Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

6: Housewives, Mothers, and Workers: Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution

145 6 Housewives, mothers, and workers Roles and Representations of Jewish Women in Times of Revolution where else in the world is it then possible for a neglected Jewish woman to receive an advanced education?1 the study of the roles and representations of Jewish women in the cultural, social, and political settings of modern eastern europe has been confined to tsarist russia and interwar poland. This chapter recreates the composite picture of the lives of Soviet Jewish women, explaining their choices and beliefs under Bolshevik rule and balancing them against the experiences and voices of their gender counterpart. The analysis of the “gender revolution” on the Jewish street reveals the endurance (and perhaps even intensification) of gender tensions, exposing the limits of the government’s state-sponsored policy of equality of the sexes. while the revolution challenged patriarchal structures in fundamental ways and claimed to liberate women from the yoke of traditional society, it also enabled the perpetuation of certain conservative patterns of male behavior. it would seem, in fact, that despite the widely heralded political emancipation of women—the granting of legal equality on paper—their social emancipation largely failed. That is, in reality, Jewish women had limited influence on the principal and most powerful institutions in the Soviet public arena. This tension between political and social emancipation, between female activism and male conservatism, and between the different visions that men and women held of Jewish woman’s path to sovietization, marked the gender discourse on the Jewish street and shaped the shifting roles that Jewish women came to play in the capital of the Belorussian republic. The tension between theory and practice (so inherent in the Bolshevik experiment ) also played out in a particularly vivid way in the history of Jewish women under the Soviets. The clash between the theory of idealizing women as selfless warriors for 146 | Becoming Soviet Jews the Socialist cause, and the practice of confining—or wishing to confine them—to the realm of the home, considerably affected their lives and experiences. perhaps in no other Jewish community in the world at the time do we find such a fierce tension between a violent push for women’s emancipation espoused by Soviet discourse and the conservative thrust to keep them out of the public sphere as we do in the case of Soviet Jewish women. The tension between theory and practice was exacerbated by the encounter between the Bolshevik experiment, or the most revolutionary and brutal attempt to implement social engineering from above, and russian Jewry, a traditional and patriarchal Jewry when compared to other Jewish communities in western and central europe at the time. while modernization of Jewish women took place in prerevolutionary times, the Soviet regime’s insistence on equality accelerated changes to a dizzying speed. Besides effecting the lives of Jewish women, the tension between theory and practice regarding the “Jewish women’s question” almost certainly increased the anxiety of Jewish men in connection with the rise of the modern woman. male concern for the modernization and empowerment of Jewish women dated back to the Haskalah in the 1870s, but undoubtedly intensified during the Soviet period.2 After all, communist discourse egged on women to take power into their hands, as the Soviet state actively promoted gender equality. under the Bolsheviks therefore male anxiety escalated, in some cases even turning communist men against the principles of equality promoted by the party. moreover, for the first time male anxiety about women’s power became widespread to all social classes, including Jewish workers and artisans, who in the late nineteenth century did not feel threatened by the rise of a modern Jewish woman as did the Jewish middle class. These gender tensions emerge in the three interrelated topics examined in this chapter: (1) The modus operandi of the minsk communist agencies responsible for drawing Jewish women into the revolution, and the strategies they envisioned to solve “the women’s question” on the Jewish street. (2) male reactions to the “Jewish women ’s question” and the fantasy image that male political activists who operated in the Jewish sphere conceived of Jewish women in public and private settings. (3) Jewish women’s patterns of participation in the political, social, and cultural life of the city, and their involvement as “agents of revolution” in the building of the Soviet system. writing about Jewish women in the Soviet context is challenging not only due to the lack of preexistent scholarly work on the subject, but also...