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U K R A I N I A N W O M A N OUR ENGLISH COLUMN Slave of the Kitchen The stir in Moscow, the Amer ican Exhibition made, among its Russian visitors has not subsid ed ; nor is it likely to. The typic al American family home, with its furniture, its. labor-saving- ap pliances seemed so unreal to the harried Russian housewives, now ^ corraled in state-operated cafete- * rias that they wandered around wide-eyed like Alice in Wonder land. After all, Russian people have been home-loving for cen turies. Forty years of superim posed ideas is not time enough to make them forget the memory of it. Within these last forty years their former freedom to create within their own four walls the warmth and cheer so necessary to happiness h a s been steadily less ening. No one, not even the Russian men could deny the magic of the Cosmetic Workshop. Furtively, they glanced in wonder at their wives. Had not seen them looking so rested, and pretty in years. So this was America. Incredible! Many a man pursed his lips, bulg ed his eyes, looked at the end of his nose, and reflected suddenly on the drab uniformity of Soviet thinking. After all there are four seasons in the year: be anh his family had not had time to enjoy them, by themselves, for years. Once again he remembered the Earth as a pleasant place, made for man. Nor had he seen, in a long time, his wife so absorbing ly interested as she was in the “American kitchen.” However, the official Soviet Line, seeing the Russian public luxuriating in the American exhi bit was quick to rout this mood. Almost at once the renowned M arietta Shaginian, the 70-year- old Armenian scholar and writer appeared in the columns of “Iz- vestia.” Her age and prominence gave a special importance to her appraisal of American living. In her, the Soviet government mo bilized its upper crust of intellec tuals in its attempt to destroy the Russian public’s pleased reaction to it. To her he American kitchen is unwanted. “The American kitch en,,’ she wrote “makes the house wife its slave. They tie her to this room. She is bound to live among its walls to serve her family like a medieval being without person ality.” In saying this she imagin ed she had shorn it of its beauty and easy usefulness. In her denunciation of Ameri can kitchen appliances, seeing as she does only her particular goal in professional training, in the ser vice of the community, with all hu manity eating as the Soviet fam ily does in cafeterias, inside their factories, or working places, she has forgotten that human beings are individuals, not regimented hordes. According to her the So viet liberates women from their worst form of slavery — work in the kitchen. These words are true, to a cer tain degree — inside the Soviet state. With the shortage of living space there almost all families share their kitchen with one or two neighbors. Because of this fact the Soviet woman lost her own kitchen; and calls her own only a table and a place on the kitchen stove. But this does not mean that she set herself free from the work in the kitchen. The nice words about the meals in the cafeterias are but in the ory. The deficiency of govern ment rules concerning inns and cafeterias is often discussed in the Soviet press. It is impossible to satisfy the hunger needs of the working people, save to. a minimal degree, as their wages cannot cope with cafeteria prices for the whole family. But the price and hunger satisfaction are only one side of the picture. A family that does not eat together disinteg rates. Their common interests les sen until they become only a dis associated group living under the same roof. The theory of the Soviet kitch en, and its actual working out clash. A Soviet woman must be come an adept in strategy to force her way through the schedule of two or three housewives in the same room. She must find there her storage room; she must take her turn in cleaning the floor. The same procedure applies to using the bathroom, if there is any in the apartment. W ith the complete picture of the Soviet woman’s working day, her problem and difficulties, you can then judge where the real slavery exists. The misery of ev ery day life is a constant drudgery to her. To make it worse, neither she nor her family have any pri vacy, that so important element in every living being, in which the spirit and mind relax, after the strain of the day, and revives its strength for the morrow. The Soviet woman has no rest from her housewifely duties, as Marietta Shaginian pretends. On the contrary she is performing them in much more inconvenient circumstances than women in the W estern world. The result of this drudgery makes of her a hard working being, a woman devoid of feminine qualities, as she so often is described by western travelers, in fact a real-lady-at- heart grown into a lack-luster automaton, in a cheerless, tol- some round, outside her home. ВИРІВНЮЙТЕ ПЕРЕДПЛАТУ! Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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