MOSCOW, November 20 (Sputnik) — In an op-ed published last weekend in Britain’s The Sunday Times, columnist Amanda Foreman voiced her view that “Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of the most loathsomely misogynistic countries in the world,” stating that she considers the situation so terrible that it’s a “threat to world peace.”
“Only in Russia did I witness sexism bolstered by state-sanctioned menace and contempt,” she stated, noting her travels for an upcoming documentary on the history of women; she also stated her view that the Russian president has “encouraged a cultural war” which includes “nationalism” and “hard-fisted chauvinism” aimed at bolstering “his political war with Europe.”
Commenting on a sexist vodka advertisement and what appears to be a trashy daytime documentary, Ms. Foreman surmised that Russia has a “repellent culture” condoning commercialized sexism whose “Kremlin-backed” media sings “a chorus of sexist hate and defamation aimed at discrediting western-style democracy.” Ms. Foreman’s most inflamatory statements center around alleged rumors that President Putin is a “serial philanderer and wife-beater,” and that such imaginary misdeeds are even “perceived as positives in the weird psychology of the Russian electorate.”
Commenting on Russian history, Foreman states that the country has never had a “concept of individual rights, let alone the rights of women,” including rights to divorce, abortion, contraception and protections against domestic violence.
The reality of the subject of women in Russia is very different, constituting a complex mixture of achievement and stagnation, of advances and issues yet to be dealt with.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Russian women made revolutionary strides in advancing toward equality with men, achieving many gains which Western women made only toward the second half of the century. This includes, incidentally, the right to an abortion (granted shortly after the October Revolution, and then again from the mid-1950s onwards, the right to an easy divorce (from just after the Revolution), and legal protections against domestic violence. The fledgling Soviet state also initiated efforts to end the commodification and objectification of women in mass culture and in social life, which included the banning of prostitution and later, pornography.
Throughout the Soviet period, women also made tremendous gains in education and the workplace, winning the right to free education, with no restriction on their field of study, and achieving equal pay for equal work. From the late 1950s onward, women went on to outnumber men in the fields of engineering, medicine, agronomy, pedagogy, and other fields. Women also won the right to pensions at age 55, generous childcare guarantees from the state, and strict child support laws (deadbeat dads actually faced prison time for failing to pay alimony). In 1981, the Soviet Union signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, five years before the United Kingdom did so. The US is still yet to even ratify this treaty.
Women were open and active participants in the titanic struggles of 20th century Russian history, fighting alongside men in the Second World War, and joining their male counterparts in space, 20 years before American women did so.
In contemporary Russia, things are more complex, with a contrast of achievements and setbacks carrying the day. Among the achievements, a study by the Grant Thornton group has found that Russian women hold 43 percent of senior management positions in private firms, higher than in Germany (14 percent), in the UK (20 percent), and in the US (22 percent). The survey compiled data from 6,600 companies in 45 countries, and found that Russia actually tops the list of countries surveyed.
In high politics, Russia has a tradition going back to its very roots of women in positions of leadership, including Princess Olga, one of the founders of Russian civilization as we know it, as well as Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Elizabeth of Russia, and Catherine the Great, one of Russia's brightest, most powerful and most progressive leaders. Today women continue to have a strong presence in high politics, including head of the Russian Senate Valentina Matvienko, Russian Central Bank head Elvira Nabiulina, and Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs head Olga Golodets. In state media, Margarita Simonyan simultaneously serves as the editor-in-chief of the RT television network and the Rossiya Segodnya news agency.
Despite the positive statistics and the big names, there is no doubt that women’s rights in the country have suffered a setback in recent decades, beginning in the 1990s. With the collapse of Soviet-era economic and social support mechanisms, the import of commercialized trash culture, and societal descent into mass poverty, Russian women were hit particularly hard by the transition to democracy and the market. The worst hit were those that fell into the trap of prostitution, and the spiritual and physical destruction of millions of Eastern European women by this phenomenon is one of the greatest and little-talked about tragedies of our time.
Ms. Foreman has every right to criticize the problems of sexism and women’s rights issues in Russia, but blaming “Putin’s Russia” for the problems which have arisen over the past 20 years is somewhat illogical.
The subject of women in Russia is complex. It can certainly be argued that Russia still has a long way to go, with a 2011 UNDP report noting that Russia is 59th out of 146 countries on the Gender Inequality Index. Women in Russian continue to face issues of discrimination in the workplace, wage inequality, and unacceptably high levels of domestic violence. But while these issues are pressing and important, they are not an indication of a country which is “loathsomely misogynistic”, and they are certainly not issues unique to Russia alone.
In the 1970s, Soviet journalist Valentin Zorin traveled to the United States to film his now famous “America in the 70s” documentary series. Despite the tensions that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States at the time, Zorin framed his exposition of America as a “country of contrasts” –of wealth and poverty, of rights and lack of rights, of glitz and grime. In other words, he refused to paint his complex and difficult subject with a single, black brush. In the interests of objective journalism, we might advise Ms. Foreman to do the same.
