Officially female

As the Eurasian Women's Forum, Feminism presented not without Putin

When Stalin proclaimed that the so -called female issue was resolved, some of the independent female organizations were abolished as unnecessary, and the mythological status of the most equal state in the world was assigned to the Soviet Union. As a result, the proclaimed equality actually turned out to be a double, or even triple load and silence of problems for many Soviet women: in the late Soviet era, the liberated woman should not only work on an equal footing with a man, but also cope in his free time with her traditional role, which no one has canceled, to be housekeeping, to take care of older relatives.

Of course, there were many victories for the Soviet gender project - they all have them in hearing. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who performed this week in St. Petersburg at the third Eurasian women's forum, which is held every three years, also knows about them. In his speech, Putin transfers the successes of the USSR, emphasizing that while other countries are still forced to fight for such benefits for his women, we have equal rights - this is “long -standing practice and tradition”. But so that we do not relax too much,

The president immediately adds that in Russia we have traditional family values, and therefore our women are primarily wives and mothers with their special nature and mission.

And that everything in the country should be arranged so that women do not feel the right to neglect such a mission, because it is this key to a successful state future. The emphasis is on the fact that the state should help a woman combine modern and traditional roles. The gender equality in Putin’s performance, thus, is not very different from the Soviet one, although it includes besides overload, facage and silence, also all the charms of a market economy.

All the main Russian speakers of the forum are also echoed to him. According to their friendly opinion, a woman’s special political purpose is equal to the natural one: to carry the world, comfort, peace, care for others, transfer the family mission to the state mission. Women should engage in ecology, because it is concern for the environment, and women are characterized by care, women should engage in diplomatic missions, because women know how to settle conflicts (in the light of the scandalous figure of Maria Zakharova, this statement looks especially funny), women should deal with family and children, because they play mothers or future mothers, women play a special role in healthcare because they are inherent in their own way Caring and kindness.

The picture of the world here is whole, but not without flirting with real topics that we would rather attribute to feminist politics: a couple of times the words about gender equality and gender stereotypes (this is how they combine criticism of gender stereotypes and conversation about female destiny?), Two times the wording of “Family and blessings of violence” will sound. In the forum program, these issues will not be paid to attention. Not a single female NGO that is engaged in the problems of gender inequality, sexualized or domestic violence will also be invited or awarded.

After the “solution of the female issue” under Stalin, state -owned female organizations appeared, controlled by the authorities and submitting a female political agenda in the correct way, on the site of more independent wife. These initiatives were aimed at the internal work with women of the country (including in order to educate women with new political personnel), and on foreign policy, international. The magazine “Worker and Peasant Woman” began to be released, who collected and published letters of his readers and covered as part of the woman’s life in the USSR, within the framework. The Committee of Soviet Women, responsible for international communication, will later report in their reports on the successes of Russian emancipation.

According to the gender historian Ella Rossman,

The current Eurasian Women's Forum is a direct successor to Soviet state female organizations and official events.

Historians and researchers of the situation of women and the history of feminism in the USSR have been conducting an important scientific discussion since the 2000s, evaluating their work in different ways. The position of some researchers is that such state organizations did not represent women at all, degenerating into the imitation of the well -being of Soviet gender policy, and were needed only to broadcast state narrative from top to bottom. Other researchers believe that even in conditions of censorship and direct dependence on the state, these organizations created a space for the agency and activity of women, to discuss at least a resolved circle of problems, to promote women on a career and political ladder.

This discussion can also be transferred to a modern UHF, which, on the one hand, promotes antifeministic, patriarchal and traditionalist rhetoric (with elements of talking about equal rights), but at the same time collects under its wing thousands of women from different countries and areas of activity, women with real projects and successes, women who want to take part in public policy. With a special desire, such projects (although I am from this) can also be called feminist in the broad sense of the word, and the forum organizers themselves more than once or twice mention that their goal is to “build a female movement”, albeit on the conditions imposed by the authorities.

The forum is given a lot of attention to the vague and rather harmless concept of “female leadership”. Russia, which did not sign the Istanbul Convention on the adoption of systemic measures to counteract violence against women, which did not adopt a law on the prevention of family-domestic violence, which did not abolish the list of prohibited professions for women, who did not deprive the mandate of the deputy of Slutsky, whom the journalist accused the harassment, ready to reason about the representation of women of Russian politics and various fields of labor. Of course, several times at the opening of the forum, the name of the first woman-cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, at the same time, became the first woman to initiate the abruption of the presidential terms.

The atmosphere of the forum is incredibly festive and even dramatic: the protruding violins in business suits, singing the female anthem Polina Gagarina in the rays of Sofitov, Valentina Matvienko, who addresses the speaking colleagues “My friends”, Maria Zakharova, who breaks the applause of reasoning about how the demonic “80 genders” take her, women who are laid out, women who are laid. She is half the rights and opportunities. Chairman of the Council of the Republic of the National Assembly of the Republic of Belarus Natalya Kochanova, denouncing from the scene of protesting lost Belarus, who corrected the "nature of the Belarusian woman - inspirer and guardian of the hearth." We are talking about how destructive forces are trying to separate the world, to isolate countries from each other, while the forum women are trying to gather it and work together.

Why do you need this forum? What is this - imitation and intercepting the agenda? An attempt to forge new women's personnel, women leaders who will serve the state economy and ideology? Understanding that women are half of the country and you need to make a long -term investment in the loyalty of this half, until they all became feminists? Playing in the international arena and an attempt to talk in your territory to pretend that we are not in a situation of increasingly aggravating international isolation? Or is this forum perceived by Putin as a nice and safe children's table at a political party, such a gesture of prudent political gallantry in relation to the ambitions of Valentina Matvienko?

The state, obviously, does not keep up with constantly updating social challenges and loses to feminists in the ability to respond to real requests and needs of Russian women.

Meanwhile, the femoral, who, of course, will not be called, intimidated, dismissed, keep under arrest and put in prisons at such a forum, are being built on administrative and criminal cases, they are trying to recognize extremists and destroyers of traditional values. Perhaps the whole point is that the state feels that he is losing a female young audience, and tries to take it back under its paternalistic supervision, until the women were radicalized and massively began to resist the rather shaky value project of the authorities?

It is even amazing how unprofitable and diverging with reality the official gender policy of our country is going on, which this forum, of course, represents. Instead of, for example, to talk about equal separation and redistribution of household duties between a man and a woman in a family, about equal involvement in the life and raising of children, about an equal decree that both parents can take, and thus remove career risks from women, the state, as usual, wants to overload the woman with conflicting obligations and roles, imposing her myth about “eternal female mission”.

At the same time, despite all the efforts of official politics, families that retain the “traditional” separation of gender roles are becoming less and less, because it is economically inconvenient and unprofitable. The interchangeability of parents is more profitable for the parents themselves and the financial situation of the family. In turn, to work, in turn to be on maternity leave, in total, is also often more profitable, as well as mutual economic responsibility for the well -being of the family. Equality is cheaper than abstract traditions. Point attempts to stimulate the fertility due to maternity capital, restrictions on the right to abort and impose a mission of motherhood (instead of working with female poverty, programs for involved paternity and guaranteed alimony) do not bring expected demographic fruits.

Finally, I’ll tell you a case from personal practice, practically a parable about how Putin accidentally helped us make a feminist festival in the State Gallery. When our boss doubted whether to say such a dubious project to us, we included a video with V.V. at a workshop. Putin, where at a meeting with gifted schoolchildren he, answering the question of a high school student, “How do you feel about feminism?”, He says that he treats feminism well without “excesses”. What these are the same “excesses” Putin did not specify, so the festival was agreed after that. If the Eurasian Women's Forum, despite all its facility and bravado, will be able to serve as an official cover for other women's projects in Russia, or if some real and necessary women's projects can be disguised as the rhetoric of this forum, everything that happens on it will not be in vain. But if some talented woman asked me whether she should take part in such an event, I would most likely try to dissuade her from this.

Author - feminist activist and writer

In the course of work on the text of the author, Gender historian Ella Rossman advised