‘A woman is everything'

At the beginning of the transition era, there was a good deal of speculation over whether the collapse of communism would precipitate a return to so-called traditional gender roles in Russia. In particular, a number of Western and Russian commentators predicted that women would succumb to the call of the home, leaving the labour force voluntarily as soon as they had the option of doing so (for example, Pilkington 1992: 200, Funk 1993: 322, Lissyutkina 1993: 276). The logic of such predictions was that since women’s inclusion within the Soviet labour force had occurred under pressure, it had not brought the emancipatory gains usually associated with female employment. As one Russian commentator put it

There can be no doubt that working outside the home and being paid for their labour is one of the main conditions for women’s emancipation. … However, women’s working outside the home can be transformed from an important means of liberation into a very powerful instrument for their enslavement. … That was precisely what occurred in our country.