Heroines Of Soviet Labor

By Jill Smolowe

"I spend most of my time in the kitchen or shopping. I spend hours looking for clothes and food. There are no kitchen appliances -- mixers, graters, dishwashers, clothes dryers, appliances that make women's work easier. I get tired a lot. Really tired."

---A young Moscow woman

Life is tough for Soviet women. Really tough. Overworked and underappreciated, most of the Soviet Union's 149 million women fight an uphill battle simply to survive the daily grind -- an endless race against time in the effort to juggle job, housework and child care. The average Soviet woman has few modern conveniences, gets little sympathy from the boss and virtually no household help from her husband. She nurtures only limited hope that the situation will change anytime soon. "I have a great admiration for the women of the Soviet Union," President Reagan told Soviet reporters on the eve of his trip to Moscow for this week's superpower summit. "I just wonder if they're getting the credit within your country that I think they deserve."

Nominally, Soviet women enjoy the same rights as men. The Bolshevik Revolution promised political and social equality for the sexes, and the constitution guarantees it. But while women today are better educated, healthier and more fully represented in the professions and on local government councils than their mothers' generation was, they remain second- class citizens. At work -- women hold 51% of the jobs in the Soviet Union -- they find themselves confined to low-paying positions and are noticeably absent from management posts. In the Communist Party, they make up 29% of the membership, but no woman sits in the ruling 13-member Politburo and less than a dozen in the 307-member Central Committee. Almost 60 years ago, Lenin described the woman's lot as "barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, crushing drudgery." Not much has changed.

The gap between ideal and reality is once again visible, as the Soviet Union projects a fresh image to the world in the person of Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Intelligent, urbane and outspoken, she leads a fast-paced, glamorous life that is as elusive to most Soviet women as the pomp of the royal family is to most Britons. Hailed abroad as the new Soviet woman, Mrs. Gorbachev is perceived as her country's first female superstar since the days of Alexandra Kollantai and Inessa Armand, both early feminists, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, more than a half- century ago.

Raisa Gorbachev enjoys opportunities that few Soviet women can imagine. She provides less a role model than a yardstick against which Soviet women measure their lives. "We envy her," says Rimma Raude, 37, an economist who emigrated from Kharkov to the U.S. a year ago. Mrs. Gorbachev's life-style serves both to highlight and deepen women's dissatisfaction, even as the rising expectations spawned by glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) have emboldened some women to speak out about their problems.

Few women would suggest that Raisa sets a realistic standard for the future. Quite the contrary. The hopes and dreams of most Soviet women in fact sound startlingly unemancipated to the Western ear. They rarely challenge the status quo, which entitles men to be waited on, first by their mothers, then by their wives and female employees. Nor do women question the concept that they should assume responsibility for all child-related matters, whether that involves family planning, child rearing or, if a marriage breaks up, child support. Says Tanya, a Moscow teacher who, like many of the women interviewed, requested anonymity: "We have no time to philosophize about our role when we have to worry about finding meat for dinner."

Life thus consists of a procession of countless lines, this one for meat, that one for vegetables, a third for milk. Each of those queues becomes two or more lines, as the consumer moves from the selection counter to the cashier to the pickup point. Because of food shortages, accumulating frozen and canned goods is virtually impossible, so shopping becomes a daily necessity. Women must then make their way home, toting unwieldy shopping bundles onto crowded buses and along often unpaved footpaths, to prepare meals for the family. Housecleaning, like cooking, is done largely without the help of modern appliances. Dishes are washed by hand. Clothing is generally laundered in tubs, then hung out to dry. Disposable diapers are unknown. Floors are scrubbed with brooms wrapped in damp cloths.

Small wonder that the typical Soviet woman is far less interested in redefining her role than in reordering her life. Primarily, she wants greater control over her time: longer maternity leaves, flexible work schedules, part- time jobs. She would like to have time-saving conveniences that most Western women take for granted: electric mixers, cars, supermarkets for one- stop shopping. In many rural areas, the wish list is more fundamental: central heating, running water, sewerage. And everywhere, women share the sentiment expressed by Anna, 28, a language student at Moscow State University: "Soviet women don't want equality. We want more time at home with our children."

Help may be on the way. Mikhail Gorbachev, perhaps prodded by his wife, is taking a more active interest in women's issues than any other Soviet leader since Lenin. His concern may be largely pragmatic. He knows that Soviet women, despite their subordinate status, generally control the household purse strings, taking charge of the husband's paycheck and handing him back a small weekly allowance. If Gorbachev is to introduce price reforms and alter spending habits, he will need the cooperation of women. He has already eased in some reforms that should make life easier. The average minimum wage has been raised from $317 to $336 monthly, a change that benefits women primarily. Salaries have improved for some lower-paid professionals, among them teachers and doctors, who are mostly women. Moreover, many factories have added on-site banks, shoe-repair shops and even commissaries from which weekly food packages can be ordered.

If Gorbachev can maintain his course, the next few years hold further promise. He has pledged to increase child allowances for low-income families and extend preschool child care. Plans to expand part-time employment options are particularly appealing to working women, most of whom want to hold on to their jobs but not full time. The Soviet Women's Committee, which submits to the government proposals on legislation affecting females, is seeking to increase the number of day-care centers (currently there are 3 million children without places) and build greater flexibility into work schedules. Some factories have begun to experiment with six-hour shifts. Says Zoya Pokhova, who heads the Committee: "Our goal is that women with young children should have shorter work hours."

Soviet women are largely unconcerned about what shorter working hours will mean for their careers. While officials contend that females have equal opportunities, women live with no such illusions. True, fields that are still male preserves in the West have long been open to equal employment in the Soviet Union. Women are train conductors and engineers, garbage collectors and construction workers, but often they receive less pay than their male colleagues. "It's not written in any law that women's salaries for the same work will be lower, but that's what happens," says Elena Weinstein, 35, who worked as a translator at Moscow's Pedagogical Institute before immigrating to Israel last December.

The higher the posts, the more they are male dominated. Top openings are regularly reserved for active members of the Communist Party, an avocation that requires more time than most women can spare. Even within the party, women rarely rise far. In 1986 Alexandra Biryukova became the first woman in 25 years to be elevated to the Secretariat of the Central Committee. Concedes Pokhova: "We have too few women at the decision-making level."

Many seem resigned to that situation. "Women are not suited for administrative positions overseeing men," says Maria Shaulov, 39, who was an architect in Leningrad before moving to New York City last October. Her view is typical even among the educated. "Somehow I feel that for a woman to be the boss is against the natural order."

In the Soviet Union the natural order is motherhood -- and that is nothing less than a patriotic duty. World War II left an estimated 20 million Soviets dead, the overwhelming majority of them men between the ages of 18 and 40. As a result, women account for 53% of the population. In some parts of the country, they complain that they outnumber men by as much as 6 to 1. The imbalance helped give rise in 1944 to Operation Birthrate, under which women who had seven children were awarded the Glory of Motherhood medal. Bearing ten or more children earned the title of Mother Heroine.

In the past few years the birthrate has slowly started to climb, but motherhood remains on a pedestal and women are the first to sing its praises. "Of course women are responsible for raising the children," says Economist Raude. "Who else would be?" In a 1987 address before an international women's conference in Moscow, Gorbachev spoke of the gender's "inherent functions: those of mother, wife, the person who brings up children." Later that year, he referred in a television interview to women's "predestination, that is, as keeper of the home fires." While Western feminists shuddered, Soviet women welcomed Gorbachev's words as a sign of respect for the maternal role. "We live for our children," says Eva Berezena, 27, a ballerina at the Moscow Musical Theater. "It's the most important thing we have."

Berezena has one child, and statistics suggest that at most she is likely to have only one more. The state tries to encourage women to press past the usual two-child rate, offering a one-time bonus of $167 for a third baby and early retirement from employment to those women who have more than five. Yet for all the official exaltation of hearth and kin, the disincentives are far greater. Housing is cramped. Money is tight: another mouth to feed can be a serious burden. Bosses are inflexible, making it difficult to obtain time off to care for ill children, even though the law requires that a woman be paid whenever she must stay home with a sick child. Emigre Weinstein recalls that her boss offered her a higher salary if she promised never to stay home when her child got sick. "He also made me promise not to have any more children," she says.

What if the husband were to stay home instead? "It would not be bad," says Eda Vishnevetsky, 39, mother of three, with a shrug that suggests she has never before considered the possibility. Soviet men would probably blanch at the thought. "If she left her husband in charge," chimes in Eda's spouse Yefim, 39, "he might make some mistake even with the best of intentions."

Vishnevetsky, who moved his family from Kiev to New York City four months ago, is more enlightened than most Soviet males. To help his wife, who had a full-time accounting job in Kiev, he regularly did the laundry, including the diapers. "Two hours a day I did like this!" he says, rubbing his hands together. "I was like that little animal, the badger, who is always rubbing his paws together." Vishnevetsky also ventured into the kitchen, even teaching his daughters how to make a salad. "My contribution was smaller than my wife's," he says, "but still it was there." In many households, it is . not. "It never enters my husband's mind to help me," says a middle-aged Muscovite. "Even when we're both exhausted, it's me who waits on him. He's never touched a vacuum cleaner or a pair of dirty socks in his life."

Male sloth, however, is not the main reason that 1 in every 3 Soviet marriages fails. Women -- who, according to the weekly journal Literaturnaya Gazeta, initiate 7 out of every 10 divorces -- cite their husbands' drinking as the primary source of friction. Thus many Soviets consider Gorbachev's antialcohol campaign his most significant profamily reform. "Before, when a woman struggled against her husband's alcoholism, it was considered to be her own private affair," says Yefim Vishnevetsky. "Now it is considered a public problem."

Parental interference also puts a strain on marriages. The problem is almost unavoidable, given the Soviet Union's severe housing crunch. Young people know they stand a better chance of getting an apartment and moving away from their parents if they marry. Hence, they often tie the knot prematurely, move in with one set of parents or the other and make a quick application for housing. While their names languish for years on government waiting lists, they must endure the clash of generations in tiny apartments. Often they wind up divorced before securing their own flat. A 1986 study published in the Soviet press cited housing as the most acute problem confronting young married people. That survey, of couples in Minsk, found that 50% of those sampled lived with parents, 32% in dormitories and less than 3% in their own apartments.

Given such statistics, it should be surprising that young women are eager to leap into marriage. While the wedding age is on the rise in the West, it is falling in the Soviet Union. Another 1986 study, this one prepared by Moscow State University's center for population studies, found that Soviets on average marry three years younger than they did 20 years ago. One in 4 Soviet females weds at 18; the husband is only a year older. There is family and peer pressure to marry early, and a shortage of young men is keenly felt. Moreover, girls know that society favors married women. "If you're not married by 20, people think there's something wrong with you," says Rimma Raude. "After you're married, you're treated with more respect."

Still, couples who have been married less than a year are swelling the divorce rosters. Many already have children on the way. One 1986 study published in the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda indicates that 25% of marrying women are pregnant at the time of their nuptials; of the rest, one- third get pregnant within the next nine months. More than social pressure is at work here. Some 60% of young men and women, according to the sociology journal Sotisologicheskoe Issledovaniye, regularly engage in unprotected intercourse before marriage. For the vast majority of Soviet women, the main means of birth control is abortion; Western researchers estimate that there are three abortions for every live Soviet birth.

Women tell of having six, seven or eight abortions. They may be the lucky ones. The Soviet press reports that every sixth woman who aborts her first pregnancy is left infertile. Since anesthesia is usually not used during state-subsidized abortions, many women seek private arrangements. They may get their anesthesia, but the risk of complications is apparently greater than in a hospital. According to the monthly Rabotnitsa (Working Woman), one-third of all women who opt for private abortions die from the operation. Prospects for improvement on that front are remote. Beyond the 5 cent condoms that are widely available, other contraceptive means are largely unobtainable. Western birth-control pills are difficult to find, and Hungarian-made equivalents are in short supply. Women often complain about the lack of contraceptive options, yet they remain stoic. Asks Natalie Meyerson, 34, who emigrated from Moscow to Israel three months ago: "If the man does not want to be careful, what can you do?"

The relative inattention to women's health seems a contradiction, given the state's emphasis on childbearing. Yet gynecologic care is lacking. New mothers tell of unsanitary conditions and inadequate care. "I was at one of the best maternity hospitals in Moscow, but it was dirty," complains a 29-year-old woman. "The mothers all had caked breasts, and the toilet was filthy." Adds an employee of a maternity house in the capital: "Women in labor are treated like cattle. There's one midwife for every 15 women." Alexander Baranov, a Deputy Minister of Health, admitted in a recent newspaper interview that gynecologic clinics are no better, most of them lacking heat and plumbing. Yet the clinics are vital to the female population: 1 out of 3 Soviet women has gynecologic problems, and miscarriages are common.

Unhygienic conditions are coupled with a general ignorance about reproduction and its hazards. Sex education is rarely taught in school. Many a young woman panics when she sees her first menstrual blood, having no idea what it signifies. Her options for dealing with menstruation are unpleasant: thick, rough pads or cotton batting. That may soon change, however. Moscow is negotiating with an American firm to set up a joint venture for the production in the Soviet Union of up to 25 million tampons a year.

To Western eyes, the lot of a Soviet woman may seem outrageously unfair. Yet Soviet women find Western attitudes toward marriage and family alien, if not laughable. "Your ideas of independence are a luxury," says Tanya, the English teacher. A small minority speak longingly of organized action to press for women's rights but are afraid that officials would crack down on any such effort. Most, however, are too overwhelmed by the hardships of day-to-day living to squander energy on political and personal issues that for more than two decades have enlivened Western debate about the woman's role. "I've never heard a Soviet woman talk about fulfillment," says Student Anna. "We don't think in these terms."

Nor, apparently, does Raisa Gorbachev. For all the difference between her glamorous life-style and the drudgery endured by most Soviet women, the First Lady expresses attitudes that reflect popular aspirations. In a letter to TIME, she strikes a series of chords that show her to be in tune with her female compatriots. Selflessness. Self-sacrifice. Keepers of the hearth and home. From such broad themes, it is only a small step to the primary preoccupation: coping with life as it is, rather than dreaming how it might be. What does a woman want?

"An electric mixer," says Physics Teacher Valentina Mityushova.

"More food in the stores, more meat, fish and caviar," replies Nadezhda Rybkina, an engineer.

Says Anna: "A life without lines."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow, Sally B. Donnelly and Margot Hornblower/New York