As a result, women had to assume the role of bread-winners and protectors. The myth of a weak, traumatized man who needed to be taken care of came into existence.
Of course, the demographic imbalance was corrected in the next generation. The myth of men’s scarcity and male weakness, however, persisted. Two generations later, this model of male-female relationships is still in place.
“What do you mean you are sick? You are a woman, so just suck it up already.” “He’s a guy, he’s fragile. It’s your duty to educate him and help him learn to be more mature.” (I know that it sounds like the repetition of the Angel in the House myth, and how weird is that?) “Well, what do you expect? He’s a guy, so obviously he is whiny, fickle, and unreliable.” “Of course, he can’t hold down a job. What do you expect from a guy? You are a woman, just deal with it. Can’t you provide for the family on your own? No? What kind of woman are you, then?”
This is what women kept hearing from the day they were born.
For generations, women in my culture saw permanently immature, cossetted and babied men and powerful, strong women who had to provide for the family, find food (we are still talking about the Soviet Union, remember?), tend to the house, bring up children, and take care of older relatives. Enacting femininity became a rare luxury. You had to be extremely rich to afford to think about new tights (I keep forgetting the American equivalent for them, sorry!), a lipstick or a tube of mascara. Dresses were impractical because you had to work all the time. High heels, too, for the same reason. And everybody despised the profligate female who would waste money on a hair-dresser instead of cutting her own hair with kitchen scissors over the sink (after the needy husband and the kids were put to bed, of course).
(To be continued. . .)
Clarissa's Blog 
This is very similar to the story my friend Olga told when I asked her why she left Russia, and why she didn’t date Russian men.
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Clarissa, but did you notice that your argumentation, taken just one small step further, can be used and is frequently used in the FSU to justify and even glorify not working? 🙂
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Honestly, no, I don’t see it at all. People who don’t want to work do that without my arguments. 🙂 And everywhere I’ve lived, non-working women are the least capable of enacting femininity.
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Interesting observation, Clarissa. I wonder whether men who have a non-working wife may pressure their wife into not “enacting feminity” so that they need not worry about another man wanting to take her away. One woman I dated for a while said that a wife should cook so well that she makes her husband fat, so that he will not attract any other women and she won’t need to worry about losing him.
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I heard/saw this particular argument more than once: “we (FSU women) were forced to work, so now for us it is an achievement to have and to exercise the right not to work (and depend on men on whom we could not depend)”
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Yes, that of course exists. But those women stop enacting femininity in any way the second they stop working. They simply have no audience for it anymore (I’m not talking about the oligarchs wives, of course.)
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Now I am confused… First you claim you are enacting your femininity for your own (and your femininity’s own) sake, and than it turns out that enacting femininity requires male audience of more than one member (husband).
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For me, it requires no audience. There are some differences between what I do and what the type of woman you describe does, aren’t there? 🙂
Of course, there are crowds of people for whom enacting femininity serves a variety of purposes with which I would never identify.
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I’m an emigrant from Zimbabwe. I arrived in Australia in 1984 and boy there were some differences, in all sorts of ways. One was in terms of female authority. It didn’t take me long to realise that the female teachers in Perth had no authority over their classes. They basically had to resort to a pose of apathy, whilst stating that no focusing in class was an irrational form of behaviour if one wanted to get ahead. The Australian male teachers had slightly more natural authority than their female counterparts, but would often resort to clowning around to endear themselves to their students, rather than exerting control.
My culture was extremely authoritarian in all sorts of ways — but women who obtained institutional power had an equal share of it.
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