Seventy-three years after the Russian Revolution, Soviet women are confronting a powerful backlash against its emancipation of women. Glasnost is allowing Soviet citizens to voice patriarchal prejudices once banned as bourgeois or counterrevolutionary. The state-controlled news media, for example, frequently blame “overemancipated, masculinized women” for social ills from juvenile delinquency to divorce. And Mikhail Gorbachev's ambivalent positions on the role of women in political and economic life, along with the social policies proposed by the Communist Party and the Congress of People's Deputies earlier this year, further strengthen the view that only women are responsible for children and housework.

So far, perestroika has failed to change Soviet women's secondary position in the work force or shorten their second shift at home. Measures proposed by the Communist Party to “improve the working and living conditions of women,” for example, will allow women to work fewer hours a week; release them from heavy work and labor injurious to their health (usually the highest-paying jobs); and increase prenatal, maternal and workplace-funded leave for mothers of large families and single mothers. These policies, however generous and necessary, fail to address the fundamental inequalities women suffer. Official discussions of women's double burden rarely extend to men's family responsibilities—or consider society's responsibility for family welfare. The idea of parental, as opposed to maternal, leave was unthinkable until this year. (In April the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution which for the first time allows “fathers, grandfathers or other family members” the right to take unpaid child care leave.)

Why is this happening in a country that produced the first woman ambassador and the first woman in space? The Soviet Union contains the largest number of women professionals and specialists on the globe, and close to 90 percent of its female population is in the work force. Early Soviet legislation sought to secure full economic and social equality for women. They were to be employed in the public sector as a condition of complete equality, and the responsibility for housework and child care was to shift from the individual household to the collective. But the disruptions of war, large-scale unemployment, rampant inflation and Stalin's conservative social policies meant that few resources were devoted to social programs. Although opportunities for women in the labor force expanded, the socialization of housework never took shape.

As a result, many Soviet women express yearning for a traditional female role centered around the family and the home. They are exhausted by decades of paper equality and a double burden made more difficult by consumer shortages (a recent Soviet survey shows that 275 billion hours, equal to 90 percent of the time devoted to paid work in the national economy as a whole, are spent on shopping, child care and housework each year, most of it spent by women). Yet recent national polls show that only 20 percent of Soviet women would quit their jobs even if they could afford to. And most Soviet women, like their American counterparts, still need to work full time in order to make ends meet. Other women, fewer in number but increasingly vocal, are taking advantage of increased opportunities for political and social activism. Some are even espousing Western-style feminism, as they understand it.

Francine du Plessix Gray set out in 1987 to capture a society in flux through the voices of its women. She admits to a dual purpose: to examine “the first community of women in history to be officially emancipated” and to decode “the forceful spell that Russian women have had on me for much of my life” (Gray was raised in Paris by a Russian mother, grandmother and governess). Her nostalgia for the cozy and aristocratic milieu of her Russian maternal relatives may have led her to talk mainly to educated, urban, “successful” women. There are no rural women, or engineers or scientists in Soviet Women (although there are many doctors, a more traditional female occupation), and only a few token workers. Her portraits of women in their homes, at work or in hospitals and clinics are always meticulously observed and often lyrical. A distinguished writer of fiction and nonfiction, Gray tells these women's stories like a novelist.

The strength of Gray's book is its reporting on how women are being affected by a deteriorating health care system. Gray hears stories about the brutal treatment of women during childbirth. On visits to several hospitals, she documents the primitive conditions: the unchanged, blood-smeared sheets on nursing mothers' beds, the lack of bathing facilities and the patients' shabby, prisonlike hospital gowns. Men are not allowed to visit their wives or children for fear that they will infect them. The great irony of the Soviet Union's backwardness in the field of gynecology is that the technique of prepared childbirth had originated there several decades ago (the Frenchman who introduced it to the West, Dr. Lamaze, had actually learned it in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s from two Soviet doctors, Platonov and Velkovskii). Today the Lamaze method is virtually unheard of in the Soviet Union, and women have little or nothing to say about the conduct of their labor. According to Gray, only one clinic in the Soviet Union, in the more westernized Baltic Republic of Latvia, practices family birthing techniques.

Abortion is the primary method of birth control—not by choice but because of the absence of reliable contraceptives (diaphragms come in only two sizes, and condoms are called galoshi, which means just what it sounds like). There are four to eight abortions, depending on whose statistics you trust, for every live birth. The conditions in abortion clinics that Gray describes are now being graphically detailed in the Soviet press. Last year, for example, Moscow News published an account of one woman's ordeal under the headline, “I Don't Want to Be Sorry I'm a Woman.” The author, Yekaterina Nikolayeva, recalled her experience in an abortion clinic. A doctor yelled at her for staring at his bloodstained gloves and scolded another woman by saying, “‘You should have had second thoughts before. You're all fond of sweets, but you're not willing to pay the price.’”

The article led the highest-ranking woman in the Soviet government, Aleksandra Biryukova, to order a Health Ministry investigation. She promised that the contraceptive industry would radically increase its output over the next two years. But Biryukova's call for change will not be easily answered. The Soviet reproductive health system needs radical restructuring before it can serve women humanely and effectively, and the lack of contraceptives is not the only problem. Family-planning programs are almost nonexistent and have no way to counter widespread beliefs that contraceptives are unreliable, dangerous or unobtainable. (No sex education materials designed for women are readily available now, but next year Progress Publishers may publish Our Bodies, Ourselves.)

Unlike the abortion debate in the West, which pits the putative rights of the fetus against women's right to choose, the Soviet discussion is about women's health care—the right to adequate supplies of reliable contraceptives, sanitary conditions, anesthetics and the respect of medical workers. As of now, there is no national debate in the Soviet Union about the morality of abortion. But rising ethnic tensions in the Russian Republic and in the Caucasus, for example, could open that issue because they strengthen patriarchal religions which have a dim view of women. (A similar phenomenon is occurring in Poland, where the Catholic Church is trying to use its influence with Solidarity to curtail abortion and the availability of contraceptives.)

Few Soviet sexologists (a surprisingly busy and esteemed specialty) will discuss homosexuality, and decades of cultural isolation from the West and of repressive laws have insured that sexual attitudes remain reactionary. (Although lesbianism was never officially outlawed, homosexuals have been jailed for up to eight years under a statute that, according to press reports, is likely to be repealed this year.) But there have been glimmers of opposition. In December 1979 a group of Leningrad women issued a samizdat publication, Almanac: Women and Russia. It was the first self-consciously feminist text produced in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s, and its half-dozen contributors wrote about the flaws of Soviet gynecology, the scarcity of consumer goods and the general overburdening of women, problems that are aired today by numerous women in the glasnost press. What was unusual about Almanac was its accounts of lesbian relationships, a reality of Soviet life that is only now being acknowledged (albeit euphemistically and grudgingly).

Ten years earlier, in November 1969, Natalya Baranskaya's novella A Week Like Any Other was published in the prestigious literary journal Novy Mir. (It has just been published in English, along with several of Baranskaya's short stories, by Seal Press.) Written in the form of a week's diary entries, it details the nightmare of one woman's daily life: food shortages, endless lines, poor health care and day care, the lack of basic household services and a husband who buries himself in the TV or newspapers and never lifts a finger. When he suggests to Olga, a young scientist, that she stop working and stay home to take care of the family (a familiar proposal these days), she is appalled: “You want to shut me in here for the whole year! How could we live on your salary! … All this boring stuff is for me alone, and the only interesting things are for you!” Olga's story touched a raw nerve; Baranskaya received hundreds of letters from grateful women thanking her for telling the truth about their lives.

That was twenty years ago; it's taken women that long to get started. Since 1989 there has been an upsurge of independent (that is, outside party control) activism by women. And although there are still no signs of a mass movement, independent women's associations have emerged around the country. But Soviet Women doesn't take these developments into account. (To be fair, things are changing so rapidly in the Soviet Union these days that many books are outdated by the time they are published.) Gray writes that women are “hindered from cohesive action, to this day, by their government's censure of any ‘feminist’ movement that would function outside of party control … and by their curious lack of solidarity.” Her comment that during her travels she “barely found two” other feminists is difficult to understand. One evening last December I sat in a newspaper office in Moscow and listened to twenty women from eight different independent associations define what feminism meant to them. Many were in their 20s, contradicting Gray's view that the younger generation has lost contact with feminist traditions. In fact, the emerging women's associations are composed of women of different ages and different political and professional orientations.

In Moscow, Olga Voronina and a group of women scholars have established the League for Society's Liberation from Stereotypes (LOTOS), which is beginning to articulate a gender analysis of Soviet society. Olga Bessolova has revived a once dormant Women's Council in the Aerohydrodynamics Institute in Zhukovsky, sixty kilometers from Moscow. She has organized a Women's Initiative Club, which lobbies the town government for better services and holds bimonthly consciousness-raising meetings, and an Inter-Regional Women's Political Club, which organizes political training workshops for women and nominates women to run in local and national races. Last January I attended one of the Initiative Club's meetings. Forty women—professionals, scholars, journalists, engineers and factory workers—gathered for four hours. These women believe that the solution to the “women's question” lies not in the improvement of consumer goods and services but in the redefinition of male and female social roles.

One month earlier, a federation of women writers was formed inside the Russian Writer's Union, and women filmmakers and journalists have started lobbying groups to fight for higher pay and better working conditions. (The Soviet Union still has only one female foreign correspondent.) In March several women formed a women's center in Moscow which will offer legal consultation as well as political leadership training. In Leningrad, Elena Zelinskaya, who heads a women's cooperative association and the Northwest Information Agency, a network of independent journalists in Leningrad, was recently appointed to chair the City Council Commission on Communication. In Uzbekistan (where Gray interviews a “narcissistic Communist official” and a “Dragon Lady”), Rozika Mergenbaeva makes documentaries about the appalling conditions under which women and girls work in the cotton fields.

More disturbing than these omissions is Gray's conclusion, presented early in the book, that “the Soviet Union might be as much in need of a men's movement as of a women's movement.” She tries the idea out on some of her Soviet friends and finds it “very well received.” But the women Gray asks, and who inform this book, are almost exclusively strong and successful women who live with either their mothers or children or with passive, emasculated men, whom they deride in Gray's presence. As someone who has traveled regularly to the Soviet Union in the past ten years, I'd say the country has had a men's movement all along; only now are women's concerns emerging on the fringes of the male-dominated political and cultural outpourings that characterize glasnost. What kind of matriarchy pays its female workers two-thirds of the average male income, gives women the dirty manual jobs while insuring that they cannot reach the top of the professions and then blames “masculinized” women for every social problem?

Gray emerges as a kind of romantic feminist, accepting the view, so popular among the Soviet intelligentsia and political elite, that Soviet women have an essence that is indisputably different from that of men. “In this laboratory of emancipation offered us by the Soviet Union,” Gray concludes, “in this epochal experiment which has engaged women in the work force longer and more fully than any society in history, the paradoxical ‘equality’ between the sexes may well symbolize a central dilemma of the human condition: the female's secret and ambivalent desire to lead and be led, the male's confusion and resentment before her mysterious force and her often awesome versatility.” Throughout all levels of Soviet society, she writes, “one is constantly awed by women's keen sense of their greater patience, diligence, optimism, endurance, shrewdness and self-esteem—a self-esteem apparently heightened by the very arduousness of their everyday duties, their incessant foraging for basic necessities of food and clothing.” Gray continues, “Many women I talked to prefer to remain exhausted, to continue complaining and to keep their husbands out of the kitchen, where ‘it is not their place to be.’” Perhaps, she notes, this stance makes more sense if viewed in the great Russian literary tradition that depicts women's suffering as a redemptive force. In the end, she creates the same image of women created by Russian male authors in the nineteenth century: heroines considerably more powerful than their male counterparts. Those authors placed women on pedestals, the better to admire their suffering while keeping them in their place.

The structure of much of the book—small-scale, impressionistic pictures of women in their homes, with their children and, occasionally, “henpecked” husbands—places women in a traditional surrounding. This setting draws out Gray's novelistic skills, but women in any society have many sets of relationships. However, Gray doesn't seem interested in describing the public activities of women in Soviet society. As a result, there is often a static and passive quality to these women's lives. I wish Gray had asked more of them what they think they, or the Gorbachev government, could do to improve their living or working conditions.

In fact, women as active political figures do not figure in the book. When Gray does refer to the glaring absence of women in positions of high political authority, she doesn't discuss the structural shortcomings of a system that has produced only two women Politburo members in seventy-three years. Instead, she argues that Western feminists have “tended to put too much blame on men's sexist biases” to explain Soviet women's absence from the higher echelons of labor and politics. Soviet women, Gray implies, consider politics a dirty business, best left to men. “In the glasnost era,” she writes, Soviet women “often note, with a touch of irony and pride, that in view of the totalitarianism and moral debacle of past Soviet regimes … their skeptical reticence toward political power may have been prophetic.” But the situation seems more complex. Consider that multi-candidate elections last year, the freest since 1917, produced a Congress of People's Deputies in which fewer than 15 percent of the deputies are women, as compared with 33 percent under previous governments. And in the recent local elections to the Russian Republic's Parliament, the proportion of women elected dropped from 35.3 percent before the quotas were removed to 5.4 percent afterward. (A pre-election poll in Argumenti i Fakti last year showed that voters considered “being a man” one of the most important qualities in a candidate.) These alarming statistics have sparked a debate among women about developing affirmative action programs during this transitional period to help more women get into the grass-roots soviets, which are so important to the new political life of the country.

Class differences are as important in the Soviet Union as in the United States, but Gray's focus on women from the “intelligentsia” obscures rather than illuminates these differences. For example, several of the women she interviewed express the hope that private enterprise and cooperatives will offer better conditions for women, such as flexible hours and improved health care. But for millions of women, the implications of the market-style economic reforms are less appealing. Indeed, I have spoken to many women who worry that reforms like radical cuts in the 18-million-member bureaucracy will mean layoffs of support staffs—which consist almost entirely of women. They worry that cooperatives, which are more like profit-making limited partnerships than communal enterprises, are requiring workers to put in twelve hours a day, thereby excluding mothers unless they are able to work at home. Other reforms, such as work brigades, which were introduced as an incentive to make workers more productive, are leaving the disabled, older workers and women, who traditionally take more sick leaves because of responsibility for children, on the sidelines. In addition, when women try to take advantage of their legal rights to work fewer hours or on a part-time schedule, employers are reluctant to accommodate their requests, and women then often find themselves under pressure to quit. Since almost all benefits in Soviet society (housing, health care and pensions) revolve around one's job, women are worried that they may well become more dependent on their husbands or families as a result of the reforms.

Perhaps the only perceptible—and significant—benefit Gorbachev's reforms have brought to women is the freedom to organize, to address the inequalities in the system or, as a Soviet friend of mine puts it, “to let steam off.” Olga Voronina, who helped form the independent group LOTOS, wrote last year, “In Western Europe and America women's movements have spent twenty years fighting for society to recognize their problems. Here we are only just beginning the process of democratization, and our issue cannot be resolved by decree. Until society changes its view of women and stops reducing their problems to goods shortages, nothing is going to change.”