Who Helps the Degraded Housewife? Comments on Vladimir Putin's Demographic Speech.} (original) (raw)
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Comments on Vladimir Putin’s Demographic Speech
2020
This article analyses the new demographic programme that was announced by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in 2006. The main goal of this programme is to encourage fertility, especially the birth of a second child. New benefits should elevate the status of wome taking maternity leave, who might otherwise suffer from discrimination in the family. The housewife is considered to be dependent and ‘degraded’. We argue that this demographic politics recalls continuity with soviet gender politics centred on the support of wage-earning working mothers. The programme provokes different critiques. Liberal critics argue that the programme is a populist one and it may have undesired economic and social consequences. Conservative critics want to encourage more traditional ‘woman’ and ‘family’ roles in society. Feminist critics argue that this politcs would reinforce both the inferior position of women on the labour market and gender imbalances on the symbolic level.
"How to Use the Maternity Capital: Citizen Distrust of Russian Family Policy.
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
European Journal of Women's Studies
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
Using maternity capital: Citizen distrust of Russian family policy
During the last decade Russian politics have aimed at stimulating the birth rate, most famously by the maternity capital program. This article provides results from the first extensive study of citizen use and attitudes to this benefit and concludes that Russian women and families harbor a deep distrust of the program and Russian social policy, as it sends contradictory messages combining paternalistic and liberal trends. Many eligible mothers have not activated their capital due to various bureaucratic obstacles they encounter. Contrary to the expectations of economists and sociologists, the results indicate that middle-class families have more resources to use their capital.
In post-Soviet Russian society, new cohorts of women have been socialised into norms which are structurally different from those of their parents’ generation. They consider their private lives to be arenas of deliberate planning and conscious choice. For them, planning has become a question of individual aspiration and responsibility—at least, for women with resources—while a ‘responsible’ and intensive motherhood cultural model has gained a prominent place in contemporary Russian society. In line with this, young women perceive child rearing solely as their personal responsibility. This, in its turn, implies a strategic attitude towards pregnancy and childbirth.
BASEES Annual Conference, 2019
Before, during and after the Soviet-era, Russian politicians have advocated pronatal policies to address the country’s demographic challenges. Since 2007, this has included Maternity Capital (MC), a state-funded benefit, that incentivizes higher-order births. Existing research has tended to focus on determining whether pronatalism has produced a sustained increase in the nation’s fertility or has assessed the consequences for gender roles within Russian society. Some authors also contend that MC is motivated by a need to reinforce political legitimacy through a constructed demography-related morality. I argue that, not only have Russia’s contemporary pronatal measures have failed to achieve their stated demographic aims, but that the state's pronatal policies, particularly its MC programme, have evolved in order to support Russia’s housebuilding sector and domestic mortgage industry as much as its demographic ‘crisis’.
Policy Experiment in Russia: Cash-for-Babies and Fertility Change
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2011
Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change women's reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women. Russia is facing a steep population decline framed by below replacement birth rates and a catastrophic surge in mortality rates. Since 1993, the first year marked by sharp population decline, Russia has lost about four percent of its population; on average, the Russian population shrinks by seven hundred fifty thousand people
In: Irvin Studin (ed.) Russia: Strategy, Policy, Adminstration. Chapter 28. L.: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018
Family policy in contemporary Russia has inherited many of the policy objectives and instruments of the former Soviet Union, while also preserving certain archaic aspects of pre-Soviet Russian family policy. Indeed, because Russian family policy has historically been contradictory in both its ideological underpinnings and its demographic and social consequences often mythologising past social and demographic realities- post-Soviet family policy in Russia has no clear cementing ideology. It is instead woven together from poorly structured and disjointed elements. Fundamental problem of contemporary Russian family policy lies not so much in particular policy instruments ( although these too are poor) or in a lack of resources, as in the inadequacy of family ideology for the country's contemporary challenges; more precisely, it lies in the primacy given to ageing social institutions and the state's denial of the fact that the family and its role evolve. The Russian state views the family, first and foremost, as a resource for advancing high policy or geopolitical goals. In the post-imperial period, Russian family policy changed many times over, fundamentally along a "more state" versus "less state" axis. Every attempt at state interference in the family and in the processes of childbearing or rearing was accompanied by a change in family ideology along a "liberal-conservative-traditional" axis. The phases of Russia's demographic modernisation (known among demographers as the First and Second Demographic Transitions) , as well as its periods of worsening social-demographic conditions, can be identified in both the Soviet and post-Soviet versions of modernisation. The Russian political elites of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods observed objective demographic changes in Russian society but reacted negatively to social innovations in familial life and maintained a conservative approach to family policy. The Russian state's approach to demographic and family policy is not new. Indeed, it was the dominant approach of developed countries from the end of the nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century. Between the world wars, when questions of national identity were central to the policy challenges of European states, politicians and totalitarian regimes sought out similar policies, embedded in militant nationalism and traditionalism, as an answer to their demographic, socioeconomic and geopolitical challenges. Pronatalism played a central role in these policies.
Women’s Responses to the Conservative Turn in Russia and Russian Social Policy
2021
Russia has experienced a conservative turn in gender policy since the early 2000s, especially since 2012. There have been conservative trends in legislation and policies along with a deterioration of women’s rights in Russia. The conservative trend is also reflected more specifically in developments in social policy. The aim of this article is to highlight how women have experienced and responded to these policy changes. Both resistance and acceptance have been noted: during my field work I have observed four kinds of responses. The article further discusses how the conservative trend might contribute to a social marginalization of women. The theoretical framework of the article is institutional economics with an orientation to agency as the changing factor. The most relevant part of the data for this paper is composed of over 250 interviews about policies on poverty and social marginalization collected in 2010-2019 from five Russian regions with social work experts and other person...
The Putin Era and Gender Equality: A Patriarchal Renaissance
Major scholars characterize the Putin era as a patriarchal renaissance, as an onslaught of conservative ideology that paints feminists as deviant in relation to both their gender and their Russianess. President Putin argues for protecting Russia from Western cultural influences that reject moral principles and traditional identities, including sexual ones, and for reversing demographic decline by boosting traditional family values, with the goal of increasing birth rates and establishing a three-child norm family. The regime’s close ally, the Russian Orthodox Church, labels feminism a dangerous phenomenon that threatens Russian civilization by turning women away from their central mission as wives and mothers. But has the growing gender dimension of nationalism had an actual impact on widespread public attitudes toward gender equality? There are countervailing arguments that could propel Russian toward enhanced gender equality: that young women welcome and strive for career advancement in a manner distinctive from their mothers’ pattern of marrying young and combining work force participation with family life; that women bring a heritage of high workforce participation rates and substantial human capital to the workplace; that economic realities compel close attention to earning a living; and that demographic realities boost women’s opportunities for advancement. Thus, economic and sociological reality as opposed to propaganda about traditional values may push in opposite directions. The issue of gender equality is of no small import, as cross national research highlights its central importance as a key indicator of tolerance, personal freedom, and level of democracy. This paper explores Russian attitudes toward gender equality utilizing several types of evidence: longitudinal World Values Surveys tapping Russian attitudes toward gender equality in 1995, 2006 and 2011; trends in women’s access to high level political positions as well as managerial posts in the economy; and shifts in women’s access to a wide variety of avenues of higher education.