Julia Ioffe: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m not sure. Anyway, this Soviet historian said women had to do these jobs, her work outside the home, household work, and raising the children, as if each of them were her only job. I would add, as if it were her job alone. Pretty much all women worked outside the home. That was also mandated in 1920 that women had to work. When they implemented the policy to try to get a baby boom after the war, they tried to make sure that women wouldn’t just be stay-at-home moms by tying food places and daycare nurseries to a woman’s workplace to keep them in the workforce because, given the catastrophic losses they suffered in World War II and the years preceding it, they couldn’t afford to have women stay at home the way they could in the West. Women worked outside the home, they did all the household chores, they did all the cooking, they did all the child-rearing. Let me give you an example. My grandmother, who died about a year ago, this time last year, at 96, she was a chemical engineer who ran the lab at a water filtration plant outside of Moscow in a little suburb called Rublyovka. It provided drinking water for a lot of Moscow and the Kremlin. She oversaw a team of about a dozen people. She had to be at work at about 8:00 in the morning, having dropped off my father and his sister at school or daycare. Then she would work. Then, at her lunch break, she would go into the surrounding forest and forage for mushrooms and berries. Mushrooms, I don’t know if you know, are pretty dirty, so when you come home, you have to wash them, you have to dry them, then you have to marinate them or preserve them in some way, cook them, very labor intensive. She’d go back to work. Then at the end of the work day, she’d race to pick up my father and my aunt from school or from daycare, from kindergarten, then they’d go to the store, the first store, let’s say the bread store, the bakery. They’d have to wait in line to order, then they’d have to wait in the second line to pay, then they’d have to pay in the third line to pick it up. Then they’d go to a different store to get the milk and wait in three lines, then they’d go to a different store to get meat if they could find any scraps or vegetables. Once they did that, they’d stop by their little cellar to get the potatoes or cabbage they had been growing in the brief growing season, come home, my grandmother would make dinner, feed the kids, try to help them with their schoolwork, and wash the dishes, get them to bed, then do laundry. She didn’t have a washing machine, so she was doing it by hand, boiling pots of laundry on the stove, using a washboard, then drying it all. If you’ve ever done that, it gets pretty stiff, so you have to iron every piece of laundry. Then you have to figure out what needs repair, what socks need darning, what holes need sewing because you couldn’t just go and get a new pair of kid socks in the store. She said she was just always so tired. All she thought about was how she wanted a little bit more sleep. at holes need sewing because you couldn’t just go and get a new pair of kid socks in the store. She said she was just always so tired. All she thought about was how she wanted a little bit more sleep. My grandfather, meantime, who was an engineer and worked in the city, he’d be coming back from Moscow to Rublyovka. He would take the bus home. He would get off a couple of stops early because there were beautiful forests in this area, and he would walk home through the forest because he wanted to clear his head and breathe some fresh air. He’d come home, have dinner, lie on the couch, read the paper, watch the TV, once they got one, while my grandmother was doing all of this. This was not out of the ordinary. By the end of the Soviet period, the average Soviet woman, after her working hours outside the home, spent about 40 hours a week doing domestic labor, which was pretty good because if you were a woman in the countryside, and you had even fewer modern conveniences, and you had farm animals and a garden to tend to or a plot of land to tend to, they did about 55 hours of domestic labor in addition to the work they did outside the home. On top of that, as we said, you have to look good. You have to make it look easy. You don’t want to be a nag because you don’t want to drive your husband away, or you want to be able to catch a man. By the end of the Soviet period, as one woman who wrote into a Moscow newspaper said, “Soviet women can do it all, we just don’t want to anymore.”…

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