Copyright by Tatiana Borisovna Segura 2008 - The University of ...

personal circumstances have little impact on their careers, women’s domestic
arrangements were a key factor in determining career projects” (64).
Work or employment is crucial to women’s sense of identity. It provides them
with financial security and the sense of social importance. Many women prefer to keep
their jobs even if they do not like them for two simple reasons: 1) they need a source of
income and security; and 2) they are aware of their own disadvantageous position in the
labor market. The labor market in post-Soviet Russia was very unfriendly towards
women. Such extreme cases as rendering sexual favors in order to stay employed were
not rare occurrences. The perception of women as sex objects and not employees is still
very strong in the minds of some Russian men. Thus, the patriarchal approach to gender
differences goes far beyond the mere belief that workplace is not a woman’s realm – it
often results in overt sexual harassment at work.
Gender and sexuality
With the fall of the communist regime, sexuality in Russia became more
“visible.” As Lissyutkina puts it, the disintegration of totalitarian ideology provoked the
collapse of the image of the working woman as the ideal Soviet woman. She contends
that the image of the woman worker was overthrown by the ideal of the woman as
prostitute or beauty queen. Lissyutkina believes that this was a normal reaction to many
years of “forced labor, a hypocritical sexual morality, and impoverishment” (275).
Sexuality (and everything related to it) as a former forbidden fruit turned into the object
of mass obsession.
Goldschmidt argues that at the end of the eighties Russia started experiencing a
new sexual revolution. He believes that two factors were responsible for setting off this
revolution – finally relaxed censorship and the rise of a free market (321-22). The policy
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