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WOMEN AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF EASTERN EUROPE (Conclusion) It is much too early to hazard predictions on the women’s movement in Ukraine. Women in Eastern Europe face difficult challenges. They are overworked, since all of them work outside the home and then face the second shift of shopping for scarce items or acquir ing those that do not exist on the market — clothes, dishes, shoes.39 Economic dislocations and high prices, part of the cost for conversion to a free market economy, have hit the women very hard. Some women find solace in reli gion and ethnography, especially in rediscovering old songs, rituals, food, clothing. In Kiev, for instance, there emerged an organization called “She who preserves,” — Berehynia — named after a pagan goddess. Limited to middle-aged city women with a college or professional education, this organization attempts to preserve the folk dress, food and customs. A combination of back to nature, back to the extended family, and back to the simple farm days, the organization tries to fill the void social life leaves for all Soviets. Apartments are small, and the political insecurity in the previous years limited social contacts to few trusted friends. Berehynia will not be a mass movement, and will have the nostalgia of a quilting revival on a small campus. Organized religions — Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and the rapidly spreading Baptist faith — offer more than solace to women. They also have a reverse attraction of justifying the woman’s role in the family, limited to raising children and want ing a husband who could care for her. The escapism that characterized American society in the 1950’s, that pushed the women into the cocoons of suburbia, is far from being realized in Eastern Europe, but that does not diminish its attractiveness. Attempts are being made at establishing Orthodox Church women’s societies, known as sisterhoods, that in the eighteenth century supported charity and promoted education. Catholicism, which has been actively persecuted by Moscow and only in 1989 came out of the underground, has a tradition of supporting women’s organizations for charity, prayer, setting up day care and food centers, and church beaut ification programs.40 The goals of women’s liberation and self-actuali zation are absent from the aspirations of most women in Eastern Europe at the moment. In good historical fashion, the women are subordinating their welfare to the common goal, and the common goal is liberation — liberation from the fear of totalitarian terror, liberation from centralized bureaucracy, from deferral of decent existence today for some life tomorrow. The women are opposed to all centralized government and to militariza tion. They are also opposed to social experimentation and when they write it is to stress the need to return to some idyllic conception of decency, morality, family values; they write much about the pedagogical role of the woman as the exponent of moral values and bemoan the reduction of women to materialistically greedy crea tures under the late socialist regime. That does not show an understanding of women’s issues, women’s concerns, let alone of the sophisticated conception of women’s aspirations and the complexity of the condi tion of women that we in the West have developed. What then can the use of categories of analysis devised by and for women demonstrate for the understanding of the current situation in the USSR? Precisely that. The society in the USSR, — but for a thin layer of urbanized intelligentsia, which often knows English and the West, either from study or from travel, — is a society in which family structures, personal rela tionships, and traditional social relations determine world views and expectations. Western democracy, with its stress on personal initiative and personal responsibility, with its impersonal relations embedded in law, with its self-discipline and its social structures, is understood by most Soviets as a system of communal liberation, not of individual opportunity.41 This is a similar process to the manner in which Eastern Europeans defined feminism as community action, rather than women’s liberation. We must try to understand their meaning, and not rely on transferring ours. V The current situation in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, or even Russia itself, has shown us the limitations of an exclusively political or ideological approach to history and society. Terminology is another salient factor. The ease with which we transfer labels is repeatedly decried and just as frequently practiced. Women in Eastern Europe have neither devised a termi nology of their own nor have they developed specific definitions for accepted usage. Hence, to determine their views and describe their policies we have to study what they meant; we have to decode not so much their understanding, as the uses which the term described. This is particularly the case with nationalism. The issues facing women and the problems con fronting the whole area are both similar and in a deeper sense intertwined. The lack of articulation and the lack of recognition of the congruence of the issues, the automatic channelling of the discussion into nationa lism, leads to the perpetuation of stereotypes that in themselves hamper the study of the area and the com prehensive analysis of its problems. The vicious circle that keeps Eastern Europe in the backwaters of history Cont. on p. 22 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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