Olga, the protagonist of Natal’ia Baranskaia’s insightful novella A Week Like Any Other (1969) is repeatedly late for work, does not get enough work done when she is at work, is reprimanded by her boss, is scolded by her colleagues, etc. All this makes her feel guilty, but she feels even more guilty about the fact that she sometimes neglects her children in order to accommodate work demands. At a political training session she cannot contain her frustration and declares: “I have a degree in chemical engineering, I love my work, I want to work better. But I feel sorry for the children.” The next day, even while apologizing to her colleagues for making life difficult for them, she cannot stop thinking about her children: “A mysli moi v’iutsia vokrug rebiat.”204 She is especially upset that her sick daughter is in daycare that day when she should really be at home—but then she would have to be at home to look after the child.
The novella ends with Olga waking up in the middle of the night in a state of inexplicable anxiety. She goes to her two peacefully sleeping children, rearranges the bedding, strokes their little heads. Everything is quiet. She does not know why she is anxious: “Chto zhe trevozhit menia?”
This is a serious question. It indicates anxiety and guilt. Such feelings are the lot of mothers everywhere. A child, from a Darwinian viewpoint, is a guilt-inducing machine. This is one way the child elicits the altruism it requires to survive. When a mother, for whatever reason, withholds care and attention from the child, she may be expected to feel even more guilty than usual. Working full-time outside of the domestic sphere is one way, from the (especially preschool) child’s viewpoint, to withhold care and attention. A sensitive mother cannot avoid feeling guilt in such a situation (this is quite apart from the ideological question of whether mothers should or should not enter the workplace).
What is of psychoanalytic consequence is this: holding down a full-time job outside of the home is difficult, especially if one continues to do the majority of domestic chores as well. This difficulty, however, is itself quite handy, for it can make one feel virtuous, that is, it can assuage the guilt felt about withholding care from the children (and from the childlike spouse). It would thus appear that the extradomestic burden carried by Soviet (and now many post-Soviet) women represents not only an increase in needed financial resources, and not only an enhancer of self-esteem, but is also a means of expiating the very guilt it produces. Much of the “tension” and “strain” reported in the literature on the double burden points to the ever-changing psychological dialectic between guilt and punishment.
As we saw above, Soviet women who bore the double burden tended to approve of the extent of the involvement of their husbands in domestic work (Baranskaia’s Olga rebels, but only briefly and superficially). Yet we also saw that these women recognized the inequality, even the unfairness of their situation. If, then, they were not blaming their husbands, who were they blaming? Who, indeed, if not themselves?
Women who accepted the double burden accepted responsibility for what they were doing. They were not, in fact, responsible, or at least were only partially responsible, because their husbands were responsible as well. Yet still they accepted the responsibility for themselves, and this acceptance was an ongoing act of masochism. Every woman who accepted her double burden was reasoning as Dmitrii Karamazov did when he accepted Siberia on behalf of others, for the “babe.”
An overworked Soviet woman interviewed by Hansson and Lidén declared: “I’m a disgusting mother! I bring up my son on the run.” This is very typical. Obviously this mother felt guilty, yet she managed also to relieve herself of guilt:
Naturally, a good mother has to take care of her baby, take it out for walks and make sure it develops physically. But she should also give the child moral guidance—a feeling that life has a spiritual dimension. A mother who is concerned only with the child’s health and safety is not a good mother. Of course she has to be a social being as well—she has to suffer the sorrows of her people. Then her child will turn out well. I’m quite convinced of that.205
This is a marvelous example of magical thinking. As long as the mother suffers in some way, then the child will somehow be alright. In this particular case the mother has to “suffer the sorrows of her people,” which is a very Russian way of describing a mother’s double burden (see the discussion below on masochism and the collective).
Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Developments
Toward the end of the Soviet period there were growing indications of resistance to suffering on the part of Soviet women (these began to appear well before the onset of political and economic deterioration in the late 1980s). For example, nearly a quarter of the women in a Moscow sample disapproved of the extent of their husbands’ participation in housework.206 Some studies indicated a correlation of marital instability with unfair workload on the wife.207 Attwood, basing herself on statistics provided by Larisa Kuznetsova, asked a quite sensible rhetorical question: “If women are naturally so suited to family life, why is it that they initiate 70 to 80 percent of divorces, and are much less inclined than men to risk marriage a second time?”208 Again, to supply a psychoanalytic answer to the kind of rhetorical question that feminists so often ask: many women were divorcing their men because they were beginning to understand how self-destructive and self-defeating, that is, how masochistic it would have been to remain with them.
In particular, some Soviet women were coming to understand how undesirable life with an alcoholic could be: male alcoholism was the single most important cause of divorce in the late Soviet period.209 The overworked woman who tolerated an idle husband was less likely to tolerate him when he became a violent drunkard as well.
One of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Moscow women nicely summed up the reasons for getting rid of a man: “Any young woman in her right mind is better off living alone with her child than sitting home with a man who constrains her by never wanting to go out anywhere, and doesn’t lift a finger at home, and creates scandals with his drinking…. Why should any woman be stuck with two children?”210
This latter image of the husband as a mere child occurred again and again in the literature on gender roles in late Soviet Russia.211 The popular media in the late Soviet period also presented images of the husband as a child.212 The phrase “infantile husbands” became a commonplace.213 Even when the husband was present in the family, he was often absent as an active, responsible adult. He became, in effect, a child in the Russian matrifocal world.
Many late Soviet women explicitly rejected traditional female masochism: “At last we’re fed up with being martyrs and heroines, we want fairness, justice,” said one Leningrad woman interviewed by Gray.214 Irma Mamaladze declared that, “in a society of equal responsibilities women are not up to sacrificiality, compliance, and softness.”215 Women were rightly throwing away their “traditional virtues.” They became tougher, more authoritarian even (“avtoritarnee”), but men should not be intimidated by this, she said.
There were also calls to subsidize women’s household labor in some way. One idea was to allow women more time at home for childbearing and childrearing, without cutting their pay.216 The idea of part-time employment (for women, not men!) also became attractive,217 although women’s employers were usually reluctant to make the necessary adjustments.