing that her salary is nearly twice her husband’s.182 Tamara Afanas’eva wrote: “The title of family breadwinner—an honourable and responsible title—has always helped the man to realize his significance and his essentialness to the people closest to him. Without this role the very earth slips from beneath his feet.”183 The traditional male role of father-provider (“otets-kormilets”) would not die easily.
The Soviet Russian male did not just want to dominate. He also wanted to be in a position to render altruism to a woman and her offspring. When he was displaced from this position he felt threatened. Kon says: “However offensive this may be to the strong and proud sex, the man, no longer the sole provider and regulator of the family budget, is falling more and more under the influence of the woman [vse bol’she podpadaet pod vliianie zhenshchiny].”184
I emphasize the original Russian of the final clause here because it is so suggestive of the traditional Russian fear of dominance by a woman, for example, “He is under her shoe” (“On pod bashmakom u nee”), roughly equivalent to English “She wears the pants in the family.” Compare Zhukhovitskii’s vocabulary of degradation: “After a series of fights, and having with difficulty driven her spouse under her heel [zagnav supruga pod kabluk], a woman suddenly and with despair and irritation realizes that she is the wife of a wimp [osoznaet sebia zhenoi podkabluchnika].”185 Unfortunately, even the English word “wimp” cannot begin to convey the contempt a “real man” feels toward a husband who has turned into a “podkabluchnik,” literally, “one under the heel.”
Arkadii Vaksberg, offended by a call for greater participation of men in domestic labor, believed that men should not be mobilized to “wash floors” (“mobilizuia muzhchin na myt’e polov”). According to Vaksberg, “The emancipation [raskreposhchenie] of the woman from housework is not achieved by the ‘enserfment [zakreposhcheniem] of the man.’”186 N. G. Iurkevich quite justifiably criticized Vaksberg for reacting this way, asserting that it would be a long time before labor-saving devices were sufficiently developed to help Soviet women in their domestic work, and that men should therefore not sit idly by but do their fair share of work in the household too.187 But Vaksberg’s reaction was nonetheless indicative of typical masculine feelings: participation in domestic labor was not only a form of slavery, it was somehow “low”, on the level of the very floor which had to be washed.
There was something distinctly sexual in the humiliation a man could feel before a powerful woman. Literary scholar Vera Dunham, referring to passages in Soviet prose works from the 1940s, says that “it does not seem right that the man be emasculated”; “She offers to support his research out of her own savings. He stands up to this castrating assault.”188