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CHAPTER 14 Gendered Experiences in Entrepreneurship, Family and Social Activities in Russia ——————————————————————————————————— Ann-Mari Sätre Introduction In the Soviet Union the state took responsibility for a large share of duties traditionally dealt with by families. When the Soviet system collapsed, it was expected that budget-financed, female-dominated sectors such as health care and education would be the first to suffer from the reduction in government funding. Simultaneously, reforms such as those reflected in the constitution of 1993 and the family law adopted in 1995 made it possible for women to opt not to work outside the home by establishing material obligations of family members to each other (Semeinyi Kodeks…, 1995, art. 85–87). The abolishment of the Soviet system for planning entailed a reduction in the number of salaried positions. Fewer employment opportunities, along with new possibilities to set up private businesses, implied that men as the main breadwinners were assigned a special role in the Russian family and now would earn money from entrepreneurship. However, although the changes in family policy seemed to suggest that the state had abandoned the norm of a two-income household, it soon became clear that such a policy was not realistic. Women continued to provide a substantial share of family income, and most never got the option of becoming a housewife. In any case, the idea of a sole male breadwinner seemed completely unrealistic for most Russian families. Thus in post-Soviet Russia, more responsibility for breadwinning and care duties was put on the family. The aim of my chapter is to shed light on the effects of this increased responsibility for gender relations in the family and society. To this end I will relate the gender effects to surviving and changing institutions.1 My ambition is to explain why the Soviet family model of a dual breadwinner and a female/state caregiver has survived despite considerable pressure. The analytical frame is based on Douglass North (1990), who specifies four main kinds of institutions influencing the way a society develops: legal rules, organization forms, enforcement, and behavioral norms. To this I will add the gender dimension. To gain deeper insights into these questions, I will use interviews with women and men in families where one or both spouses have been active in the business sphere, as well as exchanges with politicians and community officials on their experiences of and views on gender roles in Russian families in post-Soviet Russia.2 These questions were asked within the framework of the fifty interviews I conducted between 2002 and 2008 in conjunction with the follow -up of a project financed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) aimed at helping individuals to start their own businesses.3 The interviews were conducted in three communities in one Russian region that represent the situation in sparsely populated areas as well as in neighborhoods near a city.4 As many of those I have talked to wished to be anonymous, I have not identified the region in which the study was carried out. In general terms the economic development in this region has followed trends on the national level (Sätre, 2007). Changing Images versus Surviving Norms The Soviet gender order was strongly determined by the needs of the state and communist ideology. Because women and men were needed to build up the industrialized socialist state, household duties were to be taken care of by childcare facilities and public authorities outside the family (Clements, 1992). In tune with the rhetoric of the 1930s, women were portrayed on tractors, thus mirroring the images of the socialist woman current in that period (Carlbäck, 2005). Because the socialization of households was only partially realized in practice, the image of the “working mother” soon came to dominate the female identity, which became constructed upon the double burden of domestic care duties and full-time paid work (Gradskova, 2007; Khotkina, 2001; Kozina, 2005). The male identity continued to be built around paid work, while men took little role in household work. In particular, the economic reforms of the early 1990s strongly cultivated the ideal of a male breadwinner (Ashwin, 2006; Kiblitskaia, 2000). Simultaneously , there was a changing image of women that could be interpreted as a backlash against women regarding their position on the labor market. The most successful images of the ideal woman in the media were as a housekeeper or a beautiful sex symbol with a rich husband (Bridger et al., 1996...

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