Looking for the roots of Estonian feminism: the Soviet Chapter
by Piret Karro
Translated by Keiu Krikmann
Olga is 26 years old. She has two children and a husband, Dima. Together, they live in a three-room 34 m2 flat in a new residential in Moscow. Olga works in a polymer laboratory, Miwhere new composition fiberglass is being developed. She is a junior researcher and in 1968, she has missed 78 days of work, because she had to stay at home when her children were ill. Flu, common cold, chickenpox. Olga really loves her job. She also loves weekends, when she can rest and dedicate herself to her family. On Saturday mornings a little after eight, she makes breakfast, then sends children outside with their father, makes soup, dusts the flat, washes the floors, airs out all blankets, sorts out dirty laundry, leaves hers and her husband's laundry to soak, folds a few loads to be taken to the laundrette, children's laundry will be taken care of on Sundays. She puts cutlet meat through the meat grinder, washes and boils plums for compot, peels potatoes. Lunch at three. After the younger child is put to sleep, she cleans the stove and the burners, cleans out the dishrack, waxes the floors... and gets back to the laundry still soaking, washes herself and mends her underwear. Dima is tasked with taking the children outside and going to the laundrette. In the evening when Olga is bathing the children before sleep time, she calls out to her husband to take their daughter to bed from the bathroom, he replies: “Enough for today, eh? I want to read too“.
Natalya Baranskaya's short story “A week like any other” (1970) describes the everyday of a Soviet woman. The writer skilfully shows what the term second shift means, often used to describe the reality of Soviet women. At the time, the employment rate of women was many times higher than in the West. This is an example of how the experience of women living in the Soviet Union was significantly different from that of women in Western Europe and Nothern America. Which is why the Western approach to feminism cannot be applied to the former Soviet bloc in the same way. When Betty Friedan published “The feminine mystique” (1963) that became a seminal text for the so-called second wave of feminism, the first Estonian female tractor driver and combine harvester operator Elmina Otsman had already received the Socialist Work Hero Golden Star Award (1958). In Eastern Europe, women could be doctors, architects, film directors, writers and members of the Supreme Soviet legislative body.
Yet, the gendered expectations to women were still very much present. Although during state socialism, formally gender equality was established – comrades! – the expectation that women take on most of the housework, like cleaning, caring for children and cooking had not dissipated. As more families moved from farms to centrally heated flats in cities, tasks that were traditionally considered men's jobs decreased. And so, after every work day women started a second shift at home. In her brief afterword, Branskaya confesses: “I write less than I would like and would be capable of, as I am once again short on time. Now I must help my daughter. My grandchild goes to kindergarten but... what it all looks like, is described in my short story “A week like any other””.
Since in its rhetoric the Soviet Union supported gender equality and workers, women needed to be directed to professions traditionally dominated by men, such as tractor drivers, machine technicians, architects, film directors, ministers. This policy, partly a propaganda move, allowed many women to realise their ambitions creatively and professionally in the Soviet Union. There are several women artists working in the late Soviet period who have created works that are now considered seminal for Estonian culture. The film director Leida Laius (1923–1996) brought the character of a strong and decisive woman into the Estonian film tradition and by now almost all of her films are considered classics. In Laius’ 1979 film "The Master of Kõrboja" the character Kõrboja Anna states: “From now on, I am the head of the Kõrboja farm. It is me who will find a master for Kõrboja.” For her 1985 film "Well, come on, smile" the director received the grand prix at the Los Angeles Women in Film Festival. Looking back at her life, Laius has said: “I am happy to have been able to do what I truly have wanted”.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had a massive impact on gender relations in the former Soviet republics as well. The general attitude in society was highly critical of the recently ended Soviet occupation, including the rhetoric of so-called gender equality. Women were told that in the name of national ideals of the newly free state, they needed to become housewives and they could forget about any kinds of work hero titles. Some women felt the same – while previously they were expected to do two shifts, being a housewife only meant one job. However, in a society, where people had also become poorer, most of the families could not afford to have only one breadwinner in the house.
In the 1990s, the local women’s' right advocates came into contact with Western feminists who often felt like patronising school teachers to their Eastern European sisters. The perceived contradiction lies in the fact that the Western feminist discourse promoted gender equality, discussed how personal is political and that women should get out of the kitchen and join the workforce, while women with Soviet experience were exhausted by the communist party's propaganda rhetoric, politization of the private sphere and the double shift.
Eastern Europeans became reluctant to adopt feminist ideas coming from the West, because their experiences were just so different. Barbi Pilvre, a well-known feminist columnist in the 1990s wrote: “There is no chance anybody in the Estonian Republic would admit that the Soviet system in many ways did the job international missionary feminists are starting in Estonia and the whole Eastern Europe right now. For some reason, nobody wants to talk about the fact that the starting position here is completely different: at a time, where Estonia's employment rate was 100%, the first housewives in Scandinavia or America were only gaining the courage to suggest that sitting at home tends to get boring and they'd like to participate in public life.”
In Estonia that had just restored its independence, but also in the Baltics more widely, a neo-nationalist ideology was gaining ground, which stated that women should be at home, not in politics or running the country. It only benefited the ideology that Estonian women mostly resisted the Western feminist attitudes. Alongside the contempt for the Soviet rhetoric of gender equality, this shift in values created a base for an antifeminist direction in society. In 1997, Pilvre wrote that the Elite milk and Businessman bread brands available in shops at the time were marketed to well-off consumers who wanted to mark their difference from the proles living in run-down or tower bloc residential areas, because highlighting differences – between the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, men and women – seemed progressive after an era of forced equalisation. Men were oppressed by the expectation of being rich, women by the expectation they should look like models – long legs, high heels, thin, always wearing make-up. At the same time sexism was abundant in the public sphere and women's bodies were depicted as consumer goods. In the West the idea of the beautiful Eastern European woman began to spread. To that Pilvre retorted that if the beauty of Estonian women was genetic, Estonian men would be beautiful, too.
The fact that a large majority of women were professionally engaged throughout the Soviet period from the 1940s to the 1990s differentiates the experience of Eastern European women from that of Western European women. This is the reason the idea of three waves of feminism that originated from North America cannot be applied to the history of feminism in Eastern Europe, instead, to make generalisations about the region, the experiences of these societies must be studied.
