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3 Gender Mainstreaming and the Third-Sectorization of Russian Women’s Activism What can be legitimately political depends neither on people’s perceptions of inequality nor on the wherewithal to organize, important though these are. It depends on what identities and activities can count as part of the public in various historical versions of a civil society. (Gal 1997:42) Before I moved to Tver’ in September 1997, I spent two months in Moscow, renewing my acquaintance with women activists I¤rstmetin1995 when I began the project of mapping Russian women’s NGOs. This gave me the opportunity to explore the effects of third-sector grants and funding on the women’s movement . During this period I visited most of the main women’s NGOs in Moscow and interviewed their directors and some of their staff. These activists were Valentina’s peers, women with whom she was at least peripherally acquainted. Many of them had been involved in the ¤rst forums of the independent women ’s movement at Dubna, and in the early 1990s they found themselves on the frontline of engagement with donor agencies. Agencies such as the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation,which arrived in Russia in the early ’90s, established their headquarters in Moscow. They had a new mandate to support women’s groups and sought them out. Foundation representatives were particularly glad to make the acquaintance of highly educated, Western-oriented feminist women such as these, and invited them into the ¤rst collaborations. I spent most of the time with one women’s NGO, an information center, situated in a four-story building in a Moscow neighborhood about a one-hour journey by Metro from the center. This organization was one of the earliest bene¤ciaries of foreign aid; it had received a large grant from the Ford Foundation in 1992 after the second Dubna forum. Like the Humanitarian Institute in Tver’, it had become a kind of clearinghouse, a resource center speci¤cally for the women’s movement. Its primary role was to collect and disseminate information (about grants, conferences, events, and activities of other women’s groups), and to encourage the expansion of the Russian women’s movement through distributing grants and running seminars on topics such as women’s leadership, networking, and NGO development. Twice a week I made the hour-and-a-half journey on the Metro across the huge city from my apartment in the north to the comfortable, well-equipped of¤ces where the organization was housed. Once there, I helped staff translate documents from English to Russian. Often these were electronic bulletins pertaining to new transnational campaigns; sometimes these were draft grant applications that needed to be translated into English. This offered me a good vantage point on the contemporary women’s movement, or at least, that part of it which had close links with foundations and donor organizations. Although I never became as intimate with these women as with my friends in Tver’, we had warm relations. Indeed, when they learned that I was supporting myself in the city by tutoring English, a small group of these women activists hired me to give weekly English language conversation classes. I maintained these relationships after I moved to Tver’ and throughout my ¤eldwork, returning to the center fairly regularly. As the nature of my work in the city became apparent, the center women accepted me as a representative of Zhenskii Svet (jokingly referring to me as a provintsial’ka—a provincial woman). They greeted me as Valentina’s envoy and asked me to carry materials back to her—brochures, newsletters, and other publications they put out. As our crisis center project got off the ground,they provided useful clues and tips about funding sources and helped us make contact with people. Through my time at the center, I got to know what aid and the third sector meant to Moscow-based activists and how it had transformed their activities. At ¤rst glance, it looked great. Surely these women were “activists without borders ,” to draw on Margaret Keck and Katherine Sikkink’s in®uential account (1998),1 successful pioneers, testimony to the new freedoms and scope for political action post-1989. However, once again I found that this success was a source of ambivalence and that the move from activist to third sector insider entailed some uncomfortable shifts in identi¤cation. These women straddled complex sets of relationships, between foundations, international NGOs, and their sister groups in the provinces. Although...

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