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I liubytymesh neboho, Poky ne zahynesh Mezhy psamy na morozi Denebud pid tynom! Shevchenko died eight years before Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill published On the Subjection of Women, five years before 1,500 British women signed the first petition for woman suffrage, and in the year in which the Russian Empire formally abolished serfdom. He saw in a woman—Mariia Vilinska Markovych Zhuchenko, better known as Marko Vovchok—his spiritual suc cessor. The issue of sexual equality emerged in societies wh6re women had the education and leisure time to formulate it. It emerged at a time when progress was glorified, the nuclear family was becoming the norm, and industrialization brought major changes in the lives of the masses. The “sexual equality” that resulted became a double burden for women who tried to fulfill the idealized role of mother and wife while pursuing community- or career-oriented goals. Feminist thought distinguishes between four broad sociopsychological historical stages. In the pre-Bronze Age, it seems that birth, lactation, and the ability to bleed without dying endowed women with powers mys terious enough to create matriarchal systems. Later, these powers, no longer mysterious, became proof of the uncleanliness and weakness of women and justified their subordination. In modern times, sexual equality was circumscribed by existing societal prejudices. Hence, even when legal equality was achieved, women could not make full use of it, because psychological, biological and societal barriers tended to perpetuate inequaltiy. New feminism is searching for the means to best actualize the potential of both males and females without doing violence to the individual. This stage is predicated on the ability of the individual to achieve a sense of autonomy, authenticity and self-worth. Femi nism, therefore, is a striving for individual autonomy and an attempt at ensuring the objective conditions for its realization. The ominous-sounding “liberation’ is nothing but the Ukrainian “vyzvolennia" or "vyzvolnyi rukh,” which elicits a surge of justified pride in our hearts. It connotes the legitimate quest for liberty, equal opportunity, and the right to individual autonomy. Significantly, the first and still major feminist novel in Ukrainian literature, Olha Kobylianska’s Tsarivna (The Princess), published in 1896, stressed the attainment of personal authenticity and autonomy. This process was complicated by the fact that the heroine was a women. As a women who was denied education and travel, Kobylianska was more aware of the seductions of sub ordination lurking for women. Yet, autonomy was neither predicated on nor determined by the sex of her heroine. Mykyta Shapoval, an eastern-Ukrainian political activist, realized that the striving for autonomy and individual authenticity was at the core of Kobylianska’s writing and used her as a model for his own quest for authen ticity.2 Women’s equality is most llikely to be achieved dur ing some serious crisis. When society, as a congregate of families, is itself threatened, everyone does what has to be done and not what he or she has been accus tomed to doing. Throughout its history, Ukraine has been under virtually continuous pressure, which has frequently threatened its very survival. Women in front ier societies had to be more self-reliant and independ ent than women in stable societies. Frontier societies were characterized by independence, individualism and anarchy, attributes that Ukraine exhibited throughout the stages of its incorporation into the Russian Empire. The situation in Western Ukraine was slightly dif ferent. After the eighteenth century, methods of social control there were more subtle. Politically, Western Ukrainian territories, especially Galicia, were under a parliamentary system, more or less. The opportunity for legal political activity for the Ukrainians in the nine teenth century, however, was not accompanied by the emancipation of women. The discrimination against women led to the formation of the first Ukrainian women’s organizations in 1884 and gave rise to feminist literature. The issues raised by the Ukrainian feminists nearly one hundred years ago still remain relevant today. What were the interests of the Ukrainian women, and how did they see themselves in the national picture? In the Russian Empire, and to a lesser degree among the Poles, the discussion of the “women’s question" became popular in the 1860s. It was closely tied to the questions of women’s education, service to the common people in the countryside, and growth of an active opposition to tsarism. In theory at least, the women in the Russian Empire had control over their wealth. The women of the upper classes and the intelligentsia, therefore, once they broke with the traditional concepts of tsarism and class stratification, were more likely to be accepted into the mainstream of the opposition move ment than was the case elesewhere in Europe. Since neither men nor women in the Russian Empire had polit ical rights, the idealized version of the struggled for pol itical liberty had them side by side. In the Habsburg Empire, on the other hand, all women, children and the insane were specifically disen franchised, but some men, and after 1907 all adult males, had the vote. A few western-Ukrainian women had been making political statements and writing minor literary works since 1848. The emancipation discussion, however, did not develop fully until the late 1870s. Then it was raised within the context of Western European socialism. The first Galician feminists were also so cialists. 2Shapoval, “Doba khatianstva,” in Ukrainska khata (New York, 1955), pp. 35-6. To be continued ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИПЕНЬ-СЕРПЕНЬ 1984 31
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