Feminism in Post-Soviet Belarus | Heinrich Böll Stiftung

The Soviet concept of gender equality was based on Marxism, and Marxist ideology which related the oppression of women with private property and class inequality. According to the Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai, the resolution of the women’s question “is not possible without dismantling the very basis of capitalism, removing class delineations and paving the way for new forms of human social existence.” While capitalists oppressed and exploited workers at factories and sweatshops, males, who appropriated and used unpaid women’s work in the family and the household, also turned out as oppressors and exploiters. According to this logic, gender inequality could only be dealt with through the elimination of classes and by creating a socialist society where women would enter the regulated labor market, receive an education, and learn modern professions. The system would also include affordable (state supported) childcare, access to legal abortion, state healthcare, women’s education and maternity leaves and benefits. Thus in Soviet Belarus women’s equality was conceptualized as social security through which women would be able to combine maternity and work outside of home. With time, women grew independent of men, but became dependent on the socialist state. While the “women’s question” was considered to have been solved in principle, the issues that Western feminism, starting form late 1960s, viewed as symbolizing the very core of patriarchy, i.e. violence against women, the exploitation and control of female sexuality, non-recognition of women’s autonomy and full humanity etc., could not be raised.

With the disintegration of state socialism, which pushed the formation of economic inequality and the development of nationalist ideologies, the process of socialist emancipation began to be reversed. In the 1990s women were disproportionately ousted from the labor market and the public sphere in general. With the goals of “national renaissance”, “gender normalization” or returning women to their “true vocation” in view, women’s roles in the post-Soviet region were redefined through the concepts of sexuality and nurture. Women became domesticated sexual objects. At the same time as the care of the young (and the elderly) was passed into the female hands (from state agencies), the sexualization and objectification of women’s bodies was glorified by liberal media as a freedom of choice; sexual trafficking and prostitution were often viewed in terms of women’s free choice as well. Some Belarusian political movements and parties, using the slogans of «demographic security» and «Christian morality», projected female bodies as the body of the nation, endangered and in need of protection by men. This initiated a discourse on banning abortion, limiting women’s rights to choose, and returning to a more traditional family model.

The full text of the analysis is available in pdf format.