Do Russian women want to work?

Abstract

From the very beginning of change in the Soviet Union it was predicted that economic and political reforms would have a significant impact on women. In particular, there was an expectation that unemployment would be an inevitable consequence of restructuring, and that women would be the worst afflicted by this: ‘that unemployment was primarily a female problem became practically a universally accepted point of view in Russian society from the moment when unemployment was legalised in July 1991’. With the threat of mass unemployment, the negative aspects of women's work received more and more attention in the media and policy-making circles. This change in emphasis partly reflected a wish to protect men from unemployment and was also seen as socially desirable in itself. The Russian commentator Larissa Lissyutkina, for example, has argued that ‘emancipation for Soviet women is not based upon a demand to work. On the contrary, liberation is perceived by many as the right not to work.’ It also seemed that a reduction of women's employment would make economic sense, since the cost of social provision for women, such as maternity leave and child care, is said to make ‘the female labour force an extremely unattractive proposition for employers’. A logical answer to the great problem of economic reform – mass unemployment – therefore seemed to be that, instead of attempting to combine several roles, women should be allowed to fulfil their biological destiny as wives and mothers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.