The Frustrated Housewife

Reading three

In happy families based on love and mutual respect household chores are shared out. How willing are men to help their wives about the house? Read the text to find the answers to this question.

In most Russian families, the women take such complete responsibility for managing the household that husbands simply turn over their paychecks to their wives as a matter of course and leave the rest to them.... Ordinary Russian women take it for granted that they are the binding force in the family and sometimes laugh at the helplessness oftheir husbands. “My husband can go out and buy the bread or milk, simple things like that,” a waitress in an airport restaurant told me with a twinkle. “But I can't trust him with anything bigger. If we wanted to buy something really big, like furniture, we'd save money and decide on it together. Otherwise, I buy everything – even his clothes, I always go with him. If I didn't, he'd come home with terrible junk...”

Most Soviet women by now take a job as part of the natural order of things and find it hard to imagine not working. So strongly ingrained in them is the work ethic that there is a stigma to being simply a housewife. The weight of propaganda steadily emphasises the duty to work. One movie, Let's Live Till Monday, for example, showed a teacher publicly criticising a tenth-grade girl for answering a free-essay question: “What do you want to be?” by saying her dream was to become a mother with many children. The teacher castigated this as a shameful response. For many Soviet women, the traditional American women’s role of home-maker, mother, raiser of children does not seem adequate: they feel unfulfilled without a job. Even some whom I heard complain bitterly about having too much to do, said in the next breath that they reluctantly preferred the exhaustion of too many burdens to the 'spiritual death', as one young teacher put it, of being unemployed, bored and idle at home...

One of the most persistent reactions to American life that I encountered among Russians was their surprise that large numbers of American families could be supported by the father alone. Even middle-class Russians, who were my counterparts in Soviet society, were incredulous that in a family of six, my wife did not have to work to contribute to the family budget. Finances
in Russian families with children are often so touch-and-go even with both parents working that some women do not even use all the unpaid maternity leave to which they are legally entitled because their families cannot afford to live on the husband's salary alone...

Where the Americans are rebelling outwardly against having to be housewives, the Russians are rebelling inwardly against having to be breadwinners, a necessity that can transform work from a means of self-fulfilment and independence into drugery...

I remember the wry reaction of one veteran woman editor, whose years in publishing houses and on newspapers had left her with perennially weary eyes, when I asked her reaction to American-style women's lib. “Away with your emancipation!” she retorted. “After the Revolution when they emancipated women, it meant that women could do the same heavy work as men, but many women prefer not to work but to stay at home and raise their children. I have one child but I wanted more. But who can afford more children? Unfortunately, we cannot NOT WORK because the pay our husbands earn is not enough to live on. So we have to go every day and make money.”

Hedrick Smith. Extracts from The Russians. 2000

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