Russian Women, Fish, and Bicycles

Because I teach such high-level classes at the moment, one of my big challenges is finding good topics for discussion. Students who reach these levels tend to say they really want grammar, but in practice what I find is that they really want to talk. And talk. And talk some more. All of which is great, since a main aim of an EFL teacher is to get students to "produce" langauge (in TEFL jargon, this means using language authentically to express their own thoughts and opinions).

This week, a couple of my classes got to teach me about the status of women and the outline of gender roles in Russia. What they had to say about this topic was surprising.

The first student who got to teach me about such things is a businessman I see on an individual basis twice a week, a man I will call Volodya. I often think of Volodya as the Russian counterpart of a good friend of mine in New York, who will no doubt recognize himself in the following description. He is a mild-mannered but affable tax attorney, married with one child and plans to have or adopt another. Right now, Volodya's aim in improving his English is to be ready in a year when the steel company for which he works adopts an English-only e-mail policy (something which is becoming more and more common in multinational corporations, I hear). He has traveled quite a bit around Europe and will be venturing off to South Africa later this summer to visit relations.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave Volodya a lesson involving the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So impressed was he with this program that he asked me to lend him my DVD. I did so but also gave him an assignment to read the Wikipedia article on MTM and tell me when the program was on, why it was successful, and why it was important in America. Volodya did admirably at finding all of this information. His reporting of his findings segued nicely into a discussion of women in Russia.

First, I taught Volodya the term "pink collar" and asked him if there are any jobs that are considered pink-collar in Russia. Some of his answers surprised me. In Russia, bus and trolleybus drivers are almost always female. So are cashiers on the Metro, a fact I had noticed independently. Provodnitsas on trains (somewhat akin to airline stewardesses--on nicer trains, they actually do fetch you a cup of tea) are also generally women.

When I asked him whether he thought women in Russia are equal to men, he seemed to indicate that the biggest challenge to Russian women is not discrimination in the workplace or at the voting booth but the simple fact that Russian men are extremely traditional in their attitudes toward childcare. In America, wives complain that their husbands don't change diapers often enough; in Russia, men won't touch them with a ten-foot pole. Almost anything having to do with children is still seen as "women's work," and when men do get involved in it, it's not because they have an ideological commitment to gender equality but because they happen to be unusually affectionate toward their child. Though he did not say so explicitly, I gathered that Volodya fell into this category, as he has always discussed his daughter with palpable affection.

Intrigued by what Volodya had told me, I brought up the subject of women again in what I had supposed would be a "conversation group" (only one student actually turned up). I had a reading prepared about an annual festival in part of Greece that involves men and women swapping roles for the day. To lead into the topic, I wrote on a flip chart the following expressions:

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Woman needs man, and man must have his mate.

(For fifty points, explain to me why the first sentence requires articles and the second does not).

My student, whom I will call Svetlana, had an unexpected interpretation of the second sentence. Not knowing its origin or context, she took it to mean that, whereas a woman needs an emotional attachment to a man, a man just wants sex. Certainly not what I had even interpreted "As Time Goes By" to be saying, but in the interests of our discussion, I did not try to persuade her to adopt my interpretation.

Like Volodya, Svetlana listed provodnitsas, trolleybus and bus drivers, and Metro cashiers as pink-collar jobs. But she added in a couple that surprised me. Doctors, it seems, are usually women in Russia (I gather that the medical profession in Russia does not offer the same pay and prestige as in America). Her own profession, that of bookkeepers, is also highly female.

When I asked her for an explanation of this, she said that women are just naturally better at having attention to detail than men, and so this was "naturally" a woman's profession (I thought of telling her that, in America, feminists have had to fight a perception that women are not good at math, but didn't quite know how to get that idea across to her). She also indicated that, because of their heavy home responsibilities, Russian women are more likely to take a job that has regular hours and that is unlikely to make taking a day off to care for a sick child (in Russia, this is invariably seen as the mother's responsibility) possible.

I asked her about women in politics. Her responses were interesting. She told me that about a third of the members of the Duma (the Russian parliament) are women. But she felt it was unlikely a woman would ever occupy Dmitri Medvyedev's job. As evidence, she pointed out that Russia had had generations of czars but only two queens, and that not a single party chairman in Soviet times had been female.

Overall, I get the distinct impression that Russians of both sexes are less reticent than Americans about professing belief in "natural" gender differences. In America, suggesting that women are "naturally" better suited to any job would probably result in lynching. But in Russia, the thought seems common. This is not to say that feminism doesn't exist in Russia, but it takes a very different form than in the West.

Women's issues are just not the same here. Many commentators have noted that, since the fall of Communism, Russian women have become much more interested in fashion and "femininity" than they were previously. Russian women do not seem as concerned about being unabashedly girlie as educated American women now are. Much of this has to do with increased access to Western fashion and cosmetics. But a lot more has to do with how women existed under Communism.

From what I gather, the Communist regime, though proclaiming women the equals of men, mostly just liberated women to be drudges. Russian women worked a double shift, one at the office and one at home, where men steadfastly refused to take up the slack. American women also complain of a double shift, but for Russians under Communism, that shift was even more grueling. The lack of refrigerators in my apartments and preservatives in most foodstuffs (the latter is still true today) meant endless waits in line to buy groceries that were often in short supply. Additionally, Russian women had access to few labor-saving devices to assist them with housework (and still have them less often than their American counterparts). Many urban apartments still lack a washing machine, and I gather that clothes dryers are an almost unheard-of luxury (though one of my fellow teachers has a washing machine that also dries clothes).

So for Russian women, girlie clothes and make-up end up being not symbols of oppression but signs of liberation. If you have time to worry about your appearance, the thinking seems to go, this indicates that you have been at least half-liberated from domestic drudgery.