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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, КВІТЕНЬ 201 2 WWW. UNWLA.ORG 21 THE STRUGGLE OF RURAL WOMEN AGAINST POVERTY IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE by Iryna Klyuchkovska and Martha Kichorowska Kebalo Laying aside romantic descriptions of Ukraine’s rural women as guardians of national culture, noble mothers, heroines, and great bea u- ties, we suggest examin ing the circumstances faced by these women through the dispassionate language of statistics, which affords a completely different perspective on their lives. Today, about a third of Ukraine’s popula - tion resides in approximately 29,000 small rural settlem ents. These settlements are mostly nu c- leated villages surrounded by fields and forests. The rural populace supplies the workforce for the country’s vast agricultural sector, which compri s- es 17% of Ukraine’s GDP and provides 60% of the foodstuffs Ukrainian s consume. The labor of pr o- ducing wheat and barley — the premier crops on Ukraine’s famous black soil, the chornozem — has long been performed by women. Yet the ge n- dered aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural produ c- tion, particularly as it has evolved in Ukraine’s post - Soviet transition and the accompanying de - collectivization and land reform process, have not been adequately illuminated. According to Dr. Kateryna Yakuba of Ukraine’s Institute of Agrarian Economy , in the 1990s women represented 40% of all of Ukraine’s agricultural workforce (1.9 of 4.9 million total) and 70% of all those employed in grain produ c- tion and animal husbandry — work that was not highly mechanized during the Soviet period. It continued to b e performed as manual labor, and as such, was considered low - skilled and of low prestige. The breeding of pigs and the feeding, cleaning, and milking of dairy cows are tremen d- ously demanding jobs that are still performed a l- most exclusively by women. T he cultivation of Women spend 3 ¾ hours on household work daily, 3 - 6 times more than men. grain, sugar beets, and sunflower, their hoeing and weeding in the hot summers and their ha r- vesting through the rain and snow in the fall, are still considered women’s work. Women regularly perform the back - breaking labor of loading and unloading produce and heavy sacks of grain, ca r- rying up to 9 tons over a day’s work. In addition to such employment, women spend 3 ¾ hours on domestic housework, 3 - 6 times as much as men do. And in recent years, women have added the cultivation of domestic fields and gardens to their daily workload in order to put food on the family table and to have som e- thing to sell at the market. Many rural women, thus, have a trip le burden of labor, leaving them little time for rest or recreation. No wonder that only 10.9% of rural women consider themselves to be in good health. G enerally, the standard of living for the residents of Ukraine’s numerous villages is much lower than t hat in the more urban areas. Ukraine’s National Statistics Commission reports that in the rural areas, only one in every five household s has water and sewer services, only 5% have a gas water heater, only 43% are connected to a municipal gas line, and only 20% have a tel e- phone line. Rural villages typically lack paved roads; over 70% of the ir schools are dilapidated; many lack any sort community center for social and cultural life , and there is limited public tran s- portation to get to another village, town, or city. In 1989, Ukraine’s rural population was 17 million of 51.7 million; in 2010 , the rural popul a- tion is 14.5 of less than 47 million. Ukraine is u n- dergoing a nation - wide trend of rural depopul a- tion that is part of a demographic transition m a- n i fest ing itself as a demographic crisis. Birth rates are sharply down, while death rates, partic u- larly male mortality rates, are spiking. Overall, rural birthrates have gone down from 13.7 to 9.4 per thousand , while the rural mortality rate ou t- distances urban death statistics by 1.4 times. The traditional large families once typical of the rural areas are now a rarity and an economic liability: 72.3% of large families are in poverty. Two - child families have become almost the norm in the vi l- lages: 38.3% of famil ies having two children , and only 10.9% of families have three. The Ukrainian village no longer represents a replicable comm u- nity: in 9% of the villages, there are no children
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