Gender, Politics and Society in Ukraine 9781442685871

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GENDER, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY IN UKRAINE

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EDITED BY OLENA HANKIVSKY AND ANASTASIYA SALNYKOVA

Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4064-1

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Gender, politics, and society in Ukraine / edited by Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-4064-1 1. Sex role – Ukraine. 2. Women – Ukraine – Social conditions. 3. Men – Ukraine – Social conditions. 4. Ukraine – Social conditions – 1991–. 5. Ukraine – Politics and government – 1991–. I. Hankivsky, Olena II. Salnykova, Anastasiya, 1983– HQ1075.5.U38G45 2012

305.30477

C2011-907523-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Olena Hankivsky: I dedicate this book to the memory of Solomeya Pavlychko (1958–1999) – a pioneering intellectual in the promotion of feminist ideas in Ukraine, and to my co-editor Anastasiya Salnykova – the promising future of gender scholarship in Ukraine.

Anastasiya Salnykova: I dedicate this book to my family: my mother Nina, who taught me to feel, my father Sergei, who taught me to work, my sister Polina, who taught me to teach, my husband Mykhailo, who taught me to love, my son David Bjorn, who taught me live . . . and to my co-editor Olena, who taught me to inspire and make things happen.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables xi Acknowledgments xv Contributors xvii Introduction: Gender in Transition: Legacies, Opportunities, and Milestones in Post-Soviet Ukraine 3 olena hankivsky and anastasiya salnykova PART I: POLITICS AND GENDER 1 A Mosaic Model of Gender Democracy in Ukraine alissa v. tolstokorova

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2 Discourse of Continuity and Change: The Legislative Path to Equality 54 marian j. rubchak 3 Electoral Reforms and Women’s Representation in Ukraine anastasiya salnykova 4 Global Campaigns to Combat Violence against Women: Theorizing Their Impact in Post-Communist Ukraine 98 alexandra hrycak

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PART II: GENDER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES 5 Gender, Nation, and Reproduction: Demographic Discourses and Politics in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution 131 tatiana zhurzhenko 6 (Re)Constructing Ukrainian Women’s History: Actors, Agents, and Narratives 152 oksana kis 7 Gender and Social Worth in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Civil Society 180 sarah d. phillips 8 Homeless Men and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Ukraine 204 anastasiya riabchuk PART III: GENDER AND EDUCATION 9 Gender Policy and Education in Contemporary Ukraine: Discourses and Controversies 225 olga plakhotnik 10 Gender Analysis of School Textbooks in Ukraine elena semikolenova

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11 Educational Achievement, Social Background, and Occupational Allocations of Young Men and Women in Ukraine 282 svitlana oksamytna PART IV: EMERGING ISSUES 12 Gender and Health in Ukraine olena hankivsky

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13 Masculinity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine: Models and Their Implications 325 tetyana bureychak

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Cash and/or Care: Current Discourses and Practices of Fatherhood in Ukraine 362 iryna koshulap

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Ukrainian Societal Attitudes towards the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 385 tamara martsenyuk

16 Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Ukraine: Tensions, Challenges, and Possibilities 411 olena hankivsky and anastasiya salnykova Afterword 440 olena hankivsky and anastasiya salnykova

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Figures and Tables

Figures1 9.1 Cover image of Work Training Grade 6: Technical Kinds of Work (boys) 235 9.2 Cover image of Work Training Grade 6: Service Kinds of Work (girls) 236 9.3 Gender distribution of university positions at Franko Lviv National University, 2006 240 9.4 Gender distribution of degrees and titles at Franko Lviv National University, 2006 241 10.1 An illustration from Fundamentals of Health 261 10.2 An illustration from Me and Ukraine 263 10.3 An illustration from Ukrainian Language 264 10.4 An illustration from Me and Ukraine 266 10.5 An illustration from Fundamentals of Health 272 13.1 Glory to the Warrior-Victor! (1945) 332 13.2 The Love of the Whole Nation for the Warrior-Victor (1944) 333 13.3 This Is a Profession – Protect the Motherland (1984) 334 13.4 With Intensified Speed Let’s Do Our Five-Year Plan in Four Years (1930s) 335

1 The figures and illustrations presented in this volume were drawn from images understood by the authors as public domain. Soviet-era propaganda art or illustrations within training manuals and state textbooks commissioned by the government of Ukraine, while attributable in some cases to individual artists, are considered public property. Reference, where appropriate, has however been given to both artist and year of completion of the piece or to the author/publisher of the volume or public archive/collection within which certain pieces are found or have been reproduced.

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13.5 There Are No Fortresses that Cannot Be Conquered by Bolsheviks and Stalin. Building the Dneprostroy Dam Is Finished (1932) 336 13.6 We Will Mechanize Donbass (1930) 337 13.7 Train Yourself If You Want to Be Like This! (1951) 338 13.8 Fight for New Achievements in Sport! (1955) 339 13.9 To the New Victories in Labour and Sport (1955) 340 13.10 Pioneer’s Tie (1961) 341 13.11 Ahead – To the Great Goal! (1959) 342 13.12 Personal Plan for the 110th Anniversary of Lenin’s Birth (1979) 343 13.13 Lenin Lived, Lives, and Will Live! (1967) 344 13.14 Stalin. ‘Dear Stalin – Happiness of People!’ (1949) 345 13.15 ‘Mazepa’ and ‘Doroshenko’ Vodka 349 13.16 Sugar – ‘Cossack’ Brand 350 Tables 1.1 Stages of Gender Equality Policy in Independent Ukraine 33 3.1 Women’s Representation in Independent Ukraine, 1990–2007 83 10.1 Household and Family Duties of Adult Family Members as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 260 10.2 Children’s Household Duties as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 262 10.3 Adult Pastimes (Inside and Outside the Home) as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 265 10.4 Children’s Pastimes (Games and Activities) as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 267 10.5 Children’s Leisure Activities Outside the Home as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 268 10.6 Professions and Types of Labour as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 269 10.7 Professions by Gender in Illustrations in the Textbook Career Education 270 10.8 Toys Held and Played with Inside and Outside by Boys and Girls as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks 271 10A Analysed Grade 1 Textbooks Used in Ukrainian Russian-Language Public Schools 277 11.1 Educational Attainment of Men and Women Aged 15–34 and Their Parents 286 11.2 Mothers’ and Fathers’ Educational Attainment: Same or Different 287

Figures and Tables xiii 11.3 Distribution of Young Men and Women across Areas of Education 289 11.4 Distribution of Young Men and Women by Occupation 290 11.5 Educational Attainment of Men and Women Aged 24–34 and Their Parents 292 11.6 Educational Mobility of Men and Women Compared with Their Fathers 293 11.7 Educational Mobility of Men and Women Compared with Their Mothers 294 11.8 Probability of Completing a Full Higher Education Depending on a Parent’s Level of Education 295 11.9 Social Class Status by Educational Attainment and Gender 296 13.1 Opinions of Men and Women on Who Should Be the Head of the Family 352 13.2 Opinions of Men and Women on Who Should Earn the Most Money in the Family 353 13.3 Opinions on Whether Society (Selected Spheres) Would Function Better if Headed by a Woman or by a Man 354 15.1 Opinions in Ukraine on the Human Rights of Homosexual People, 2002 and 2007 391 15.2 Opinions in Ukraine on Registered Same-Sex Partnership for Homosexual People, 2002 and 2007 392 15.3 Opinions in Ukraine on the Right of Homosexual People to Raise Children, 2002 and 2007 394 15.4 Opinions on the Statement: ‘Society Should Treat Homosexuals the Same as Other People,’ 1991 and 2006 395

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the Mykhailo Onufriiovych Samytsia Endowment Fund (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta), the Simon Fraser University Publications Fund, the Prometheus Foundation, Dopomoha Ukraini, and the Wrzesnewsky, Dzulynsky, Korbutiak, and Hankivsky families. We thank the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations for the administration of funds supporting this publication. We would also like to thank Marguerite Pigeon for her editorial assistance, Mykhaylo Salnykov for technical and emotional support throughout the project, and our colleague Diego de Merich for his indefatigable commitment and invaluable assistance in the preparation and completion of this edited collection.

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Contributors

Tetyana Bureychak holds a kandydat nauk degree in sociology and is an associate professor at the Department of History and Theory of Sociology, National University of Lviv. Her research interests include studies of men and masculinities in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, hegemonic masculinity, gender and nationalism, gender identities in the context of consumer culture, and gender representations in advertising. Olena Hankivsky (Ph.D., University of Western Ontario) is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where she is also the director of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy. Her research interests are focused on social and health policy. She is an internationally recognized expert in gender mainstreaming, health determinants, violence against women, and intersectionality-based analysis. She is the author of Social Policy and the Ethic of Care, co-editor of Women’s Health in Canada: Critical Perspectives on Theory and Policy, and lead editor of Health Inequities in Canada: Intersectional Frameworks and Practices. Her work has appeared in journals such as Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Health and Social Policy, International Journal of Health Services, Canadian Public Policy, and Critical Public Health. Alexandra Hrycak (Ph.D., Sociology, University of Chicago) is an associate professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches courses on feminisms, social movements, the collapse of communism, and consumer culture. Her research focuses on the role of women’s activism, and more broadly, gender in post-Soviet democratization. She has

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been a recipient of grants from IREX, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Her publications have appeared in edited volumes and in journals including East European Politics and Societies, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Studies in East European Thought, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Oksana Kis holds a kandydat nauk degree in history (specialization: ethnology) from the Ivan Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Lviv. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (in Lviv), an associate professor at the Ukrainian Free University (Munich), president of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, and a head of the Lviv research centre Woman and Society (an NGO). Her academic interests focus on women’s history and feminist anthropology of Ukrainians, and her book Women in the Traditional Ukrainian Culture, Second Half of the 19th – Early 20th Centuries was published in Lviv in 2008. She has authored over 50 articles published in scholarly journals in Ukraine and abroad. Currently, she is conducting an oral history project on women’s historical experiences in Ukraine. Iryna Koshulap is a Ph.D. candidate in gender studies at the Central European University in Budapest, where she is working on her dissertation ‘Women, Nation, and the Generation Gap: Women in the Ukrainian Diaspora in the United States.’ Her research interests include diasporas, women and migration, gender and nationalism, masculinity, and gender regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. Tamara Martsenyuk holds a kandydat nauk degree in sociology. Her research focuses on the social structure of society and, particularly, on gender relations. She teaches at the Department of Sociology at the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Her courses include Sociological Analysis of the Forms of Deviant Behaviour, Masculinity and Men’s Studies, Gender and Politics, Social Problems in Ukraine and the World, and Gender Relations in Ukraine: Sociological Analysis. She is the author of some 30 academic papers. In addition to the implementation of gender equality in Ukrainian society, her research and activism interests also surround the promotion of diversity, overcoming xenophobia, and racism.

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Svitlana Oksamytna holds a kandydat nauk degree in sociology, is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Social Technologies, National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are social stratification and inequality, intergenerational social mobility, educational inequality, and gender differentiation and stratification. Sarah D. Phillips (Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University. Her major publications include two books, Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine and Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation, and an ethnographic documentary film, Shapes in the Wax: Tradition and Faith among Folk Medicine Practitioners in Rural Ukraine. Her geographical areas of specialization are Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union (especially Ukraine and Russia), and the United States. Her topical interests include post-socialist transformations, civil society and non-governmental organizations, development, gender studies, medical anthropology, disability studies, post-Chernobyl health and healing, revitalization of the Chernobyl ‘exclusion zone,’ and the anthropology of pharmaceuticals. Olga Plakhotnik holds a kandydat nauk degree in social philosophy and is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at National Aeronautic University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She also teaches courses on gender and education and gender aspects of social policy at Karazin Kharkiv National University. Her research interests are in social critical theory and feminist methodology, with a focus on education, sexuality, and feminist teaching. She is a recipient of international scholarships for research in gender studies from IREX (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Open Society Institute (Central European University), and DAAD (Free University in Berlin). She has published widely on gender and education issues and feminism in Ukraine. Currently she is writing a book on Western feminist pedagogy and its applicability in Ukraine. Anastasiya Riabchuk is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (dissertation on the social construction of homelessness in contemporary Ukraine), and a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla

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Academy. She teaches courses on social problems and qualitative methodology, and her research interests are in the fields of poverty, homelessness, and urban marginality. She is editor of the Ukrainian journal of social critique Commons/Spilne. Marian J. Rubchak is a senior Fulbright scholar and currently senior research professor of history at Valparaiso University. She has travelled extensively throughout Ukraine and has written on women’s issues, gender, and identity construction in a variety of contexts. Her most recent publication is an edited collection titled Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine. Among her numerous articles is ‘Ukraine’s Ancient Matriarch as a Topos in Constructing a Feminine Identity’ (Feminist Review). Anastasiya Salnykova is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of British Columbia, where she works on her dissertation ‘Deliberative Democracy in Transition: Electoral Systems, Crucial Events and Discourses in Ukraine and Georgia.’ She is also a senior lecturer at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy where she teaches multiculturalism. Her research interests are in post-communist democratization and political theory, with a focus on ethnic relations, institutional design, deliberative democracy, gender, and health. She has co-authored such academic papers as ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Application and Applicability’ (Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics) and ‘National Identity of Ukrainians: Dilemmas Cultural and Socio-Political’ (in Ukrainian) published in Political Management. Elena Semikolenova holds a kandydat nauk degree in linguistics and is an associate professor of linguistics at the Department of Interlingual Communication and Journalism at Tavria National University, in Simferopol, Ukraine. She is also a director of the Tavria Centre of Gender Studies and a senior fellow at the Crimean Centre of Education Management. Her research interests are in Slavic languages grammar, linguistic gender studies, gender stereotypes in communications and mass media, and gender analysis of school textbooks. She has published widely on linguistic gender studies and gender education in Ukrainian and international scholarly journals and edited collections. Alissa V. Tolstokorova holds a kandydat nauk degree and is an independent expert on gender issues, providing research expertise to the International School for Equal Opportunities (ISEO) in Kyiv. She is a

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recipient of international scholarships for research in gender/women’s studies and social sciences from the ERSTE Foundation (Vienna), SAIA (Comenius University, Slovak Republic), Swedish Institute (Stockholm University), British Government Chevening Scholarship (University of Leeds), and U.S. Department of State, Fulbright Junior Faculty Development Scholarship (George Mason University). She has also received short-term training in gender/ women’s studies and social sciences in Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Czech Republic, United States, Kazakhstan, and Slovenia. She is a member of 15 international professional associations and networks, has presented papers at over 35 national and 40 international seminars, workshops, conferences, congresses, and symposia, and is an author of over 130 publications. Tatiana Zhurzhenko holds a kandydat nauk degree in social philosophy and is Elise Richter Fellow at the Institute for Political Science, University of Vienna, where she is researching the politics of memory in postSoviet borderlands. She has taught at the V. Karazin Kharkiv National University and worked at the Kharkiv Centre for Gender Studies. She has widely published on gender politics and feminism in Ukraine. Her recent books are Gendered Markets of Ukraine: The Political Economy of Nation Building and Borderlands into Bordered Lands: Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine.

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GENDER, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY IN UKRAINE

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Gender in Transition: Legacies, Opportunities, and Milestones in Post-Soviet Ukraine olena hankivsky and anastasiya salnykova

The idea for gathering an edited volume on gender in Ukraine originated from our joint research into evolving post-Soviet Ukrainian gender policies and our respective research in the areas of sex trafficking, HIV/AIDs, and sociopolitical transformations in independent Ukraine. Scanning the literature in support of these projects, we came to the realization that in most edited publications on post-Soviet countries, Ukraine remained on the margins or simply absent from the analysis. And in published works on transition to democracy, the impact of this dramatic process on gender relations was ignored. In studies that did attend to questions of gender, the focus of investigations was typically on women only. There was, in short, something missing that would bring these threads of research together. This volume is an attempt to remedy that. Here, we combine brand new research into the gendered impact of transition with a detailed focus on a single country, Ukraine, and we do so from a broad perception of gender that goes beyond women only to include men, women, and the relations between the genders as they shift over time. In the past twenty years, similarly to other former Soviet states, post-communist Ukraine has been undergoing what Taras Kuzio (2001) has termed a ‘quadruple transition.’ This transition has included four large-scale changes: (1) from communism to democracy, (2) from planned economy to free market, (3) from being part of an imperial state to building an independent state, and (4) from a suppressed national identity to identity revival (pp. 168–77). Transitions from communist to capitalist economic systems, along with the associated processes of democratization and changing social environment, have garnered much academic attention (Bunce 1995; Carothers 2002;

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Kornai 1995; Kuzio 2001; Linz and Stepan 1996; McFaul 2005; Offe and Adler 1991; Perelli-Harris 2008; Rose 1998). For Ukraine, like other countries in transition, ‘the time of transformations was not only a period of fast economic changes that resulted in the loss of everyday routines, welfare benefits, and job security, but also a period of transformations of cultural representations and changes of personal, collective, and public memories’ (Lukic´ et al. 2006, 301). In general, however, researchers investigating these transitions ‘have explored the establishment of democratic institutions and processes with no reference to gender’ ( Johnson and Robinson 2007, 13), even though all elements of change in post-Soviet states have had significant and distinct effects on gender relations in the region. As Kuenhast and Nechemias (2004) explain, ‘Societal transformation . . . encompasses more than political systems and economies. Social relations between men and women, young and old, rich and poor are also in transition’ (p. 18). Thus, gender – a fundamental dimension of personal life, social relations, and culture (Connell 2007, vii) – is a critical but often overlooked factor in examinations of political, economic, and social changes within transitional states. As such, it is not possible to adequately understand the economic and political transformations in post-Soviet societies without considering the complex processes through which restructuring takes place in the gender order (Zhurzhenko 2008, 9), that is, the socially constructed constellation of dynamics between and within genders. Despite the overall lack of attention to gender in the literature on transition, exceptions do exist. Beginning with Nanette Funk’s groundbreaking work in 1993, Gender Politics and Post-Communism, a number of scholars have examined the specific history and experiences of women in post-Soviet countries (Corrin 1999; Einhorn 1993; Jähnert et al. 2001; Kuenhast and Nechemias 2004; Marsh 1996; Mogdhadam 1993; Occhipinti 1996; Rubchak 2011; Štulhofer and Sandfort 2005), and they have investigated gender dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly (Duffy 2000; Funk and Mueller 1993; Galligan et al. 2007; Gal and Kligman 2000; Jähnert et al. 2001; Johnson and Robinson 2007; Lukic´ et al. 2006; Pascal and Kwak 2005; Matland and Montgomery 2003; Rueschemeyer and Wolchik 2009). The range of studies to date has enriched understandings of the role of gender in post-authoritarian societies and, in particular, ‘the dynamic interaction among gender and cultural, ethnic, social and political identities’ (Kuenhast and Nechemias 2004, x). The analysis put forward by many

Introduction 5

such scholars highlights the challenges of searching for ‘new identities and values to fill the ideological vacuum created by the collapse of communism’ (Marsh 1996, 14). In the process these researchers have challenged the basic assumptions and arguments about gender that still dominate in the consolidated democracies of the West. Eastern European feminists and other scholars working in the field have long voiced objections to the imposition of Western analytical, methodological, and political principles on the examination of non-Western experiences (Blagojevic´ 2003; Busheikin 1997; Havelkova 1996; Lukic´ et al. 2006; Slavova 2006; Marsh 1996; Muharska 2005). The inclusion of alternative perspectives in major debates about the discourses and practices of gender have therefore provided invaluable ‘insights and correctives to Western feminism’ (Funk 1993, 14). For the most part, however, work in the area of gender and transition – whether explicitly focused on women or utilizing a woman-specific lens to look at gender relations – has prioritized women’s experiences and the gendered effects of transition on women. Research questions whether ‘the transition to democracy and a market economy opens doors or erects new barriers for women in post-Soviet society’ (Kuenhast and Nechemias 2004, 1). It also asks whether and how women’s lives are better or worse in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Investigations to date, while paying some attention to broader issues of gender, predominantly focus on women. Accordingly, less attention has been paid to the gender order in which men and women figure and are ‘learning both new and old ways of living gender’ ( Johnson and Robinson 2007, 18). With few exceptions (e.g., Johnson and Robinson 2007; Gal and Kligman 2000; Štulhofer and Sandfort 2005), examinations of the gendered transformations occurring during transition in the post-communist region have, therefore, been limited to analyses of women’s lives. The focus on women, while important, yields only a partial depiction of gender. In its definition of gender, the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (2000) points out that: Gender refers to the social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female and the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as the relations between women and those between men. These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialization processes.

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Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova They are context and time specific and changeable. Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. In most societies there are differences and inequalities between women and men in responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken, access to and control over resources, as well as decision-making opportunities.1 (UNEGEEW 2011)

Only by taking into account this changeable, large-scale set of dynamics can we truly characterize a society’s gender order. Accordingly, examinations of societal transitions in many post-Soviet states should include both men and women and their relationships in all their diversity. Against this backdrop, the aim of this volume is twofold: to build upon the path-breaking work in the gender and transitional field – especially in terms of highlighting non-Western perspectives – and to extend this developing body of literature by specifically investigating the effects of transition on the gender order in Ukraine. As such, while a few of the chapters focus on the tradition of examining the situation of women, most pay attention to the continual development and concomitant challenges of more and more various forms of gender, a choice that highlights the multidimensional and variable nature of gender, including what Johnson and Robinson (2007) call ‘gender multiplication,’ in which ‘the market, globalization, a larger civil society and the like enable a diverse array of strategies and tactics that women and men may use to construct the version of gender that they believe will help them survive if not thrive’ (p. 2). In this way, the volume advances a relational approach to gender that also emphasizes the gendering of men’s lives. This latter focus fills an especially important gap in the literature. As Štulhofer and Sandfort (2005) have noted, ‘What is often lacking in the analyses of the gender relations in postcommunism is the fact that social reality changed drastically for men too’ (p. 4). Referring explicitly to Ukraine, Janey et al. (2009) have recently argued that ‘efforts will be needed to understand men and how they are responding to the demands of the post-Soviet era in a country that is trying to separate itself from its Soviet past, and redefine its identity’ (p. 138). Thematically, this volume is closely aligned with that of Johnson and Robinson (2007) whose collection explores several related questions: how gender is presented and performed after communism; the role of the state and market in establishing preferential gender constructions as well as in enabling new opportunities for gender

Introduction 7

identities, performances, and behaviours; whether state and market roles have changed since the communist period and in what ways; and finally, how transition from authoritarian state power to a weaker central state has affected gender ideologies (p. 6). Here, we build on these themes, with a particular focus on how the gender contract continues to be transformed through transition. But this volume is also a single-country study, presenting biographical, historical, and critical analyses of Ukraine. This choice is justified in several ways. In the environment of burgeoning academic literature on gender politics and policy in Central and Eastern Europe, the case of Ukraine remains largely unexplored. This is a significant gap. From the perspective of the world community, Ukraine represents a bridge between Europe and Eurasia. It is also the largest country in Europe, with a population of over forty-six million people.2 It has been referred to as the most democratic state in the post-Soviet space (Pifer et al. 2009; World Audit 2009; Campbell and Pölzlbauer 2010; Freedom House 2010). Indeed, Ukraine was one of the first countries to entrench gender equality in its Constitution (Gander and Magdyuk 2006, 37). At the same time, in today’s Ukraine numerous inequities and complex issues along gender lines persist that reveal the interplay between local history, communist-era politics and economics, and transition. Membership of women in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) is consistently low, at no higher than 8 per cent. In general, women occupy few positions of power in either the public or private sector. Furthermore, a veritable laundry list of disturbing statistics continues to emerge from Ukraine showing that it has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world (Maksymenko 2009; PerelliHarris 2008), one of the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in Eastern Europe (Betliy et al. 2007; Gander and Magdyuk 2006), the highest per capita prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (UNAIDS 2008, 52; Booth et al. 2004), the worst human trafficking problem in the world (Trafficking in Persons 2009), and significant rates of poverty, with 35 per cent of the Ukrainian population living below the poverty line as of 2009 (CIA The World Factbook 2010). The pressure of economic restructuring has taken a serious toll on the population’s self-reported health (Gilmore et al. 2002), life expectancy (WHO 2006), chronic pain conditions (Tsang et al. 2008), mental and alcohol disorders (Bromet et al. 2005), and levels of distress and anxiety (Cockerham et al. 2006; Kohn et al. 2002). While the number of

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people who have migrated abroad for work between 2003 and 2008 is officially pegged at about 233,000, information from related areas like statistics that track temporary migration indicates that closer to 1.8 million people did so in that same period (Hampton et al. 2009, 35). Ukraine has been among the countries most severely impacted by the global financial crisis that began in 2008 (Round and Williams 2010), and it is currently the third largest recipient of funds from the International Monetary Fund (United Nations 2010). All of these trends and developments make Ukraine a unique context for examining issues of gender vis-à-vis transition. In a short time, gender relations in this country have been affected in a myriad of ways, leading, in particular, to the feminization of poverty, a serious prevalence of violence against women, and growing unemployment and poor health among men of working age. Meanwhile, the process of forging an independent national Ukrainian identity has been challenging. Ukraine remains strongly shaped by its past and related political and ideological legacies. As Lukic´ et al. (2006) explain, ‘In Ukraine, its 337 year history of Russian domination and Soviet rule ensures a more difficult process of independent state building’ (p. 124). There is no doubt that Ukraine is considered the single most important post-Soviet state from a Russian perspective, as the buffer state between Russia and NATO countries. Ukraine hosts the Russian Black Sea Fleet and houses important infrastructure linking Russia to Europe, most notably gas pipelines. But the Russian legacy is only part of the story, as Ukraine simultaneously experiences ongoing pressures from the West as well. From a U.S. and European viewpoint, a strong independent Ukraine is an important source of regional stability (Woehrel, 2009; Kolisnichenko and Rosenbaum 2009). Negotiating these conflicting forces has meant that less attention has been paid to what are often perceived as secondary social issues, such as gender equality. In addition, the East-West tug-of-war, instrumentalized by various political actors (including politicians looking to lure an electorate with its own divided East-West loyalties), has created multiple divisions in Ukrainian society, including along the lines of gender. For example, NATO funding for Ukrainian nongovernmental organizations, (among them women’s NGOs in Ukraine) has been perceived equivocally by different sectors of society. Moreover, in an attempt to increase their public support, pro- and anti-NATO proponents have capitalized on women’s family sentiments by arguing that either a pro- or anti-NATO stance in the

Introduction 9

country could see Ukrainian soldiers sent to Iraq or Chechnya (T. Zhurzhenko, personal communication) respectively. Ukraine’s current approach to addressing gender parity is shaped by vestiges of Soviet ideologies. While Soviet gender policy guaranteed important political and socioeconomic rights for women and a commitment to full equality, it also perpetuated the traditional treatment of women. On the one hand, the Soviet ideological and economic system was beneficial for women, as it demanded full employment of the entire population, which eliminated the notion of a ‘housekeeping wife.’ The literacy level among both Soviet women and men approached 100 per cent, and the rate of higher education among women increased immensely. The Soviet state also provided health care and parenting support systems, as well as a network of housekeeping services. Politically, parliamentary quotas of at least 30 per cent for women were in place. As a result, in the mid-1980s, 36 per cent of members in the Ukrainian Soviet Parliament were women (Hrycak 2001, 153). On the other hand, the shortcomings in Soviet gender policies outnumbered their positive effects. The Communist Party claimed gender equality and vilified feminism as bourgeois ( Johnson 2007, 395), thus denying the necessity of further work in the area. Despite legal guarantees of gender equality, the Soviet regime perpetuated the oppressive view that childbearing and family caregiving should be women’s primary concerns. The formal equality practised in the Soviet Union led to the perception that women’s rights were fully protected and, consequently, that no reforms in terms of gender equality were needed. Arguably, such perceptions underlie current resistance in transition countries like Ukraine to dealing with issues of discrimination and inequality. The movement for Ukrainian independence, which started in the late 1980s, and afterwards the project of nation building, has caused a resurgence of nationalism. Patriarchal traditional gender images, roles, and narratives were revived, leading to what has been referred to as ‘neotraditional gender’ – that is, the idea that men and women have distinct roles in society ( Johnson and Robinson 2007). For example, Pavlychko (1996) explains that feminism played an ambivalent role within Ukraine’s nationalist movement for independence, one that became even more diluted after independence when state building became focused on both reasserting and inventing an ideal female citizen: a pure, maternal, self-sacrificing Ukrainian woman. As in many other post-Soviet states, a particular national ideology has

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developed in Ukraine’s process of state building that is creating a resurgence of traditional gender divisions (Lukic´ et al. 2006). Consequently, ‘at the level of mass consciousness, women are primarily seen as mothers whose place is in the family. Such stereotypes hinder real equality between women and men, and obstruct harmonization of professional and family roles for Ukrainian women’ (Von Struensee 2002, 10). Ironically, this is in considerable contrast to women’s experiences under a communist state where they simultaneously performed the ‘triple role of “mother,” “working class hero,” and “socialist citizen” ’ (Lukic´ et al. 2006, 249). At the same time, post-communism idealizes pre-communist gender roles and has driven men out into the business world ( Janey et al. 2009). Debates have ensued about how to respond to these essentialist trends, and in particular, how to forge ideas and approaches to gender inequality that do not necessarily draw only from the Western tradition as point of reference. Indeed, as Galligan et al. (2007) point out, ‘gender equality is a context-bound concept, shaped by the specific social reality that it inhibits’ (p. 14). And yet, Western influences, both in terms of ideas, such as discourses of equality rights, and in terms of concrete action in the form of powerful equality development organizations, have affected Ukraine’s approach and response to gender equality. For example, the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing in 1995, the ideological agenda of which was set in largely Western feminist terms, is now considered to have been ‘a watershed moment for the women’s movement in Ukraine, as activists began to realize that the state is obliged under international law to take effective steps to protect women from violence and that state resources could be designed to defend women’s rights’ (WWICS 2007, 1). At the same time, throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian state ‘formally acceded to gender-equality conventions – such as CEDAW [Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women] – but persisted in a quasi-Soviet maternalist approach to women’s rights that diverged from the norms and practices of international organizations’ (Hrycak 2005, 78). Initiatives were for the most part ineffective and contradictory, and the responsibility for their execution was left to underfunded government bodies concerned with social services. The contradictory stances towards gender issues among Ukrainian policy makers are captured by the very formulation of the gender equality provision in the Ukrainian constitution. Article 24 of Ukraine’s 1996 Constitution states:

Introduction 11 Equality of women’s and men’s rights is ensured by providing women with opportunities that are equal to those of men in the sociopolitical and cultural spheres, in education and in obtaining professional accreditation, at work and its remuneration, special actions targeted at women’s work safety and health, establishment of pension privileges, creation of conditions for combining work with motherhood, legal protection, material and moral support of motherhood and childhood, including paid vacations and other privileges to pregnant women and mothers.

Tamara Melnyk (personal communication, Sept. 2009) has argued that this provision contains a number of problems. First, it is focused on the problems of one of the genders, namely, women; only women’s health, work safety, and special pension privileges are addressed. Second, emphasis is placed on women having equal opportunities in the cultural sphere, even though they already make up two-thirds of workers in that area, and therefore need no further promotion in this realm. Third, Article 24 uses the words ‘motherhood’ and ‘childhood’ in tight connection, hinting that a woman’s role is primarily as a mother. In the 2000s positive developments in gender policy began to take hold when the Ukrainian government introduced a number of crucial documents, including legislation to promote gender equality, and ratified and adopted a number of key international conventions and agreements: In May 2001 a special presidential decree About Upgrading the Social Status of Women in Ukraine was issued on the matter of women’s equal rights and opportunities in public and political life. In July 2003 a gender adviser position was created within all ministries and regional governments. In 2005 the Law on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men (often referred to simply as the Law on Gender Equality) was passed, intended to secure parity for men and women in all sectors. Moreover, it can be argued that the 2006 Cabinet of Ministers’ Decree on the Concept of the State Program ‘On Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Ukrainian Society 2006–2010’ contained the beginnings of what is called a gender mainstreaming (GM) policy approach because it follows the basic idea of considering the status of both men and women in combating gender imbalance (Gander and Magdyuk 2006, 40–1). Besides legislative work, there have been three national action plans that have focused on gender in a host of areas. These plans have addressed policy making, labour market and career growth discrimination, programs for women victims of

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economic reforms, education for women about gender equality legislation, encouragement for women to participate in decision making and media, a focus on gender in the health sector, the establishment of policies related to human trafficking, production of annual reports on governmental actions, and monitoring of the dynamics with respect to gender issues. Ukraine is also a signatory of the U.N. Millennium Declaration, which has as one of its central goals the achievement of equality between women and men. Ukraine proclaimed that its goal is to reach an improved gender balance by the year 2015. Of course, a crucial event in the past decade was the Orange Revolution of 2004, which appeared to signal a decisive shift towards Europe (White et al. 2010, 346). President Yuschenko proclaimed European integration to be among his highest priorities and one of his first decisions in office was to create the Ministry for European Integration (Karatnycky 2005). In the aftermath of 2004, legislation and measures pertaining to gender equality came into being that were congruent with the standards and norms of practices in the European Union, for example, the aforementioned 2005 Law on Gender Equality and the state program on establishing gender equality proclaimed in 2006. Concurrently, however, frequent restructuring of state institutions has resulted in blurred responsibilities for the development, implementation, and evaluation of gender policy. The only state institutions working on these issues today are the Ministry for Social Policy, and the Sub-Committee on International Relations and Gender Policy, which reports to the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, National Minorities, and International Relations. Everything else exists on paper only (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007, 8). Currently, Ukraine’s path towards a European framework for gender equality has been interrupted with the election of Victor Yanukovych as president, in 2010, a change that again brings to light Ukraine’s position at a political crossroads between Western and Eastern power and pressures. Besides running on a generally anti-Western and pro-Russian platform, Yanukovych also sent a clear message about his stance on the issue of gender when he refused to participate in pre-election debates with Yuliya Tymoshenko, comparing such debates to ‘women’s whim’ (RIA Novosti, 20 Jan. 2010) and announcing that Tymoshenko should return to her kitchen (OSCE 2010, 5). Moreover, newly appointed Prime Minister Azarov has justified the absence of women in his government by pronouncing that ‘conducting reforms is not women’s business’ (Harding 2010).

Introduction 13

In sum, like in many other post-Soviet states, the fall of communism in Ukraine opened up opportunities to embrace democracy with its principles of human rights, inclusion, and non-discrimination, and in particular, to promote and protect gender equality. These opportunities have not been overlooked. The sheer amount of gender-related documents adopted in Ukraine, especially since 2000, is impressive; there are laws, national action plans, and parliamentary hearings on gender issues. State policy evolved from its first use of the term gender to the establishment of a state program on gender mainstreaming in just ten years, a significant achievement given the slow-moving nature of most government machinery. At the same time, however, formal priorities have not led to effective gender politics and practices. National and international developments and mechanisms are primarily on paper only. They are not implemented, and widespread marginalization and discrimination continue (Lukic´ et al. 2006; Buchanan 2003; Von Struensee 2002). Furthermore, the state rhetoric has not yet fully moved to a relational perspective on gender roles. Gender equality initiatives focus on protecting women rather than on creating equal opportunities for both men and women and changing the relations between men and women (Gander and Magdyuk 2006, 39). With the exception of fatherhood provisions in the Family Code, government documents tend not to address men’s problems in Ukrainian society, even though they are equally numerous and significant. Not surprisingly, then, despite the range of formal commitments and related programs and policies, Ukraine ranks 57th out of 146 countries in the 2011 U.N. Human Development Report on the gender inequality index (p. 140). (The gender inequality index measures inequality in achievements between women and men in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and the labour market.) The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) still faults Ukraine for the lack of state efforts in the areas of fighting discriminatory stereotypes, ensuring women’s representation and equal economic opportunities, and addressing the burgeoning women’s health issues (United Nations 2010). Despite this blatant contradiction between formal commitment and weak implementation, however, few researchers have taken a closer look to understand why such a gap persists. Janey et al. (2009) explain that ‘contemporary gender roles in Ukraine are influenced by a number of factors including Soviet ideology, Ukrainian history, the fall of communism, and

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dramatic changes in the Ukrainian economy. These elements interact within a larger context of a society that is in the process of establishing a national identity and distancing itself from a totalitarian past’ (p. 139). Yet, such factors, among other explanatory causes, are only starting to be identified, understood, and fully interrogated, making this collection a particularly timely and important contribution to the literature. The Ukrainian experience presented here will be of interest to scholars who investigate similar phenomena in other post-Soviet countries. It is true that it is impossible to generalize about gender in all the countries of the former Soviet Union because of the influence of disparate cultures, histories, and religions. As Rai (2007) points out, ‘Different contexts bring different strains and tensions’ (p. 270). Nevertheless, in writing about social identity and women’s experiences, Duffy (2000) asserts that ‘there are similarities shared across the countries of ECE [East-Central Europe] that entice scholars to examine women’s situations at a fairly high level of abstraction. All the countries in this region, after all, have undergone drastic economic and political changes since 1989, resulting in considerable instability and social turmoil. In all . . . nationalist inclinations have strengthened . . . In all, there has been a recent retrenchment in government-guaranteed benefits . . . and (re) surfacing of what appear to be very traditional and patriarchal policy proponents’ (p. 215). Not surprisingly, then, Galligan et al. (2007) have argued that ‘more comparative research remains to be carried out on the subject of gender and politics’ (pp. 147–8). Moreover, Funk (1993) has observed the need for ‘more thorough investigation of the similarities and differences across the postsocialist states’ to compare and contrast the development of ‘Slavophil versions’ of gender equality (p. 14) in the midst of political, economic, and social turmoil. By focusing on Ukraine, this volume will facilitate such comparative analyses. At the same time, an in-depth examination of the Ukrainian case enhances the knowledge of academics, the NGO community, and international political bodies like the United Nations and regional groupings such as the European Union of how ‘universal’ gender principles play out in specific cultural and historical settings. Indeed, there is much to learn from the Ukrainian context about how specifically Western notions of gender and gender equality are ‘appropriated, rejected or transformed’ (p. 1). This volume is unique in bringing together, for the first time, an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars and practitioners from political science, public policy, sociology, history, anthropology, education,

Introduction 15

linguistics, economics, women’s studies, and philosophy to examine gender issues in the context of Ukraine. Although this is the first Western publication on the issues of gender and politics in Ukraine, gender studies do continue to develop within this country. As Zhurzhenko (2008) puts it, ‘Feminism and gender studies have stopped being exotic in Ukraine: university courses on gender issues are taught, conferences are organized, dissertations get defended, articles and books are published. There have also been created several independent centers of gender (women’s) studies, among which the ones in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and Odessa are most known’ (p. 38). Here we feature research by leaders in the development of gender scholarship in Ukraine and in the West, alongside writings by new and emerging scholars whose contributions will continue to advance the field well into the future. The collection is far from comprehensive: our attempt has been to cover central areas of concern and their implications for a Ukrainian-specific gender order, including political participation, education, health, demographics, violence against women, economic inequality, homelessness, masculinities, fatherhood, sexual orientation, and gender mainstreaming. Until now, many of these areas have been woefully underrepresented in international volumes on post-Soviet gender relations. As readers will observe, there is no uniform point of view on offer here. Each contributing author draws on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches – statistics, ethnography, interviews, content analysis, to name a few – from both non-Western and Western perspectives. The contributors also bring to the volume a range of writing styles and insights. Moreover, because many of the sources (including government laws, regulations, and documents) drawn on throughout this collection are in Ukrainian, unless otherwise indicated, the translations into English are by the authors themselves and, as a result, the terminology used may vary slightly. The diversity and breadth of scholarship are the strengths of this volume, as is the variety of topics covered, ranging from longer-standing debates and discussions to emerging gender challenges and issues facing Ukraine. All of the authors of this volume are in agreement that the implementation of the gender policies adopted and the international documents ratified by Ukraine requires sustained attention. However, while understanding that gender equality cannot be realized solely through governmental instruments and interventions, the authors point out that all sectors must participate in the promotion of structural changes

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in Ukrainian society and especially in the development of effective educational initiatives to break down harmful gender stereotypes, such as those that have re-emerged or been further entrenched as a result of nationalistic discourses in post-Soviet Ukraine. A majority of the contributors discuss the importance of including men in gender equality work. Gender justice requires transformations of masculinities and gender relations in both the public and private spheres. Although in Ukrainian laws and concomitant policies, gender still tends to be associated with women, men’s issues are no less problematic and much less investigated to date. Finally, another key issue that arises across the chapters is the role and consequences of international forces. The contributors stress that international governments and organizations have been vital to the development and adoption of numerous pieces of gender policy legislation. At the same time, the issue of the applicability of Western models to Ukraine remains in question and is addressed by several contributors. As they note, the problem of ‘travelling models’ is that they are not automatically effective or appropriate to the distinct realities of the Ukrainian context. Moreover, international aid for the development of gender equality initiatives has often undermined rather than furthered such work by creating new inequalities and elitism among gender NGOs and even demobilizing existing civil society. Most importantly, these developments, as highlighted by the collection, raise serious questions and concerns regarding the extent to which Ukraine should be expected to follow and adapt Western ‘best practices’ and, to the extent that it does not, whether it should be evaluated as ‘falling short’ in developing an appropriate and effective country response to gender equality. Thus, taken together, all of the scholars contributing to this volume tackle the gendered effects of the Soviet legacy while addressing new problems and challenges, including decay in the general welfare system, the patriarchal nature of nation building, new forms of capitalism, and the power of European and North American influences in Ukrainian society. This collection furthers the understanding of the complex obstacles to challenges of operationalizing gender equality in a transitional society and, in particular, of creating contextually grounded approaches to advancing gender equality that reflect Ukraine’s needs. The volume is organized into four parts, each addressing an area of crucial importance to gender relations in any society, yet which have

Introduction 17

been largely overlooked in gender research in the post-communist region and Ukraine in particular. The areas are political processes and structures, socioeconomic transformations, educational policy, and emerging issues. Part I addresses the political and institutional dimensions of gender in Ukraine, reflecting on the transformation of gender relations in the context of a transitional society’s changing political order. It opens with Tolstokorova, who identifies the main stages of gender policy development in post-Soviet Ukraine and analyses the country’s overall approach to gender policy by comparing it with four major gender policy models in the European Union. In keeping with Ukraine’s complex political-historical situation, Tolstokorova finds that the policy model in use represents a kind of mosaic of other models. Next, in Chapter 2, Rubchak tightens the focus to analyse Ukrainian parliamentary hearings on gender issues and discusses their impact on Ukrainian society at both the elite and grassroots levels. Moving yet further from general aspects of the political system to particular issues of institutional design with respect to gender, in Chapter 3, Salnykova looks at the relationship between electoral rules and women’s representation in Ukraine and analyses the effects of two rounds of electoral reforms on the gender balance in the Ukrainian political system. Interestingly, she finds that an electoral system of proportional representation works differently in Ukraine, compared with Western countries, and that the potential for electoral mechanisms to assist in women’s representation depends in part on the will of Ukraine’s women’s movement. Part I concludes with Hrycak’s examination, in Chapter 4, of global influences on the rise of national campaigns in Ukraine to combat violence against women and the responses of state actors at the national and local levels to advocates who work on the prevention of violence. Like Salnykova, Hrycak points to the importance of effective strategies by activists for taking advantage of circumstances to further their cause. Hrycak shows that, in the case of violence against women, advocates in Ukraine have effectively inserted their issue into ongoing efforts by politicians to woo voters by demonstrating their allegiance to either Eastern or Western values. Part II delves into the underlying social structures and economic processes that influence gendered social relations in Ukraine. It opens with Zhurzhenko’s discussion of new demographic discourses in Ukraine (Chapter 5), particularly those surrounding the country’s very low fertility and high mortality rates (the latter especially among men).

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Through an exploration of developments in policies and practices designed to address these issues, she assesses their complex impacts on gender inequality and concludes that fundamental change in family gender roles and models of masculinity must take place in order to alter Ukraine’s demographic tendencies. This is followed by Kis’s critical survey (Chapter 6) of works on Ukrainian women’s history published in Ukraine since the early 1990s. Kis identifies the dominant narratives in these works within the wider sociocultural and political contexts and shows how some of these narratives, including that surrounding the matriarchal figure of Berehynia, have had a disturbingly powerful impact on political and public discourses. In Chapter 7 Phillips addresses class and the experiences of women social activists who struggled throughout the late 1990s to preserve their social worth. By following these women’s stories the chapter examines how calculations of class have shifted during the post-socialist transition. Phillips also assesses the effects of these shifts on organizing strategies by NGOs that work in the interests of marginalized Ukrainian women. Ironically, she finds that the women who run the NGOs, whose own social worth has been put in doubt by what she calls the new neo-liberal order, can find themselves playing conflicting roles as both advocates of greater government support and agents of further class differentiation. In Chapter 8, Riabchuk looks at the issue of homelessness and how it is intertwined with gender realities and their particular impact on men in post-socialist transitions. Riabchuk’s analysis powerfully demonstrates the connection between economic and political transition and social processes related to gender in Ukraine. Part III is dedicated to education, which is an understudied aspect of gender-related processes in post-communism. In Chapter 9, Plakhotnik explores the development of Ukrainian gender policy in the educational sector, demonstrating the superficiality of governmental gender equality initiatives. She provides a rich narrative about key problem areas in the educational system, including the lack of gender awareness among educators, and she engages in a critical debate with so-called gender pedagogy, which claims to support gender equality but which, in fact does the opposite. In Chapter 10, Semikolenova presents findings from her analysis of Ukrainian textbooks used in Grade 1 classrooms in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Showing the immense preponderance of gender stereotypes that these books transmit to young children, her seminal research is an eyeopener for gender equality-minded educators. Part III concludes

Introduction 19

with Chapter 11, in which Oksamytna looks at the impact of gender and social background – especially the level of education achieved by mothers, and not only fathers – on educational attainments and the transition from school to work in Ukraine, and how these factors have an impact on graduates’ opportunities for employment and achievement in professional, managerial, and non-skilled jobs. In Part IV we explore several emerging issues pertaining to gender in Ukraine. Hankivsky, in Chapter 12, examines the effects of gender on health issues in the Ukrainian population. She looks at the extent to which this crucial connection is captured by state gender and health policies and concludes that the government needs to change its current approaches and draw on a perspective that uses the social determinants of health to shape and direct health reform efforts. In Chapter 13, Bureychak provides a comprehensive overview of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukrainian images of masculinities, drawing our attention to the key implications that such constructs of gender have for men’s experience. The theme of men’s issues continues with Koshulap, who in Chapter 14 contends with prevalent Ukrainian discourses on fatherhood and their impact on fathering practices. By presenting findings from a qualitative study of new fathers, she shows how recent state support for more involved fatherhood has influenced men’s perceptions of their role in the family. In Chapter 15, Martsenyuk analyses the results of sociological research on homophobia and attitudes towards representatives of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities. Part IV concludes with Chapter 16, where the co-editors, Hankivsky and Salnykova, evaluate existing gender equality instruments in Ukraine and, in particular, the beginnings of a gender mainstreaming approach. The chapters in this volume should be read as individual pieces, each with its own theoretical interpretations and methodological approaches to a diverse range of topics. At the same time, we understand them as contributions that cohere within a framework that provides preliminary insights into the current situation and future challenges to the advancement of gender equality in Ukraine. It seemed appropriate, then, to speak to what might come next in terms of new areas of research and policy. The Afterword is our attempt to do so. We hope that academics and decision makers alike – among them, some of the contributors featured here – will pick up on the overall discussion of gender and transition in Ukraine and move it forward in their various fields.

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Jähnert, G., J. Gohrisch, D. Hahn, H.M. Nickel, I. Peinl, and K. Schäfgen, eds. 2001. Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe: Proceedings. Berlin: Trafo-Verlag Weist. Janey, B.A., S. Plitin, J.L. Muse-Burke, and V.M. Vovk. 2009. Masculinity in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Exploratory Factor Analysis. Culture, Society and Masculinities 1(2): 137–54. Johnson, J.E. 2007. Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 14(3): 380–405. Johnson, J.E., and J.C. Robinson. 2007. Living Gender after Communism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Karatnycky, A. 2005. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Foreign Affairs 84(2): 35–52. Kisselyova, O., and I. Trokhym. 2007. A Gender Analysis of EU Development Instruments and Policies in Ukraine. Kyiv: Network of East-West Women, Gender Watch. Available at http://www.neww.org.pl/download/EU_Gender_ Watch_Ukraine.pdf. Kohn, M., W. Zaborowski, K. Janicka, V. Khmelko, B.W. Mach, V. Paniotto, K.M. Slomczynski, C. Heyman, and B. Podobnik. 2002. Structural Location and Personality during the Transformation of Poland and Ukraine. Social Psychology Quarterly 65(4): 364–85. Kolisnichenko, N., and A. Rosenbaum. 2009. Building a New Democracy in Ukraine: The Unacknowledged Issue of Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity in Public Administration Education and Training. Public Administration Review 69(5): 932–40. Kornai, J. 1995. Highways and Byways: Studies on Reform and Post-Communist Transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuehnast, K., and C. Nechemias. 2004. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation-Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Kuzio, T. 2001. Transition in Post-Communist States: Triple or Quadruple? Politics 21(3): 168–77. Linz, J., and A. Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lukic´, J., J. Regulska, and D. Zavrišek, eds. 2006. Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Maksymenko, S. 2009. Fertility, Money Holdings, and Economic Growth: Evidence from Ukraine. Comparative Economic Studies 51: 75–9. Marsh, R.J., ed. 1996. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction 23 Matland, R.E., and K.A. Montgomery, eds. 2003. Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McFaul, M. 2005 Transitions from Post-Communism. Journal of Democracy 16(3): 5–19. Moghadam, V., ed. 1993. Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies. Oxford: Clarendon. Muharska, R. 2005. Silences and Parodies in the East-West Feminist Dialogue. L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft [L’Homme: European Review of Feminist History] 16(1): 36–47. Occhipinti, L. 1996. Two Steps Back? Anti-Feminism in Eastern Europe. Anthropology Today 12(6): 13–18. Offe, C., and P. Adler. 1991. Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing Triple Transition in East-Central Europe. Social Research 58(4): 865–92. Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). 2010. Ukraine Presidential Election. Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights: Election Observation Mission. Interim report No. 4 (18–26 Jan.). Available at http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2010/01/42521_en.pdf (accessed 12 July 2010). Pascal, G., and A. Kwak. 2005. Gender Regimes in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Bristol: Policy. Pavlychko, S. 1996. Feminism in Post-Communist Ukrainian Society. In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 305–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perelli-Harris, B. 2008. Family Formation in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Changing Effects of Education in a Period of Rapid Social Change. Social Forces 87(2): 767–94. Pifer, S., A. Aslund, and J. Elkind. 2009. Engaging Ukraine in 2009. Brookings Foreign Policy Paper No. 13 (March). Available at http://petersoninstitute. org/publications/papers/aslund0309brookings.pdf (accessed 2 March 2010). Rai, Shirin, ed. 2007. Mainstreaming Gender, Democratizing the State? Institutional Mechanisms for the Advancement of Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. RIA Novosti. Yanukovych Rejects Debate, Says Tymoshenko Can Show Off in Kitchen. 20 Jan. 2010. Available online at http://en.rian.ru/exso viet/20100120/157628829.html (accessed 12 July 2010). Rose, R. 1998. Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Round, J., and C. Williams. 2010. Coping with the Social Costs of ‘Transition’: Everyday Life in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. European Urban and Regional Studies 17(2): 183–96. Rubchak, M. 1996. Christian Virgin or Pagan Goddess? In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 315–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubchak, M., ed. 2011. Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine. London: Berghahn. Rueschemeyer, M., and S.L. Wolchik, eds. 2009. Women in Power in PostCommunist Parliaments. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Slavova, K. 2006. Looking at Western Feminisms through the Double Lens of Eastern Europe and the Third World. In J. Lukic´ et al., eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, 245–64. Aldershot: Ashgate. Štulhofer, A., and T. Sandfort, eds. 2005. Sexuality and Gender in Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia. Binghampton: Haworth. Trafficking in Persons. 2009. Country Ratings. Tier Placements. [Adapted from U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, 17 June 2009]. Available online at http://gvnet.com/humantrafficking/00-Ratings.htm (accessed 15 June 2011). Tsang, A., M. Von Korff, S. Lee, J. Alonso, E. Karam, M.C. Angermeyer, G.L. Guimaraes Borges, E.J. Bromet, G. de Girolamo, R. de Graaf, O. Gureje, J.-P. Lepine, J.M. Haro, D. Levinson, M.A. Oakley Browne, J. Posada-Villa, S. Seedat, and M. Watanabe. 2008. Common Chronic Pain Conditions in Developed and Developing Countries: Gender and Age Differences and Comorbidity with Depression-Anxiety Disorders. Journal of Pain 9(10): 883–91. UNAIDS. 2007. A Global View of HIV Infection. Available at http://data.unaids. org/pub/GlobalReport/2008/GR08_2007_HIVPrevWallMap_GR08_en.jpg. – 2008. Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic. Joint U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS – WHO. Geneva: WHO. U.N. Human Development Report. 2011. Available at http://www.beta.undp. org/content/dam/undp/library/corporate/HDR/2011%20Global% OHDR/English/HDR_2011_EN_complete.pdf (accessed Jan. 2 2012). United Nations. 2010. Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women: Ukraine. (CEDAW/C/UKR/CO/7). Available at http://www2.ohchr.org/tbru/cedaw/CEDAW-C-UKR-CO-7. pdf (accessed 25 July 2010). United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNEGEEW). 2011. Available online at: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ osagi/conceptsandefinitions.htm (accessed 15 June 2011).

Introduction 25 Von Struensee, V. 2002. Gender Equality: Legal and Institutional Framework on Women’s Rights – Ukraine. Originally published through the Public Interest Law Institute for the Transitional Societies Access to Justice Forum, 15 Jan. Available at www.pili.org/cgi-bin/a2j?_nameserve_vonstruensee). White, S., I. McAllister, and V. Feklyunina. 2010. Belarus, Ukraine and Russia: East or West? British Journal of Politics and International Relations 12(3): 344–67. Woehrel, S. 2009. Ukraine: Current Issues and U.S. Policy. Report 7–5700 prepared for the Members and Committees of Congress, 13 Aug. Available at http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33460.pdf (accessed 1 July 2010). Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). 2007. Women’s NGOs in Ukraine and the End of Western Aid. Available at http://www. wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.event_summaryandevent_ id=237920 (accessed 21 Aug. 2009). World Audit. 2009. Democracy Audit. Available at http://www.worldaudit. org/democracy.htm. World Health Organization (WHO). 2006. Mortality Country Fact Sheet. Statistical overview prepared by WHO. Available at http://www.who.int/who sis/mort/profiles/mort_euro_ukr_ukraine.pdf (accessed 22 July 2010). Zhurzhenko, T. 2008. Gendernye Rynki Ukrainy [Gender Markets in Ukraine]. Vilnius: European Humanities University.

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PART I Politics and Gender

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1 A Mosaic Model of Gender Democracy in Ukraine a l i s sa v. to lsto k o rova

With the results of the 2004 elections, when pro-European forces came to power, Ukraine for the first time openly declared its commitment to follow the European way of development and to seek membership in the European Union (EU). Governmental policy aimed at European integration was confirmed by the Ukraine – EU Action Plan signed in 2005. According to the plan, the state assumed obligations to respect and implement program documents of the United Nations and the European Commission and to promote equality between women and men in social and economic life (Plan dij Ukraina – Evropejsky Sojuz 2005, 10). In this context Ukraine’s movement towards European norms of democracy becomes a central concern to policy makers in the country, and this includes heightened awareness of gender equality standards within the European Union. Indeed, the protection and promotion of gender equality are among the key components necessary to meet the Copenhagen criteria, used to evaluate candidate states seeking membership in the European Union. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to examine how Ukrainian public policy pertaining to gender equality compares with various models practised in the European Union by tracing the development of gender governance in Ukraine. To reach this goal, I first outline existing EU approaches to the promotion of gender equality as summarized by the EQUAPOL Project, which studied eight EU countries and identified four main models of gender mainstreaming (Braithwaite 2005).1 Next I look into the history of the formation of ‘parity democracy’ in Ukraine, understood here as ‘a form of social relationship in political and legal areas, which guarantees women equal social status with men on the grounds of actual representation at all the levels of all power structures’ (MFYU

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1998, 7). I identify the main stages of the development of gender equality policy and spotlight a ‘gender mainstreaming paradox’ (Novikova, 2006) in Ukraine, which implies that some key stakeholders in the advancement of gender equality, while claiming to be its major advocates, in effect, turn into its principal obstacles. Finally, I draw conclusions about the correspondence between the existing models of gender governance in Ukraine and in the European Union. My analysis clearly shows that, in practice, Ukraine’s model is at best a mosaic or mixture of EU models of gender democracy. Its key challenges stem from the fact that the state has not yet sorted out its own national identity vis-àvis gender and gender equality. Experience of Gender Equality Policy in the European Union Between 2002 and 2004 the EQUAPOL Project was undertaken in eight European countries (Belgium, Spain, France, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), with the aim of evaluating the success of mainstreaming gender into European public policy. The strategy of gender mainstreaming (GM; for a detailed discussion of GM, see Chapter 16, in this volume) was introduced by the European Commission in 1996 as one of the policy instruments prioritized by its agenda for social policy. Gender mainstreaming is understood as ‘mobilizing all general policies and measures specifically for the purpose of achieving equality by actively and openly taking into account at the planning stage their possible effects on the respective situation of men and women’ (European Commission 1996). In the EQUAPOL final report (Braithwaite 2005) the existing approaches to gender governance were grouped into four principal models: the Swedish or ‘integrated’ model, the ‘transversal’ model, the ‘Union-impetus’ model, and the ‘generic model’ or ‘equality beyond gender.’ These models were also briefly outlined by Rugemer (2007). (1) The ‘Integrated’ Model or ‘Swedish Gender Mainstreaming.’ As follows from the EQUAPOL report, this model approaches gender equality from multiple directions, embracing socioeconomic, political, cultural, civic, public, and private aspects of society. It consists in applying a whole package of measures aimed at achieving gender equality as an ‘all-encompassing’ policy goal, together with a variety of gender mainstreaming instruments used at all levels of governance. Under this model, the responsibility for developing gender policy is spread across different departments and sub-departments and is

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shared with private and public sectors of society. To my mind the Swedish model comes closest to the understanding of GM by the European Commission and will be understood in this meaning in this chapter. (2) The Transversal Model. This model implies that gender equality policy cuts across a variety of governance sectors. It relies on the tradition of ‘positive actions,’ also known as affirmative action, positive discrimination, or reverse discrimination. Within EU law and policy practice, the term ‘positive actions’ is used preferentially to signify a wide range of measures taken to compensate for present and past disadvantages that exist because of discrimination, with the goal of achieving ‘full equality in practice’ (European Commission 2007, 5). Belgium fits this model most closely, with France and the region of Andalusia in Spain fitting to a lesser degree. As noted in the EQUAPOL report, although initially positive action measures were aimed at promoting women’s employment and human capital development, currently they are being applied to many other areas, such as in the fight against domestic violence in Spain; in recruitment policies in Belgium; as measures targeted at men, like development programs for boys in Ireland; or as measures for both women and men, such as those used to counteract gender stereotyping in France, Greece, and Spain. (3) The EU-Driven or ‘Union-Impetus’ Model. This model is new and it emerged in response to pressures for greater gender equality both ‘from below’ and ‘from above.’ On the one hand, it considers the demand of women’s and feminist organizations to approach gender from their perspective; on the other hand, it responds to the requirement to integrate a gender perspective as a condition of EU funding or membership. This model is significant for gender policy making in Lithuania, Ireland, and Greece, and to a lesser extent in Spain. One of the challenges that EQUAPOL identified with this model is a bureaucratic understanding of public policy pertaining to gender equality, which is seen as an end in itself with no connection to other dimensions of equal opportunity policies. Another challenge is that the conditions in the countries where EU gender interventions are being implemented may not necessarily be mature for the introduction of gender mainstreaming policies, which may have a negative impact on the progress towards a more gender-inclusive society. (4) The Generic Equality Model or ‘Equality beyond Gender’ Model. This model is aimed at advancing equality in a wider sense than gender equity alone. It assumes that social inequality extends across gender

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asymmetries and cuts across other forms of oppression such as class, race, ethnicity, age, and disability. This model promotes equality by attempting to restore the balance in favour of disadvantaged groups and by drawing on all possible sources of support, including financial ones, to ‘build alliances across intersections of identity.’ However, as is highlighted in the EQUIPOL report, adhering to this model bears a danger of losing the specificity of gender among other dimensions of disadvantage and treating the gender component the same as minority issues. This multidimensional approach is implemented, for example, in the United Kingdom. Main Stages of Public Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality in Ukraine Comparing Ukraine’s approach to gender equality with these EU models first requires an examination of the development and implementation of gender policy in Ukraine. Elsewhere I have identified four main stages in the evolution of state gender policy in Ukraine (Tolstokorova 2007a, 2008a). Here, taking a more nuanced view that better reflects this history as well as recent developments, I suggest that these stages may be further subdivided into phases, making six in all (see Table 1.1). Historically, a link is observable between these phases and the periods when major documents on gender issues in Ukraine were prepared, including reports on the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action, as well as two national action plans. The goal of identifying key achievements in the promotion of gender equality during the development of these documents has enabled a gradual reconceptualization of state gender policies. In turn, this has created the knowledge base at key stages for a dialectical transition to new stages in Ukraine’s evolution of gender equality policies. Stage I (1992 to 1997): Policy in the Interests of Family, Children, and Women phase 1 (1992 to 1994): motherhood policy Throughout this period women were perceived by the Ukrainian state less as subjects than as objects of public policy. In demographic terms they were lumped together with children, youth, the elderly, and disabled persons, and treated as marginalized, deprived, vulnerable, and

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 33 Table 1.1. Stages of Gender Equality Policy in Independent Ukraine Stage and Phase

Years

Developments

Stage I

1992–1997

Foundational period for state equality policy: policy for family, children, and women

Phase 1

1992–1994

Protective and family-centred approach to women: motherhood policy

Phase 2

1995–1997

Policy aimed at women as a self-contained branch of public policy

Stage II

1998–2000

Conceptual bifurcation of social policy into family policy and policy aimed at women

Stage III

2001–2004

Transformation of policy aimed at women into policy for the promotion of gender equality

Stage IV

2005–present

Policy of equal opportunities for women and men

Phase 1

2005–2008

Beginning of gender mainstreaming policy

Phase 2

2008–present

First steps towards fatherhood policy and focus on men’s issues

requiring state protection and support. In sociopolitical terms womanhood was conceptualized as motherhood. Women were addressed solely within the context of family, marriage, and domesticity, and their position was primarily identified in terms of their reproductive and nurturing roles. This approach reveals a common tendency in the Central and Eastern European sub-region to ‘address women’s issues only in relation to family issues’ (UNDP 2003, 13), both theoretically and practically. As a result, in post-socialist states, ‘the concept of women as dependent on men and as responsible for nurturing and rearing the children has been widely reproduced by social policies’ (Fábián 2006, 55). During this phase, issues concerning women, family, children, and youth were deeply interwoven and tackled by the same branch of public policy. The state looked at them as one social group, and took a paternalistic approach, aiming at the improvement of their position. This protective attitude to women is known in social sciences as ‘domestication’ (Baker 1984; Harsch 2006) or ‘familization’ (Holland 1970; Saxonberg and Sirovátka 2006). In my opinion, it may be better defined as a family-centred approach, given that it departs from the assumption that ‘woman’s place is at home’ (Kleberg 2007). It implies that women’s

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social position and public policies developed in their interest should be considered primarily in terms of family policy and the well-being of the family. This approach tends to limit women almost exclusively to the family domain, defining their social roles mainly in terms of maternity, caretaking, nurturing, and homemaking. It ignores the aspiration of women to seek self-realization beyond social reproduction. Instead of addressing family issues, the state shifts the full burden of responsibility for them to women. Among these issues are unequal distribution of domestic chores between the sexes, domestic violence, dependency on the breadwinner, and so on. This approach draws upon the protectionist principle or a safeguarding conception in relation to women’s issues that reinforces the rhetoric of protection of motherhood and childhood and promotion of the situation of women. Such a paternalistic attitude towards women set Ukraine back decades in history. Even the mother-centred Soviet family policy of the 1930s, based on a highly repressive ideology, never dared to claim that a woman’s place is at the family hearth, and it encouraged women to actively join the labour force (Chernyaeva 2007, 134). The protectionist principle was embedded even in the Constitution of Ukraine. In particular, it prohibits women’s labour in the so-called hazardous occupations based on the expressed claim that this is to safeguard mothers. In fact, this puts two hundred professions officially off limits to women (Kupryashkina 2000). Even more than that, Article 24 of the Constitution (adopted 28 June 1996), which enunciated equality of the sexes, is based on paternalistic language. It proclaims that ‘Equality of women’s and men’s rights is ensured by providing women with opportunities that are equal to those of men in the sociopolitical and cultural spheres.’ A linguistic representation of the concept of gender equality thereby portrays women as a dependent social group without its own political will, as consumers of a legislative system crafted by men. Viewed through a gender lens, the wording of this Article 24 raises a number of questions (Tolstokorova 2005, 10–11). First, why should opportunities be ‘provided to’ (nadayutsia) Ukrainian women? Are women seen as socially disabled individuals incapable of obtaining them by themselves and, therefore, in need of masculine guidance? And who is in charge of providing rights to women? Men? The state? Society? If men, why are they so privileged? If the stateor the society, why are women not subsumed as its integral part, equal in rights with others? If they are a part of the society, then

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 35

here they are presented as both givers and receivers of their own rights. Hence, this wording suggests that civil rights in Ukraine belong primarily to men, but that these can be generously shared with women. It implies that men control civil rights and that women have to receive them from this legislatively privileged group. Thus, women are viewed as passive receivers of social gains – which are owned by men (Tolstokorova 2006, 195). Were the sexes truly represented as equals in Article 24, replacing the word ‘woman’ for ‘man’ would not change its implications. Yet, is it possible to imagine that the Constitution would read: ‘Equality of women’s and men’s rights is ensured by providing men with opportunities that are equal to those of women in the sociopolitical and cultural spheres’? As empirical research shows, wording of this kind is perceived by speakers to be ‘linguistically unacceptable’ (Tschudi 1979).2 This means that men and women are not perceived to be citizens of equal worth. Hence, in its current formulation, Article 24 represents men as ‘the measure of all things’ (MacKinnon 1991, 82) and as the social norm, defining legislative standards for other groups of the population. Paternalistic and family-centred ideology is also reflected in the language of many other state documents of this period. The very titles of documents like ‘Long-Term State Program for the Advancement of the Situation of Women and the Family, the Protection of Motherhood and Childhood’ (1992, emphasis added) testify to this. Similar embedding of protectionist ideology occurs in the names of state bodies created to address women’s issues during the period, like ‘The Commission for the Protection of Health, Motherhood and Childhood,’ the ‘Sector for the Analysis of the Development of Health Protection, Issues of Women and Family’ (1993, emphasis added), and the ‘Committee for the Affairs of Women, Motherhood and Children’ (1995). The ideology of this phase, which sought to protect women and improve their position, had a narrow and ambiguous conceptual framework from the outset. Critics have noted that it emerged in response to the acknowledgment that the position of women had deteriorated in the immediate post-Soviet period (UCIPR 2006, 73). Born as a kind of reaction, the ideology lacked both strategic consistency and precise mechanisms for its implementation (Levchenko 2003, 63–4; UCIPR 2006, 73). As for the family-centred approach to policy making, it is argued (Levchenko 2003, 66) that the positioning of women’s issues within the family domain is unacceptable as long as women have their own interestsoutside the family, and therefore public policy must address

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more than issues of family and children if it is to meet women’s needs. The ideological conflation of ‘womanhood’ and ‘motherhood’ also neglects the situation of childless women. At the same time, this approach waters down the role of fathers and their rights. In its entwining of a protectionist principle and a family-centred approach, the policy approach of this phase also exacerbated conflicts between the private and the public spheres and strengthened the belief that only women are competent to care for the family. phase 2 (1995 to 1997): policy aimed at women as a self-contained branch of public policy The participation of the Ukrainian delegation in the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing in 1995, and the work on its final documents became a cornerstone in the development of public policy in the interests of women and men in Ukraine. Beijing provided the impetus for the reorganization of the national machinery for the promotion of gender equality and enabled the conceptualization of a selfcontained branch of public policy to address women’s policy needs, one that was independent from policies in the interests of the family and children. Beijing also created the conditions for the transition to a new stage in the evolution of national gender ideology. This period was benchmarked by the foundation in 1996 of the Ministry for Family and Youth, which replaced the former Committee for Issues of Women, Motherhood and Childhood at the Office of the President of Ukraine. This measure showed that women’s issues had acquired for Ukrainian decision makers the significance of policy issues requiring institutionalization at the highest levels of executive power. Within the new ministry an Office for Women’s Issues was established, itself consisting of two departments – one targeted at the promotion of the sociojuridical work with women, the other at encouraging the civic, cultural, and educational participation of women. The creation of these departments reflected an emerging awareness of the necessity of developingseparate public policies aimed at women. The ministry’s name, however, was evidence that the family-centred approach was still dominant. The parliamentary hearings of 1995 were another landmark moment of this phase. They were focused on the implementation of the CEDAW in Ukraine. What emerged was a list of state institutions responsible for the development of national equality policy, as well as practical recommendations for the realization of this goal. This created the

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 37

conditions for the formation of a systemic control mechanism for the promotion of gender equality in Ukraine (see more in Tolstokorova 2007a). This phase can be said to have ended with the publication of a research report on the issue of the development of gender democracy in transitional Ukraine (MFYU 1998), which marked the first attempt by the state to apply a gender-sensitive approach to the analysis of Ukrainian society, incorporating the issue of gender democracy enhancement into the societal agenda and outlining its key challenges. Stage II (1998 to 2000): Bifurcation of Social Policy into Family Policy and Policy Aimed at Women In conceptual terms, the second stage represents a period of bifurcation of social policy into policies in the interests of the family and children, on the one hand, and policies in the interests of women, on the other (UNDP 2006, 12). In practice, each of these emerging branches of public policy was conceptualized by separate strategic documents. The first was backed up by ‘The Conception of State Family Policy’ and the all-Ukrainian program ‘The Ukrainian Family,’ the second by ‘Draft Conception of Public Policy for the Promotion of the Situation of Women’ and ‘Draft National Strategies for the Promotion of the Situation of Women.’ The two latter documents have never been adopted, signalling a missed opportunity in Ukraine to secure a conceptual framework for state policies for the promotion of gender equality. At the same time, these two documents had already lost their social currency by the time they might have come into being, insofar as they were inherently contradictory, placing the language of equality and equal opportunities for women alongside the outdated language of paternalism and state protection (Levchenko 2003, 63–4). Changes in public awareness regarding the status of women throughout this stage were thus inconsistent. Although increasingly acknowledged as targets of public policy and addressed beyond the family-centred ideology, women were still viewed in line with the protective principle and as objects of governance, requiring the protection of the state, but not yet as self-sufficient players. This duality was showcased in phrasing enshrined in strategic documents adopted during this stage. Thus, the ‘Declaration of a Conceptual Framework for State Policy towards the Family and Women in Ukraine,’ adopted in 1999, confirmed that the state assumed the responsibility to guarantee equal rights and possibilities to the sexes, to eliminate all forms of

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discrimination against women, and to promote their ample and equitable participation in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the society. At the same time, it limited the magnitude of ‘ample’ equality for women by highlighting the area of domesticity as their main sphere of interest and their civil responsibilities as being focused on family and children (UCIPR 2006, 77). Stage III (2001 to 2004): Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality In early 2001 came a new milestone in the evolution of public policy for gender equality: the Presidential Decree on the Promotion of Social Status of Women in Ukraine. This document created a conceptual basis for transition to a new stage of development of gender democracy in Ukraine by tying the traditional objective of promotion of the status of women to a new goal of promoting gender equality in Ukrainian society. More importantly, it conceptualized women’s issues outside the rhetoric of children, family, and youth (UCIPR 2006, 81). The decree placed a great deal of emphasis on the promotion of equal opportunities for women to take part in the social and political life of society on a par with men as a priority for public policy. It was the first time that women were represented as autonomous subjects of public policy, albeit passive ones – still beneficiaries of public policy rather than active players, insofar as the state was still expected to promote the situation of women and create opportunities for them. As in the earlier stages, the conceptual evolution of public policy in the interests of women and men was mirrored in the language of state documents. Thus, the National Action Plan for 2001–2005 explicitly included the goal of ‘promoting gender equality in society.’ Public discussions during this period brought the rhetoric of women’s rights to the forefront. Also, during this period a project co-sponsored by several Canadian government agencies resulted in the development of a framework for gender equality policy.3 Called ‘Gender Equality in Ukraine in the Period of Current Socio-Economic Transformations,’ and realized throughout 2002–03,4 the project had three goals: (1) to conduct a robust analysis of the advancement of gender democracy in Ukraine; (2) to inform society about the progress of gender equality policy both nationally and internationally; and (3) to develop viable strategies for the promotion of equal rights and opportunities of women and men. In the Ukrainian context this was a unique

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research experience, since it was the first gender-targeted nationwide project. It began with all-nation sociological survey and included indepth interviews with twenty experts in gender policy as well as focus-groupdiscussions with civil servants in five regional centres: Kyiv (centre), Odessa (South), Kharkiv (North-East), Donetsk (East), and Lviv (West). Two program documents emerged from this work: the Draft Strategic Directions of State Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality in Ukraine, and, as a supplement, Recommendations for the Implementation of Strategic Directions of State Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality in Ukraine. The former document, based on the analysis of the latest Ukrainian statistics, public surveys, and expert evaluations offered a coherent, well-balanced conceptual framework for the advancement of gender equality policy in Ukraine, taking into account transformations in gender consciousness in Ukrainian society over the previous decade. It was a strategic paper aimed at harmonizing national theory and practice of gender policy making with recent conceptualizations of gender ideology from the international sphere and reinforcing the gender dimension of Ukraine’s integration into the EU framework. It outlined four major pillars for the development of gender democracy in Ukraine and set up a political goal for their implementation. The four pillars of this approach are (1) the promotion of gender parity in the quality and level of life; (2) the advancement of equal rights and opportunities of women and men in major domains of life, including human rights and law, labour and economic relations, political and civic life, decision making, private (family) life, health care, and education and science; (3) the enhancement of gender roles and the transformation of stereotypes; and (4) the eradication of violence and human trafficking. The major breakthrough in the Draft Strategic Directions of State Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality in Ukraine was the acknowledgment of the principle of gender mainstreaming as the appropriate conceptual framework for gender equality policy in Ukraine. The document also defined the promotion of gender equality as a complex, systemic, and targeted activity of the state, set out its basic principles and the criteria for evaluation of how well the state carried out this promotion, identified the major goals, and put forth its key priorities (Tolstokorova 2008a, 2009a). These evaluation criteria were framed as the ‘3Rs principle’ – rivnist’ (equality), rozvytok (development), and reorghanizacia (reorganization). Equality in this document was understood

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as ‘ensurance for all people, irrespective of sex, race, and capabilities, of equal opportunities for positive effects of the equal opportunities policy.’ Development stood for ‘multiplication of possibilities for choice.’ Hence, gender in development was conceptualized as the elimination of gender inequality in social, economic, and political domains to create a foundation of sustainable development for society. Reorganization, meanwhile, implied a complex institutional transformation of the national machinery for the promotion of gender equality based on a dual-track approach, reconciling the principles of gender equity and advancement of the status of women. These provisions were reflected in a research monograph on gender mainstreaming, produced by the State Institute for Family and Youth (SIFY 2003). Its Chapter 3 provided a rigorous analysis of the content and main pillars of gender mainstreaming as an efficient instrument for public policy, examined earlier in my larger work (Tolstokorova 2003). Although the two documents have never reached any branch of the national machinery for the promotion of gender equality, those few experts who had an opportunity to familiarize themselves with them noted that passing them into law could help to overcome the precarious situation of the ‘absence of gender policy’ in Ukraine. They proposed that the definition of gender policy offered in the ‘Draft Strategies’ should be accepted as a starting point for the implementation of such a policy (Levchenko 2003, 78). Indeed, if the documents were to be adopted as a conceptual framework for the promotion of gender democracy in Ukraine, they could enable its transition to a new stage, hallmarked by the implementation of European standards in the development of gender policy. At the time they were drafted, however, they were obviously too forward-looking, because neither the state nor the society were ready to progress to a new stage of gender democracy. Stage IV (2005 to Present): Policy of Equal Opportunities for Women and Men phase 1 (2005 to 2008): beginning of gender mainstreaming policy During Phase I of this most recent stage, some elements of gender mainstreaming began to be enshrined in several key documents in Ukraine as well as through a growing body of legislative and administrative measures, although these fell short of officially acknowledging gender mainstreaming as a policy principle.

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 41

As a side note, there is no direct equivalent to the concept of gender mainstreaming in the Ukrainian language, which is why the UNDP office in Kyiv introduced the translation of the term into Ukrainian in two ways: first as kompleksny pidhid do problemy rivnosti zhinok i cholovikiv, or complex approach to the issue of equality between women and men, and later on, as henderne integhruvannya, or gender integration. Thus, gender experts’ preference for the term gender integration over gender mainstreaming in Ukrainian public policy (as discussed in chapter 16 in this volume) is based on a terminological ambiguity, rather than on the absence of mainstreaming practices. In July 2005 the Presidential Decree on the Perfection of the Work of Central and Local Government Bodies in the Promotion of Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men was issued. Developed by the Ministry of Justice, it aimed to mainstream gender into the activity of all branches of government from top to bottom and outlined the functions of top state officials with regard to the promotion of gender equality. In particular, decision makers at the national and local levels were obliged to assign one of their deputies to carry out gender equality policies, and their duties included the integration of a gender component into the activity of their respective branches of government. Another hallmark of this period was the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine) in September 2005 of the Law on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men (often simply referred to as the Gender Equality Law), which came into effect in January 2006 after seven years of lobbying by grassroots women’s organizations. In compliance with GM principles, the key objective of the law was the advancement of equality between women and men in all domains of social life. Article 4 stipulates the necessity to conduct a gender analysis of existing national legislation, also in line with GM. Additionally, the law incorporated recommendations by experts from the Council of Europe regarding the realization of a GM strategy in the Ukrainian context. Critics of this law have argued that it is incapable of tangibly counteracting gender discrimination in society because it is only of a framework character and has neither an efficient mechanism for its implementation nor sanctions for its breach. After the adoption of the law, various amendments were required to the Civil, Labour, and Criminal codes. This resulted in the adoption of a number of new laws throughout 2007–08 to bring the codes into compliance with the Gender Equality Law. In 2009, based on a decree of the minister of justice,

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a complex analysis of the 2002 Family Code of Ukraine was undertaken to ensure that it complied with the principle of equality between women and men. The analysis focused on the legal foundations of marriage and property rights of family members, including children, foster parents, and other family members. A resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, issued in April 2006, was also important for the successful implementation of GM principles in Ukrainian public policy. It required the gender analysis of national legislation mentioned earlier with the intention of bringing this legislation into compliance with the Gender Equality Law. Already, a range of national laws have been evaluated and revised. In 2007 alone, ten state laws underwent gender evaluation.5 Efficient realization of a GM strategy in Ukraine is impossible without its implementation at the local and regional levels of governance. There are departments of affairs of family and youth at the regional, municipal, and district levels, and these are responsible for the implementation of state policies for equal opportunities in their territories. In 2006, in the course of a pilot project aimed at the enhancement of gender equality policy in four cities in Ukraine, a set of methodological recommendations was developed. They were targeted at the realization of gender equality policy at the municipal level – a first attempt at mainstreaming gender in local governance (Tolstokorova 2007b, 16). The project provided a unique opportunity to implement such innovative gender-awareness practices as gender-sensitive regional budgets; gender awareness in the organization of local information campaigns and task-oriented programs; and gender literacy training for civil servants and representatives of the media and business at the municipal level. Out of this came regional gender portraits – napshots that identified the main challenges to policy implementation and priority directions for further progress in the geographical regions under study. There are, therefore, grounds to claim that throughout the first phase of Stage IV Ukraine made some tangible progress in the promotion of gender parity in key areas of life. It began to incorporate European norms of gender equality into its legal apparatus and made its first attempts to implement GM in major sectors of national governance. However, one paradox in the implementation of gender mainstreaming in Ukraine, which has also emerged in the Baltic states (Novikova 2006, 158–9), is the prevalence of an ‘expert bureaucratic model,’ as opposed to a ‘participatory-democratic model’ (Beveridge

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et al. 2000, 386). The development of national strategies for the advancement of gender democracy has been the prerogative of a narrow, closed circle of experts and civil servants, the so-called femocrats and non-governmental individuals (NGIs) who keep a tight grip over the funding – state and especially international – allocated for the promotion of gender equality. Their activities proceed without transparency or accountability to civil society, the academic community, the women’s movement, or the general public. The result is unequal, uncompetitive, and unfair distribution of scarce resources in favour of the ‘fully funded different few.’ This creates constraints to the advancement of the principles of democratic and gender-equitable governance in Ukraine. This opinion is confirmed by experts who question, for example, how truly the coordination councils, which function under the auspices of the Ministry for Family and Youth, represent the interests of grassroots women’s organizations (Levchenko 2003, 234). Arguably, the placing of the interests of individual elites over social responsibility stems from an overall ideological vacuum in transitional Ukraine where, nearly two decades after independence, a clear national identity has yet to emerge, let alone a clear gender identity. This helps to explain why none of the three proposed national doctrines for the promotion of gender equality has ever been seriously considered in Ukraine.6 At the same time it evidences the immaturity and ‘materialist value orientations’ (Inglehart 1997) of emerging women elites in Ukraine, tendencies seen in other new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe as well (Siemieńska 1999). phase 2 (2008 to present): first steps towards fatherhood policy and focus on men’s issues In 2002, the World Bank pointed to an emerging crisis in men’s health in Ukraine that made clear the critical need to pay closer attention to men’s issues in the country. The reality of this crisis was confirmed in 2006 by the findings of a research project sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund. It explored Ukrainian men’s reproductive and sexual health and found that in many areas, including reproductive health, life expectancy, addictions, and employment, men faced greater threats than women, which in turn, affected the well-being and health of women and children. This is consistent with the results of still another project, by the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI and CIDA 2006, 7), showing that in addition to grave health challenges Ukrainian

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men face more problems than women in overcoming crises and confronting discrimination with regard to paternal rights. However, this long list of challenges was only recently acknowledged publicly, during the current stage of equality policy formation, and only after they had attracted the attention of NGOs focusing on the promotion of fathers’ rights and fatherhood policy. In 2008, issues of fathers’ rights and responsibilities finally appeared prominently on the agenda of seminars and conferences on issues of responsible parenthood organized across Ukraine. They also received special emphasis at the First All-Ukrainian Public Forum called ‘The Importance of the Father in the Family and Society,’ held in Kyiv in September 2008. Participants at the forum drafted an open letter to the president of Ukraine wherein they expressed concerns about the crisis facing the institution of fatherhood in Ukrainian society and emphasized the necessity to overcome conservative gender stereotypes regarding the role of men in the family. Furthermore, they supported an initiative to celebrate Father’s Day as a national holiday. This initiative, however, was not confirmed by the president. In September 2009, another campaign, ‘I am Proud – I am a Father!’ was launched under the auspices of the Father’s Day initiative, the goal of which was to make Father’s Day a national holiday in order to draw attention to paternity, strengthen the role of men in the family, and promote responsible fatherhood. There has been some support for this initiative by the state. In response to the campaign, later in 2009 the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sports developed a Presidential Decree on Father’s Day and submitted it for consideration by the Cabinet of Ministers. One factor enabling this renewed focus on fathers’ rights and responsibilities is the changing nature of Ukraine’s workforce, specifically through the increasing feminization of labour migration (Tolstokorova 2009b). This change is seen especially in rural areas of Western Ukraine (resultant from this gendered out-migration, a large number of families there lost their female members of working age, who found employment in the EU as caregivers or domestic workers (Tolstokorova and Gál 2008). Consequently, in the demographic structure of many small villages tangible gender imbalances emerged, because their remaining population consists mainly of males, children, and the elderly. This situation entailed grave social challenges. Above all, it is the children left behind at home. Most often they stay with their fathers, but in the case of single mothers or when both parents are working

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abroad, children stay in the care of their grandparents or are even left unattended (Tolstokorova 2008b). There is also evidence of social desadaptation among husbands of migrant women and single men who cannot find wives as a result of women’s out-migration. These men are often unemployed. Large numbers of them resort to alcohol, drug use, and unprotected sex, thereby negatively affecting their reproductive health. As a result of these behavioural patterns, these regions have experienced a dramatic increase of male mortality. Questions related to men’s responsibility for themselves and their children have thus gained currency. Evidence shows that the impact of female out-migration on the Ukrainian family is changing the nature of masculinity (Cherninska 2006). Many husbands of migrant women find their roles as caregivers and as housekeepers acceptable, although largely only during the period of their wife’s absence (Yarova 2006). However, as was shown elsewhere (Tolstokorova 2010), this reconstitution of gender role models in transnational families and the emergence of the category of ‘new fathers’ (Coltrane and Allan 1994) do not automatically result in the ‘modernization of fatherhood’ (LaRossa 1997) and have not tangibly altered ‘the culture of fatherhood’ in Ukraine. Society must still conceptualize these transformations in gender arrangements and offer viable solutions for their regulation. More recently, in 2009, a movement for men’s rights has taken shape in Ukraine through a series of events, including a seminar called ‘The Situation of Ukrainian Men’ held in the Rada. This represented one of the first attempts on the part of the government to address the role of men in the family and society in the context of the masculinity crisis, itself partly a result of the deterioration of fatherhood roles throughout decades of totalitarian rule. As a follow-up to this initiative, the youth movement MODOS appealed to the president to replace 23 February’s Day of the Motherland Defender with International Men’s Day. Despite the odd ideological underpinnings of this appeal, which would see the image of the Ukrainian man as defender substituted with an abstract idea of an international man with no specific social identity, this initiative was nonetheless a step forward, as it highlighted the masculinity crisis and drew closer attention to finding solutions to it. Yet another event cementing the framework of the emerging men’s movement was a press conference held to launch the National Network of Men-Leaders against Violence, held as part of a campaign called ‘Stop Violence!’ in March of 2009. There, prominent male figures in Ukraine, including

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politicians, public leaders, athletes, and artists, reinforced the idea of the responsibility of men in building a peaceful and non-violent society. These initiatives, however, were generated mainly by the civil society, while the role of the state in promoting men’s issues remained obscure. An analysis of the implementation of the 2006 State Program to Implement Gender Equality in Ukraine (SIFYD 2007), for example, showed that key stakeholders in the realization of public policy on gender equality, especially on the regional level, still tend to limit the concept of gender equality to women’s issues, neglecting the challenges faced by men. Furthermore, those issues that were addressed with regard to women were themselves limited mainly to the private sphere and were based on traditional roles and images of women as mothers, beauties, and keepers of the family hearth, while areas of professional, political, and cultural realization by Ukrainian women went unattended to. Nonetheless, the timid steps towards promoting men’s issues and rights in Ukraine may yet serve as an important precursor to a more inclusive gender movement. Such a movement would implicitly acknowledge gender as a ‘two-sided coin, being as much an issue for men as for women’ (World Economic Forum 2005). Correspondence of the Ukrainian Experience with European Models Analysis shows that the Ukrainian state applies a somewhat eclectic approach to the enhancement of gender democracy. More specifically, the variety of government practices of promoting gender policy in Ukraine and their correspondence to the EU models of gender governance may be summarized as described below. (1) Integrated Gender Mainstreaming. Some elements of GM have been introduced in Ukraine, mainly during the most recent stage of gender democracy development, triggered by the adoption of the Gender Equality Law in 2005. Practically, GM has been applied via the measures of the Ministry of Justice aimed at a gender-sensitive analysis of Ukrainian legislation. Further, if we interpret GM broadly as ‘genderbased analysis’ (Hankivsky 2005, 997), there are grounds to claim that some elements of this model were implemented during the third stage of Ukraine’s gender democracy evolution (2001–04), that is, during the realization of the Gender Expertise in Ukrainian Legislation project. That project published and disseminated background research papers

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and methodological recommendations for the implementation in Ukrainian legislation of gender-sensitive expertise that took into account the specific national context. If, however, we abide by the ‘Swedish model’ of GM, then we must say that attempts to apply GM principles in Ukraine do not go very far beyond legislation, and that socioeconomic, political, and private/family domains, and civil society are neglected altogether with regard to gender. From this point of view, the efficacy of such a policy approach for Ukraine has been rather low, as confirmed by a decrease in the country’s gender development index, as measured by the United Nations, which dropped from 67th place in 2001 to 76th place in 2008 (United Nations 2008). (2) The Transversal Model. The Ukrainian government has utilized the transversal model quite extensively, since the principle of ‘positive discrimination,’ on which it is based, is enshrined in Ukrainian legislation and practised in policy design and realization. In particular, quotas are in place to guarantee places for women in the workplace, and a system of incentives for mothers has been introduced, as well as special measures aimed to support women’s entrepreneurship (Tolstokorova 2007b, 24–6). (3) The EU-Driven Model. The implementation of the EU-driven model will only become possible if Ukraine obtains the status of an EU candidate country, enabling access to EU Structural Funds to financially support the realization of gender equality policy. At present this is continuously suspended because of the absence of political will and a lack of coordinated efforts aimed at the enhancement of Ukraine’s integration into the European Union on both sides of the newly emerged ‘wall around the West’ (Andreas 2000) created by the European bureaucracies. (4) The Generic Equality Model. Currently the objective of restoring the balance away from inequalities resulting from age, disability, race, and ethnicity is not really on the Ukrainian state’s agenda, especially given the present conditions of a durable political crisis, itself exacerbated by the ongoing global financial downturn. Some steps are being made in this direction, however. As an example, in 2006, I managed a project that set out to explore the gendered dimensions of the rights of people with disabilities in Ukraine. The project, sponsored by the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport, was one of the first attempts on the part of the state to seek equality beyond gender in the Ukrainian context. Given the comparison above, we can say that the promotion of gender democracy currently implemented in Ukraine is a quilt pattern or mosaic

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model of equality policy that primarily makes use of elements from two of the aforementioned models of gender management: integrated gender mainstreaming and the transversal model. The state’s gender policy has begun to integrate elements of the generic equality model, while the EU-driven model remains a remote possibility. Should the former two models be reinforced and implemented more thoroughly in the future, they could provide a good framework for state gender policy grounded on a ‘dual-track approach,’ that is, a combination of gender mainstreaming principles with specific actions in favour of either disadvantaged sex. This dual strategy, enshrined in the European Pact for Gender Equality, is actually recommended by the European Commission for the promotion of gender equality in current conditions. Ukraine’s eclectic model, however, has not emerged as a result of a purposeful, coordinated, and conscious effort by decision makers, aimed at mobilization of all available resources to ensure gender justice in society. Rather, it has resulted from the lack of a coherent conceptual framework or strategy for the development of gender democracy. Research on gender mainstreaming in Ukraine (Extröm 2002, 4, 8) suggests that this is because within Ukrainian society gender equality ‘is seen as a solved issue,’ while the ‘attitude to feminism is complicated’ and ‘resistance is large and awareness is low’ with regard to gender mainstreaming.7 Ukraine still lacks a clear national strategy for the advancement of gender equality, and much will need to be done to change that. Partly, acknowledgment is required by Ukrainian thinkers that despite tangible progress in this area in recent decades, neither the state nor civil society has reached European levels of gender awareness. Nor have they met international standards of gender justice. Some gender experts argue that GM strategies are simply alien to both state and society, compared with a more traditional family-centred, or women-protective strategy. After all, up to now, state gender policy has remained limited to outreach conducted by the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport. Meanwhile, strategies for the promotion of parity democracy in Ukraine remain to be developed.

NOTES 1 The full name of the project is ‘EQUAPOL: A 5th Framework Programme Research Project funded by the European Commission – Gender-sensitive and women friendly public policies (a comparative analysis of their progress and impact).’

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 49 2 A psychologist, Finn Tschudi, found that statements such as ‘Men can care for children just as well as women’ were judged by interviewees as linguistically unremarkable, whereas statements like ‘Women can care for children just as well as men’ were assessed as bizarre. 3 These were the Embassy of Canada in Ukraine, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and the Canadian – Ukrainian Gender Fund. 4 I put forward the idea for this project and acted as its coordinator, organizer, and moderator of focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews. Furthermore, I developed strategic policy papers to be submitted for approval by the parliament of Ukraine and administered the final international research conference on the project’s output (Tolstokorova 2002). 5 State laws submitted to gender analysis in 2007 included: Law on Annual Vacations, Law on State Support to Families with Children, Law on Employment of the Population, Law on Immigration, Law on Elections of People’s Deputies, Law on the Status of a People’s Deputy, Law on Civil Service in Local Bodies of Power, Law on Social and Legal Protection of Military Servants and Their Families, Law on Military Duty and Military Service, and Law on the Status of Highland Settlements in Ukraine. 6 These were Draft Conception of Public Policy for the Promotion of the Situation of Women (1999), Draft of National Strategies for the Promotion of the Situation of Women (1999), and Draft of Strategic Directions of State Policy for the Promotion of Gender Equality Promotion in Ukraine (2003). 7 Hankivsky and Salnykova draw similar conclusions in Chapter 16, in this volume.

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Gender Democracy in Ukraine 51 su.se/contents/sidor/publikationer/avhandlingar/kleberg/summary.php (accessed 3 Sept. 2007). Kupryashkina, S. 2000. Public versus Feminist: Enabling and Limiting Sides of Democracy for Women in Ukraine. Online Alumni Journal. June. Available at http://ames.gilan.uar.net/irex/iatp/journal/a2.html (accessed 23 June 2000). LaRossa, R. 1997. The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levchenko, K. 2003. Genderna polityka v Ukraini: Vyznachennya, formuvannya, upravlinnya [Gender Policy in Ukraine: Definition, Formation, and Governance]. Kharkiv: National University for Domestic Affairs. MacKinnon, C. 1991. Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination. In K.T. Bartlett and R. Kennedy, eds., Feminist Legal Theory, 81–94. Boulder: Westview. Ministry for Family and Youth of Ukraine (MFYU). 1998. Issues Concerning the Development of Democracy and the Maintenance of Equal Rights for Women and Men in Ukraine during the Transition Period. Kyiv: MFYU. Novikova, I. 2006. History, National Belonging, and the Women’s Movement in the Baltic Countries. In E. Saurer, M. Lanzinger, and E. Frysak, eds., Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in Post-communist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries, 141–62. Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag. Rugemer, C. 2007. A Measured Approach to Gender. Research EU: The Magazine of the European Research Area 52( June): 36–8. Saxonberg, S., and T. Sirovátka. 2006. Failing Family Policy in Post-communist Central Europe. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 8(2): 185–202. Siemieńska, R. 1999. Elites and Women in Democratizing Post-communist Societies. International Review of Sociology 9(2): 197–219. State Institute for Family and Youth (SIFY). 2003. Integhruvannya gendernogho pidhodu v derzhavnu polityku Ukrajiny [Gender Mainstreaming in Ukrainian Public Policy], 32–43. Kyiv: SIFY. State Institute for Family and Youth Development (SIFYD). 2007. Zvit pro vykonannya u pershij polovyni 2007 roku derzhavnoi programy z utverdzhennya gendernoi rivnosti v ukrajins’komu suspil’stvi na period do 2010 roku [Report on the Implementation of the State Program for the Promotion of Gender Equality in Ukraine during the 1st Half of 2007]. Kyiv: SIFYD. Tolstokorova, A. 2003. Kompleksne vprovadzhennya gendernyh pryncypiv u derzhavnu politylu jak shlyah do evropejs’kogho spivtovarystva. Indyvidual’ne naukove doslidzhennya [Gender Mainstreaming in Public Policy as a Way to European Community. Working Paper]. Kyiv: SIFY.

52 Alissa V. Tolstokorova – 2005. More Human Rights for Women: A Linguistic Perspective. Kadin/ Woman 2000 (A publication of the Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazi Magosa, North Cyprus), 6(1–2): 1–28. – 2006. The Linguistic Dimension of Gender Equality: A Human Rights Perspective. Polissema: Revista de Letras do ISCAP (A publication of the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administraja), 6: 193–216. – 2007a. Gender Equality in Ukraine: Between Declarations and Reality. In C. Sarmento, ed., Eastwards/Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the 21st Century? 40–76. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. – 2007b. Nacional’ny mekhanizm obespecheniya ravnyh prav i vozmozhnostej zhenschin i muzhchin [National Machinery for the Promotion of Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men]. In L. Leontyeva and A. Tolstokorova, eds., Draft Report on the Realization in Ukraine of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (6th and 7th Joint Regular Report), 9–18. Kharkiv: Folio. – 2008a. Modeli derzhavnoi gendernoi politky v Ukraini z tochky zoru Evropejskyh tradycyj gendernoi demokratii’ [Models of State Gender Policy in Ukraine in Terms of European Traditions of Gender Democracy]. In D. Yagunov, ed., Aktual’ni problemy evropejskoi integracii [Current Problems of European Integration], 138–59. Odessa: Phenix. – 2008b. Locally Neglected, Globally Engaged: Ukrainian Women on the Move. In R. Anderl, B. Arich-Gerz, and R. Schmiede, eds., Technologies of Globalization, 44–61. Publication compiled from the proceedings of the ‘Technologies of Globalization’ International Conference, Technical University, Darmstadt, 30–1 Oct. 2008. – 2009a. Osnovnvye etapy formirovania koncepcii gendernoy politiki i modeli paritetnoy demokratii v Ukraine [Main Stages in the Development of Gender Policy and Models of Parity Democracy in Ukraine]. Newsletter of the Pacific State University (Vladivostok, Russia) 2(50): 99–113. – 2009b. Who Cares for Carers? Feminization of Labor Migration from Ukraine and Its Impact on Social Welfare. International Issues and Slovak Foreign Policy Affairs 18(1): 62–84. – 2009с. Multiple Marginalities: Gender Dimension of Rural Poverty, Unemployment and Labour Migration in Ukraine. Paper presented at the FAO-IFAD-ILO Workshop ‘Gaps, Trends and Current Research in Gender Dimensions of Agricultural and Rural Employment: Differentiated Pathways out of Poverty,’ Rome, 31 March – 2 April, 2009. Available at http://www.fao-ilo.org/ fileadmin/user_upload/fao_ilo/pdf/Papers/17_March/Tolstokorovafinal.pdf.

Gender Democracy in Ukraine 53 – 2010.Where Have All the Mothers Gone? The Gendered Effect of Labour Migration and Transnationalism on the Institution of Parenthood in Ukraine. Anthropology of East Europe Review (AEER), Special Issue, ‘Gender in Postsocialist Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,’ 28(1): 184–214. Tolstokorova, A., ed. 2002. Formuvannya gendernogo parytetu v konteksti suchasnyh social’no-ekonomichnyh peretvoren.’ Materialy mizhnarodnoi naukovopraktychoi konferencii [The Promotion of Gender Parity in the Context of Current Socioeconomic Transformations]. Edited publication compiled from the proceedings of the International Research and Practice Conference, Kyiv, 5–7 Dec. 2002. Tolstokorova, A., and Z. Gál. 2008. Problemy mighracijoi polityky central’noji ta skhidnoji Evropy v konteksti starinnya evropejs’kogo naselennya [Challenges to CEE Migration Policies in the Context of Aging Europe]. Aghora: Perspectyvy social’mogho rozvytku reghioniv [AGORA: Prospects for the Social Development of Regions] 7: 85–93. Kyiv: Stylos/Kennan Institute. Tschudi, F. 1979. Gender Stereotypes Reflected in Asymmetric Similarities in Language. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the American Association of Psychology, 1–5 Sept. 1979. Ukrainian Centre for Independent Political Research (UCIPR). 2006. Rozvytok demokratii v Ukrajini: 2001–2002 roky [Development of Democracy in Ukraine, 2001–2002]. Kyiv: UCIPR. United Nations. 2008. The 2007–2008 Human Development Report. Geneva: United Nations. United Nations Development Program (UNDP). 2003. Drafting Gender-Aware Legislation: How to Promote and Protect Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Bratislava: UNDP. – 2006. Integhracia genderu v nacional’ni derzhavni proghramy [Integration of Gender into National State Programs]. Kyiv: UNDP. World Bank. 2002. Ukraine: Gender Overview. Edited by N. Dudwick, R. Srinivasan, and J. Braithwaite. Washington, DC: ECSSD. World Economic Forum (WEF). 2005. Women’s Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender Gap. Geneva: WEF. Yarova, O. 2006. The Migration of Ukrainian Women to Italy and the Impact on Their Family in Ukraine. In A. Szczepanikova, M. Canek, and J. Grill, eds., The Migration Process in Central and Eastern Europe: Unpacking the Diversity, 38–41. Prague: Multicultural Centre.

2 Discourse of Continuity and Change: The Legislative Path to Equality marian j. rubchak

Try not to hurt anyone, or step on any toes. Use caution in public; forget the word ‘I.’ – Deputy Olena Kondrakova1

Ukraine’s transition from socialism to a market-driven society began in 1991. On 24 August of that year the country was on the cusp of an epiphany – its successful declaration of independence. Sitting in our dining room was Pavlo Movchan, a poet with a history of dissidence in the Soviet Union, and one of a series of our house guests from Ukraine. As we listened in disbelief to this stunning news item on public radio, he suddenly leapt to his feet and exclaimed excitedly: ‘I am an author of that declaration!’ The actual transitional process had been set in motion a year earlier, with public demonstrations for liberation from the tyranny of the Soviet regime already gaining momentum. During the first days of September, 1990, my husband and I, with our four daughters, were in Kyiv, where we witnessed the fulfilment of what had always seemed to us to be an impossible dream. On 3 September a massive political demonstration moved along Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main thoroughfare. As we watched this amazing spectacle in what was still Soviet Ukraine, we witnessed wave after wave of right hands being raised, diffidently at first, then more boldly – until they became a sea of three middle fingers held aloft, signifying Ukraine’s national symbol – the trident. Soapbox orators dotted Kyiv’s central plaza, soon to be known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), and clusters of people could be heard agitating for secession at various locations

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throughout the city centre. This astonishing demonstration set the tone for more changes to come. By 1991, with the Soviet Union imploding, secession was no longer an issue. The USSR had fractured into fifteen pieces, and with republic after republic declaring its independence, Ukraine fell away as a sovereign state. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which the language of gender and women’s rights discourses have been incorporated into the passage and ratification of new statutes designed to promote gender parity in Ukraine in the aftermath of 1991. I will focus on one aspect of that objective – the interplay between women as victims of discrimination and violent actions, and the significant rise in policies, legislation, and initiatives employed to introduce women’s rights. Despite such well-intentioned efforts, however, the move forward has been slow, hampered by an inept criminal justice system, corrupt law enforcement agencies, negative stereotyping, and the government’s unwillingness to implement gender-parity legislation. As is the case in other parts of the world, ‘gender inequality has proven to be much more intractable than anticipated . . . and [the] quality of life [has] worsened’ (Cornwall et al. 2007, 1). Ukraine ‘is laden here, as are societies elsewhere, with its own historical baggage’ which is inhibiting meaningful change (Kandiyoti 2007, 191). Although comparisons with judicial systems and law enforcement agencies in other transitional countries would be instructive, the aim of this chapter is confined to examining the failure of a system to secure women’s rights in one country – Ukraine – its progressive legislation notwithstanding. I scrutinize this process from a perspective of participant observation. My findings are supplemented by media accounts, official government reports, primary evidence posted on the Internet, and scholarly readings related to empowering the powerless in the post-Soviet Ukrainian reality. Through the use of this methodology, this chapter brings to life the mix of traditional beliefs and traditions with Western views of equal rights. International Statutes in Ukraine The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the U.N. General Assembly, is often described as an international bill of rights for women. It is also judged to be ‘the most important piece of international legislation encoding women’s rights, which commits 171 signing governments

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to respect a range of principles that have . . . led to positive reforms in constitution and civil codes’ (Molyneux 2007, 235). Soviet Ukraine became a signatory in 1980, and ratified the convention the following year. On the eve of independence a decade later, complying with its obligation as a party to the Convention, Ukraine’s government issued a periodic progress report on the advancement of gender equity. Instead of recording improvement in the status of women, however, the report referred to the state of Ukrainian society as one of ‘outmoded stereotypes that reflect the role and purpose of women . . . still prevalent in society . . . [where] women are not prepared to fight in the political arena, and are incapable of standing up for their rights’ (United Nations 1991, sub-section on Ukraine). Early in the 1990s, a handful of forward-looking feminists, together with supporters of women’s rights who shunned the feminist label, began laying the foundation for equal rights initiatives. A series of projects dedicated to raising public awareness of gender inequities were launched. One of the first was the establishment of a women’s rights centre, Zhinochi Perspektyvy (Women’s Perspectives), in Lviv in 1993. In 1995, Olena Suslova founded one of Ukraine’s earliest nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Zhinochyi informatsiino konsultatyvnyi tsenter (the Women’s Information Consultative Centre). It gathers information on gender and feminism, and generates public discourse based upon the accumulated data; the centre has sponsored numerous countrywide seminars for that purpose (AWID 2005). A second initiative, the Gender Integration Program, a project of Open World Practices of the Open Society Institute, funded by George Soros, was launched in March 1995 with the aim of creating an environment reflective of European standards of gender equality. These initiatives, combined with increasing numbers of special consciousness-raising projects, set the stage for a series of unprecedented parliamentary hearings on women’s issues. The first of these has been described as an historic landmark in the country’s quest for women’s rights, and so it is, but it might also, and more precisely, be viewed as ‘political theatre’ staged by male legislators to publicize governmental compliance with the terms of the U.N. Convention. Two events – a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), held in Ottawa, Canada between 4 and 8 July 1995, and a conference in Kyiv titled ‘Woman and Democracy,’ held on 2 July 1995 – deliberated gender issues. The Ukrainian delegate to the OSCE meeting, Deputy Oleksandr Moroz (chair of the

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initial parliamentary hearing), concluded from the Ottawa proceedings that women’s rights had been secured throughout much of the world. This prompted his prediction that such success would soon inspire Ukraine to follow suit. Moroz described this experience as a defining moment in his determination to work for an end to gender discrimination. The purpose of the second meeting was to craft a platform for Ukraine’s delegation to the upcoming Fourth World Conference on Women’s Issues, held in Beijing at the beginning of September 1995. Delegates were instructed to scrutinize the proceedings for ideas on women’s rights. Making Parliamentary History On 12 July 1995, the politically oriented Zhinocha Hromada (Women’s Society), Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers, and Ukrainian representatives to the United Nations, sponsored the initial parliamentary hearings on women’s issues (Parliament of Ukraine 1995).2 Participants included members of Ukraine’s ministries, the United Nations, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Russian Duma, and Kyiv’s foreign diplomatic community. Most of the speakers were Ukrainian activists, members of various NGOs, and government officials. In his opening remarks, Chair Moroz mentioned the OSCE meeting, and reaffirmed his commitment to gender equality. His female colleagues in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine), he continued glibly, ‘are only 16 in number, but they are working zealously for the cause.’3 The sincerity of his alleged conviction, however, would have inspired greater confidence were it not for the fact that earlier Moroz had spearheaded opposition to the hearings among male parliamentarians. His characterization of gender equality as ‘equal rights for women as women’ also did nothing to dispel my scepticism of his change of heart, yet his references to ‘women as women’ clearly resonated with the female constituency, as the language of the women’s demands during the hearings revealed. The first speaker, Vice-Chair of the Parliamentary Commission on Human Rights Nina Karpachova, described the hearings as a positive preliminary step, signifying the government’s readiness to champion affirmative action on ending discrimination. ‘A new generation of women,’ she announced, ‘is prepared to lead this fight.’ Judging from the agitated buzz among the men that erupted immediately

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throughout the assembly hall, the prospect of such female leadership unsettled the male legislators. Its mounting crescendo compelled the chair to admonish the men for disrupting proceedings. Appeals for a suitable environment where ‘women can be women’ reverberated countless times during the session, as did demands for protective measures to eliminate ‘poverty with a woman’s face,’ and the unchecked discrimination against women. The Janus-like nature of the proceedings, illuminating special concessions for women on the one hand, and equal rights on the other, highlighted the paradoxical nature of the women’s crusade for justice. When foreign speakers – Norwegian Ambassador to Ukraine Øyvind Nördsledtten and Suani Hunt, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine – alluded to discrepancies in the status of women between Ukraine and their own countries, Moroz countered testily: ‘You have your countries and we have ours. Ukraine will follow its own path towards eliminating discrimination.’ I should point out that many people in Ukraine still believe that Ukraine needs to develop its own feminist paradigm, rooted in national (native Ukrainian) traditions. As I sat pondering this exchange, I became acutely aware of another troublesome tendency – the incessant linkage of women to motherhood, persistent calls for creating conditions amenable to the integration of women’s maternal obligations and professional lives, and presenting women’s rights as concessions to their special needs as women, rather than human rights. Startled out of my musings by an unexpected hush in the chamber, amid highly charged murmurs of intense expectancy, I watched Deputy Serhii Kiyashko reach under his seat to retrieve a floral bouquet. Striding purposefully to the front of the assembly hall, he placed the offering, described as a token of respect and admiration for his female colleagues, at the base of the podium. Kiyashko’s ‘homage to women’ brought to mind the annual Veteran’s Day ritual of laying a wreath at the tomb of the ‘unknown soldier,’ the fallen hero who had made the supreme sacrifice for his country. The deputy’s gesture relegated women to this symbolic realm, where sacrifice is rewarded with a ceremonial gesture of appreciation. Although Chair Moroz expressed his displeasure with Kiyashko’s action, he tempered it with: ‘Even though women appreciate such chivalry, you have breached parliamentary discipline.’ The finale of this ‘theatre of the absurd’ was played out by a beaming female deputy, who interrupted the session in her turn by performing a familiar domestic task – searching for a vase.

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At day’s end, I discussed this episode with several women; each hastened to assure me that she found such chivalrous acts appealing. In no way did the women deem themselves diminished as women by such pleasant ‘tokens of esteem.’ Indeed, they insisted that disavowing the custom would merely testify to their lack of femininity, a quality that defined them as women. When I pressed for their view of femininity, the best they could offer was: ‘Why, to be a woman, of course.’ ‘And what does it mean to be a woman?’ I persisted. ‘Why, to possess feminine qualities, naturally,’ was the response. This circular regression underscored my earlier conviction that many Ukrainian women seem unaware of themselves as social units whose identity is constructed by the opposite sex, within the male matrices of power, and manipulated by men for their own purposes. The vagaries of history have produced a culture and a philosophy of life which lead Ukrainian women to view such ‘chivalry’ in a positive light. The demands of most of the day’s female speakers still reflected essentialist convictions; only occasionally was this unmarked paradigm disregarded. For example, the head of Soiuz Robochykh Zhinok Ukrainy (the Working Women’s Alliance of Ukraine), Nina Pokotylo, used her allotted time to censure male powerbrokers for violating the U.N. convention. Accusing them of corruption and mismanagement, she charged: ‘You men who sneer at any woman aspiring to political office, what have you accomplished? Our society is in crisis. We need to bring women into the political process.’ Thus, she highlighted a dilemma which would occupy legislators and women’s rights advocates in Ukraine for the next decade and beyond, without appreciably narrowing the gap between declaration and deed. Legislating Women’s Rights In 1997, the United Nations Development Project – a global development network – began its implementation of projects designed to promote equal rights and opportunities. Its staff provided policy support for gender-sensitive legislation, and enhanced official capacity for integrating gender issues into strategic planning. In 1999, the U.N. Representative Office, which operated in Kyiv on the authority of the U.N. secretary general, received its own formal status in Ukraine and began to implement a series of U.N.-sponsored programs. Larysa Kobelianska, a tireless advocate of women’s rights and firm supporter of educational programs designed to increase public awareness of

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gender injustice, heads the UNDP Equal Opportunities Program. Her office is responsible for pioneering a wide array of creative projects on feminist activism. The most recent endeavour is an ambitious two-year Gender Education and Training Project (2009–2011), with a total of six hundred training sessions scheduled. The program targets teachers, government employees, and police officers (under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). In 2000, Ukraine subscribed to the U.N.-sponsored ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence,’ running from 25 November to 10 December each year to advance the eradication of violence against women. That same year, Ukraine signed the U.N. Millennium Declaration, and unveiled a year-long nationwide public information campaign on gender awareness, ‘Ukraine 2015: Millennium Development Goals.’ The eight Millennium Development Goals, to be achieved by 2015, are drawn from the U.N. Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2, signed by 147 heads of state and government during the Millennium Summit in 8 September 2000; goal number 3 is promoting gender equality and empowering women. On 15 November 2001, the Rada followed this with the Law of Ukraine on the Prevention of Violence in the Family. It was preceded by a number of normative acts, including a presidential decree on 25 April 2001, aimed at upgrading the social status of women. A second law, creating a platform for reviewing acts or threats of domestic violence, came into effect in 2002. On 26 April 2003, the Cabinet of Ministers issued Decree 616, containing a plan for strengthening certain provisions in the foregoing laws. A year later, in collaboration with the Ministry of Family, Children, and Youth, the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a decree establishing cooperation in efforts to expand gender equality throughout the various governmental institutions (Fedkovych 2005). During the early years immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet state, domestic violence was either ignored or victims were charged with provoking it ( Johnson 2007).4 In 2001, Ukrainian legislation enshrined this injustice in Article 11 of the Law of Ukraine on the Prevention of Violence in the Family. It embodied the concept of a victim’s ‘provocative’ behaviour as the source of domestic violence. In the interest of providing victims of such abuse with some protection, on 22 April 2002, the Ministry of Internal Affairs established a procedure known as ‘Preventive Warning’ for putting assailants on preventive record (already embedded in Article 10 of the law on ‘Prevention

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of Violence’). Soon, however, even this expedient was being used to deny women’s complaints (‘He has been warned’) or to deflect responsibility. Once the warning was lodged in a legal document, officials considered it adequate protection for women. In one way or another, and ‘despite . . . enactments of new statutes police have failed to change their conduct’ (Buzawa and Buzawa 2003, 71). This reinforced externalization of such violence committed by male assailants, who responded to the charges with: ‘She provoked me’ (Buzawa and Buzawa 2003, 35). Historically, victims of domestic violence have failed to report the crime to police because of the latter’s failure to respond appropriately (Buzawa and Buzawa 2003, 35). Although the phenomenon is recognized worldwide, in Ukraine it takes on a more sinister aspect. The absence of a viable law enforcement mechanism encourages police to turn a blind eye to evidence of violence, which is bad enough. What is even worse is that the police themselves often behave like the criminals. Law enforcement personnel are known to demand sexual favours from victims in return for registering their complaints, even to sexually assault women in police or other forms of state custody. For its part, the social stigma attached to sexual violence, stemming from an internal culture with a bias against ‘airing one’s dirty laundry in public,’ simply dissuades reporting. Such deterrents, coupled with societal norms prone to condoning the assailants’ actions and impugning the victim instead, create conditions that overwhelmingly favour the perpetrator (Network Women’s Program 2009; Amnesty International 2007). Hearing for a Second Time To address such abuses, on June 2004, the Rada held a second set of hearings, titled ‘The Status of Women in Ukraine: Reality and Perspectives.’ On this occasion, Adam Martyniuk, first deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada, acted as chair. He opened the session – which was attended by media personnel, members of civic organizations, government officials, and foreign dignitaries of both sexes – with the bizarre ‘Greetings to our bewitching guests. Consider yourselves at liberty to say whatever comes to mind; you may even sing if you wish.’ Throughout the day he indulged himself in anti-women comments. Oddly enough, no one reacted to his barbs until, in a dramatic accusation, one of the final speakers, Tamara Melnyk, reproached him decisively. She was rewarded with a rousing ovation, and vociferous

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demands from the participants for an extension of her allotted time to allow a conclusion of her presentation. Smarting from Melnyk’s criticism, the chair refused to extend it, yet when the next speaker, Communist Party Deputy Petro Symonenko, exceeded his allotted five minutes, the microphone was left open for him to continue speaking (Martyniuk and Symonenko are close Communist comrades). Only the women’s chants of ‘han’ba’ (shame) and rhythmic clapping compelled his retreat. As I strolled with a group of participants along the streets of Kyiv at the end of the day, I witnessed as people, apparently moved by the drama in the assembly hall which they had watched on television, approached Tamara Melnyk to congratulate her on her presentation. Except for the fact that references to violence against women, the evils of sex trafficking, and policies detrimental to men were somewhat more in evidence during this round of hearings, the general rhetoric differed little from that of 1995. Once again, speaker after speaker linked women’s mission in life to motherhood, called for an environment in which ‘women could be women,’ and for conditions conducive to the integration of their domestic and professional duties. Women’s rights were still viewed as concessions to their unique needs. Male deputies continued to address women with the customary ‘beautiful, charming, and weaker half.’5 Deputy Leonid Chernovets’ky (mayor of Kyiv at the time of this writing), brought this patronizing tendency into relief by suggesting that women elect qualified men to advocate on their behalf. The women countered with demands for increased female political representation. On 8 September 2005, legislation to this effect was passed. Ukraine’s landmark Law on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men (after this, often referred to simply as the Gender Equality Law) was ratified. For the first time in Ukrainian history, a law defined discrimination based on sex, and provided judicial protection from such discriminatory tactics (Fedkovych 2005).6 Third Time Around A third hearing, titled ‘Equal Rights and Opportunities in Ukraine, Realities and Perspectives,’ was convened on 21 November 2006. The hearing, attended by roughly equal numbers of male and female participants, was divided into two discrete parts – the first on violence and the second on equal rights and possibilities. During the lunch break,

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many of the men vanished. Ostensibly oblivious to the presence of males, Martyniuk (presiding as chair again) opened the assembly with another of his legendary non sequiturs: ‘Today we find ourselves in the presence of a true matriarchy. One is simply dazzled by your amiable, smiling faces.’7 The first speaker, Minister for Family, Youth, and Sport Yuriy Pavlenko began with a reference to the ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence’ campaign noted earlier.8 Even though violence against women is declining, he contended, there is an urgent need for changes to Ukraine’s Criminal Code as a corrective to administrative violations and the inadequacies of past laws (Buzawa and Buzawa 2003, 112–15). He presented a list of proposed remedies against domestic violence, which included more severe sanctions against batterers, and maximum penalties for their crimes. The minister also advocated assistance to victims in the form of psychological support, hotlines, and crisis centres. Leonid Hrach, head of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, National Minorities, and Interethnic Relations, continued in a similar vein, but warned that the criminal justice system itself harbours assailants. He also drew attention to the severe underfunding of support agencies for women, railed against the evils of poverty ‘with a woman’s face,’ and censured the political underrepresentation of female advocates in their own cause. His response to the mounting offences against women centred on pragmatic solutions, such as essential social services, but he too stopped short of plans for funding them. Olena Bondarenko, head of a Parliamentary Sub-Committee on Gender Policy within the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, National Minorities, and Interethnic Relations, echoed the call for improved legislation. Challenging Pavlenko’s exaggerated claim of declining violence, she insisted that it had simply been driven underground for lack of effective law enforcement procedures and correctional facilities. Bondarenko laid the blame squarely on Pavlenko’s ministry, but did concede some progress. If the process is to move forward, she cautioned, additional crisis shelters, more violence-prevention measures, and closer cooperation among legislators, state policymakers, NGOs, activists, and concerned citizens, is imperative. In a dramatic departure from most presenters, Bondarenko offered two real-life illustrations of the consequences of domestic violence. The first was that of a 16-year-old youth: unable any longer to stand by and watch his father savagely beat his mother, the young man committed

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patricide. A second example revealed that incessant beatings of a young woman by her father and brother had caused her to succumb to mental illness; this triggered a new cycle of violence. She beat her 18-month-old daughter so brutally that the infant had to be rushed to a trauma centre with severe brain damage and other multiple injuries. Condemnations of domestic violence continued to dominate the first half of the proceedings, along with a near consensus that Ukraine’s criminal justice system is ill-equipped to cope with the complexity and pervasiveness of such crimes. Its failure was attributed to a lack of properly trained personnel, virtually non-existent social services, and a government that ignores preventive programs, provides no assistance to victims, and includes no provisions in its budget for funding violence intervention. Some participants cited alcohol as the leading factor in the commission of violent crimes, a charge frequently repeated in the public sphere. Inexplicably, this allegation seemed to exasperate the chair. He reacted with scarcely controlled irritation, turning to the women with another of his baffling comments: ‘Esteemed women! Restrain yourselves, don’t give in to anger. I understand that your emotions might be heightened by such remarks made from the podium, but I remind you, these hearings are all about women, not the criminal conduct of violent men.’ The most provocative censure of the systemic breakdown – ranging from lawgivers to the judiciary, from the criminal justice system to the government – came from Deputy Victor Taran. He attributed the Ukrainian male’s current predisposition to violence to the historical Russian custom of men brutalizing their women. By way of example, Taran cited one perverse manifestation of Russian brutality – homosexual antics parodying women engaged in bizarre violent acts, performed for the amusement of Stalin and members of his Politburo. This Russian addiction to violence against women, he charged, has been naturalized in Ukraine. Taran also disparaged the Ukrainian political system for the immunity it afforded male deputies. Under no circumstances do women receive such concessions, Taran argued. He described this male immunity as nedotorkannist (untouchability). With his time about to expire, Taran requested a few seconds more to complete his presentation, but was cut off by yet another of the chair’s perplexing statements: ‘Don’t align yourself with the women,’ he cautioned, ‘lest you convey the wrong impression. As for women’s “untouchability,” please abstain from such catchphrases. Think about it, if women are truly “untouchable,” who will give birth to our children?’

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Was this some failed comedian, a person fatally obsessed with gibberish, or a man so obtuse as to feel no connection to the hearings that he was chairing? One participant became so incensed by Martyniuk’s demeaning comments about women that she passed a note to the chair, reproaching him for reducing the proceedings to a ‘female dog and pony show’ (to use an American cliché).9 Without disclosing its contents, but with scarcely concealed irritation, Martyniuk managed a restrained response: ‘Esteemed women, you authors of such angry notes! I too am a participant here, with the same rights as you. I must ask you not to politicize these proceedings. This is a parliament, not a marketplace, even though we do enjoy freedom of speech.’ In the end, no longer able to conceal his displeasure, the chairman trained his indignation onto one unregistered speaker who insisted on taking a turn at the podium. He addressed her with the derogatory ‘little woman’ (zhinochko, a term that infantilizes women), and when she persisted, he threatened to suspend the hearings. ‘Because I can do this, you know,’ was his defiant warning. As petitions for change followed one another in rapid succession, they turned increasingly strident. Presenters repeated their insistence on deletion of the offensive Article 11 from the Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family and they also urged lifting the fines against perpetrators, insisting that such penalties only compound domestic misery by depleting the family budget. Tetiana Yezhova, minister of Youth, Family, and Gender Politics in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine does not have such a ministry), injected sex trafficking into the deliberations, citing Ukraine as one of the leading suppliers of human flesh to the international sex industry. Her proposed solution lay in the economy. If women are to avoid the temptation of seeking a livelihood abroad where they are apt to be coerced into sexual slavery, she charged, they must be empowered to earn a decent living here. And she referred to Ukraine’s catastrophic demographic imbalance (males constitute a mere 38% of the adult population and 40% of these are incapable of procreating). Inasmuch as men between the ages of 29 and 45 are four times as likely as women in that age cadre to die, she noted that they too are victims of the system.10 Faulty economic policies, causing men to resort to alcohol or drugs, or to fall prey to debilitating diseases, bring an early death. Deputy Mykola Tomenko11 carried the earlier discussion of violence against women into the second half of the proceedings, designated for

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a dialogue on equal rights and opportunities. Referring to the negative stereotyping that marks parliamentary plenary sessions, he inquired: ‘If this is the way our deputies behave, what can we expect from ordinary citizens?’ He also raised a new question: Why had no woman addressed the problem of alimony or child support? Men seldom receive custody of their children, and they are notoriously negligent in paying child support. They can easily negotiate minimum assessments by declaring a fraction of their income or true financial worth. These same men also know that, even if they avoid making the court-ordered payments, retaliatory action is unlikely, regardless of what the law stipulates. The road to female poverty is littered with such cases. The hearings experienced an unexpected reversal when the next speaker, Ol’ha Matvienko, professor of pedagogy at Shevchenko National University, began her presentation with the explanation that equality and replication are not coterminous, that genuine equality means each sex fulfilling its own distinct role. Women have no business, Matvienko asserted, aspiring to such noble male qualities as a strong intellect, an impressive body of knowledge, and limitless possibilities. They would do better to capitalize on their own discrete female roles of ‘beautiful, loving caretakers’ ( Johnson 2007, 10). Naturally, women’s lesser intellectual capacities are not altogether attributable to their sex, she concluded, they are also stymied by the absence of male role models (in many Ukrainian households) during a girl’s formative years. Without a male to introduce them to rational thought, females will never develop what potential they do possess. Returning the deliberations to the main issue, Tamara Melnyk (adviser to Minister Pavlenko) began her presentation with a reference to recent advances in gender equality. Although the expansion of women’s rights remains largely on paper, she noted, when nothing concrete has been accomplished for so long, even the smallest gain represents progress. Relatively speaking, however, women are losing ground; advances in gender parity legislation have not translated to sweeping social progress. In any civilized country, Melnyk explained, rational gender policy is indexed by a decent standard of living for all, not some pandering to a Soviet-style technocracy that shamelessly exploits females. Moreover, Ukraine’s catastrophic demographic decline is indisputable evidence of the government’s callous indifference to the welfare of the entire citizenry. Ukraine needs clearly delineated gender priorities, sustained by a functional criminal justice infrastructure and unbiased law enforcement agencies.

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An unequivocal condemnation of officialdom brought the session to an end. The final speaker, A. Komarova, referred to the incessant talk of non-functioning law enforcement agencies, a corrupt police force, and biased criminal justice system. She referred to President Yushchenko’s address before the International Forum of Ukrainians in May 2006, in which he, too, described those same agencies as the most corrupt in the nation. In Yushchenko’s judgment it is not individual perpetrators who are the real criminals, but rather the entire corrupt system, which unleashes so much violence against the entire people. If these so-called guardians of human rights cannot, or will not, reform themselves, Komarova asked, what kind of gender justice can we speak of? In 2007, a year-long nationwide public information campaign titled ‘Ukraine 2015,’ mentioned earlier, was launched. On 4 March 2008, representatives from the Rada and the government, U.N. experts, and prominent media personnel met in Kyiv to discuss the UNDP project on equal opportunities and women’s rights. Among its achievements during the first phase (2003–06) was the passage of normative laws on gender justice. On 15 September 2008, the second phase of the UNDP-led initiative, ‘Equal Opportunities and Women’s Rights,’ was launched to consolidate earlier gains. For the first time since Ukraine’s declaration of independence, an egalitarian gender strategy was included in the government’s program of action. The groundbreaking Gender Equality Law of 2005, together with the ‘Law on the Adoption of a State Program for Ensuring Gender Equality in Ukrainian Society for 2006–2010,’ established a sound formal foundation for the work ahead. In an interview for the daily newspaper Den’ (The Day), Professor Svitlana Oksamytna, dean of sociology at Mohyla National University in Kyiv, characterized this legislation as ‘still in its declarative stage; but its passage indicates at least a modicum of reflection on the part of lawmakers’ (Mykytiuk 2008). Changing a stereotype is a fluid and protracted struggle, with its inevitable setbacks along the way, as official greetings on International Women’s Day demonstrated so well. A stunning example of backsliding came in the form of a news item on 3 March 2007, on the Mykolaiv District Government website (in Russian: Nykolaivskaia oblasnaia gosudarstvennaia administratsiia). It was titled ‘Woman-Worker, Woman-Mother, Wife-Guardian of the Ancestral Fire.’ The item equates women with a legendary empowered ‘hearth mother’ (Berehynia), who has long since been divested of her original meaning, yet her

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legacy survives as a topos to delude contemporary Ukrainian women into believing in their own empowerment. Conversely, in a Kyiv newspaper early signs of a rising feminist consciousness appeared. On 3 March 2009, the following news item ran in Den’: Last year’s 8 March greeting from the president so struck women [in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv] that they determined not to react post factum . . . instead of ‘tender sentiments’ [they declared] women would prefer . . . some assurance that Ukraine’s Law on Guarantees of Equal Rights and Possibilities for Women and Men would be implemented. The women also wrote an open letter to all government personnel requesting a change in their customary form of address from ‘my dears, most beloved, bewitching, tender, caring,’ to terms that more accurately reflect their professional status.

Déjà-vu versus Change Some two years after the third hearing, on 15 October 2008, I arrived in Kyiv to participate in an array of events on women’s rights. My first stop was a Forum: Stop Violence meeting, held in Kyiv on 16 and 17 October. Recalling Minister Pavlenko’s 2006 claim of progress on gender issues, which included crisis centres, I was dismayed to learn that the only such centre in Kyiv was scheduled for closing because of insufficient funding, while two regional centres had already been shuttered. Even at best, such shelters offer only thirty days of refuge for women age 35 and younger, with the result that many victims return to their abusive situations for want of an alternative. Still, one can argue, even these centres are better than nothing. Notwithstanding amendments to the 2001 Law of Ukraine on the Prevention of Violence in the Family, wherein Articles 10 and 11 put the onus on the victims, the entire legal system continues to favour male perpetrators of crimes. Current police responses to calls reporting domestic violence hover around 85 per cent, but few men are prosecuted, and fewer still are punished. The forum proceedings brought to mind the series of parliamentary hearings – inspirational rhetoric on the urgency of reform, including much talk of the necessity for more effective legislation, the pressing need to establish social services for victims of violence, and the advisability of intervention – but still had no reference to a concrete plan for implementing legislation or for funding desperately needed

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services. Three of the foreign speakers, Francis M. O’Donnell and Jeremy Hartley, representatives of the United Nations in Ukraine, and William Taylor, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, contributed Western ideas of a kind that would help raise the general awareness of gender injustice. Foreign participants had also advanced such ideas during the parliamentary hearings. Later, participants congregated in clusters during coffee breaks or sat together in small groups around luncheon tables, for informal dialogue. They discussed equal rights, and proposed practical solutions for eliminating gender injustice, yet I sensed that some still had failed to avoid the trap of essentialism, not unlike the women at the hearings who so ardently defended those chivalrous male acts that ‘defined them as women.’ I left with a vague feeling that as much as the desired changes might continue to inspire stirring rhetoric, real hope for sweeping social progress would persist in eluding even the most committed activists for some time to come. Instead of remaining for the second day of the forum, four of us travelled to the city of Vinnytsia for a two-day conference titled ‘Perspectives for Developing Gender Education as the Realization of Democratic Changes in Ukrainian Society.’ It was sponsored by the U.N. Development Program for Ukraine, the Swedish Agency for International Development (SIDA), the Vinnytsia State Administration, the Vinnytsia Administration of Family and Youth Affairs, the Vinnytsia Gender Education Centre, and Vinnytsia’s National Technical University. Some fifty or sixty gender scholars, educators, and members of gender centres from around the country came together on 17 and 18 October to share their personal experiences in gender education and to evaluate its current state in Ukraine. They pointed to the fact that Western critical theories and feminist methodologies have been incorporated into their programs, talked about publishing projects (completed and contemplated), and suggested strategies for mainstreaming women’s scholarship and stimulating further research; native Ukrainian traditions found no place in their discourse. A questionnaire was distributed that sought answers to queries on gender such as: What sorts of problems does it present in education? Has this approach produced any practical results? What can be done to address popular concerns? And finally, my numerous informal chats with the participants during coffee breaks and a final reception, revealed a surprising mastery of Western feminist ideas and the fact that the women were analysing their own situation in terms of global

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feminism. I also learned more about the breadth of their impressive outreach efforts in gender education. The succeeding event was an eight-hour seminar at Kyiv’s Court of Appeals on 21 October. It was designed for young graduates with law degrees who work in the Appellate Court. These are future judges in training who describe their professional activities as conducting research on upcoming cases and preparing briefs for presiding judges. Approximately sixty of these recent law graduates, divided into two groups, assembled in matching morning and afternoon sessions to hear female judges from the Appellate Court, legal scholars, gender activists, and a psychologist speak on gender politics, equal rights, and gender sensitivity in interpreting the law. The presentations were followed by a gender awareness exercise, in which real-life scenarios were used to test sensitivity to the scale of discrimination against women. Unlike the older generation of participants in the parliamentary hearings, with their different life experiences, the seminar revealed a new kind of Ukrainian citizen in the making. I witnessed the phenomenon of young people, unencumbered by traditional beliefs and prejudices, at ease with Western views of a just society, seeking to integrate their ideas on equal rights into Ukraine’s discursive landscape. The next day, 22 October, I was privileged to meet with a small group of pioneering feminists – women belonging to the previous generation. They were journalists, directors of gender programs, and feminist scholars, many of whom had spent time abroad as recipients of study and research fellowships or grants of one kind or another. We gathered for an informal chat session at the home of my hostess Tamara Melnyk to assess the country’s progress in implementing the equal rights and opportunities that animated the parliamentary and forum dialogues, and to exchange views on feminist scholarship. This conversation, along with the Vinnytsia conference and Appellate Court seminar, reinforced my impression that the country’s urbanizing culture was beginning to thrust the rustic Berehynia myth into the shadows. I realized that she was still ‘out there,’ together with other remnants of Ukraine’s folk culture, and was not likely to fade away soon; the current proliferation of neo-pagan religions in Ukraine, and rising numbers of believers in them, testify to the still-viable role of tradition in Ukraine’s cultural evolution. Still, it was obvious that new values were beginning to replace some traditional thinking on female identity construction, and that the younger generation, such as these

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legal scholars, was introducing a more innovative, more forwardlooking perception of their world to Ukrainian society. Events such as the parliamentary hearings and the forum, with their lofty rhetoric, admirable goals, stated determination to lift the status of women, and justified complaints against the slow pace of change, have been instrumental in generating some modest gains, and their appreciation of the need for equal rights and opportunities continues to intensify, yet that necessary first step, legislation, still awaits its implementation. In the words of Hilary Standing (in her discussion of gender mainstreaming): ‘There has been an almost mechanical belief in the power of intention to determine the outcome of policy implementation’ (2007, 107). In Ukraine, the ‘power of intention,’ enshrined in its progressive legislation, has yet to deliver the promised social change. Effective legislation is indispensable, but it takes more than statutes to achieve a transformative result. Conclusions: Reflecting on the Future Since the implosion of the Soviet empire, positive policy changes and scholarship on Ukrainian gender relations have represented upward momentum, yet the larger environment is still pointing in the opposite direction. Uninterrupted upward momentum calls for radical shifts in social relations. It is imperative for traditional discursive practices to interchange with the modern world. If it is to have an impact, gender discourse must reach the general population; it cannot simply be confined to the intellectual elite and political players. Gender-friendly legislation needs meaningful outcomes. A responsive criminal justice system is imperative. Corrupt institutions need to be reformed. Negative stereotypes need to be dispelled. In sum – good government must display the political will to see gender-friendly legislation put into action. A new social movement effects change with difficulty, as it works its way through the people’s resistance to new cultural beliefs (Dobash and Dobash 1992). The decades ahead will present even greater challenges to building gender justice.12 Overcoming them will call for cooperation from all sectors of society. As they take stock of the progress over the past decades, the pioneering advocates of women’s rights will find that they must now take their efforts to a higher level. To answer this call, they have broadened their sphere of consciousness-raising activity by introducing new and even more effective programs, aimed at reaching ever-increasing numbers of men and women.

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NOTES 1 This was Deputy Nina Kondrakova’s advice to women aspiring to a political career. 2 In addition to my notes taken as an observer, I had access to a draft copy of the proceedings provided by a participant: Tretia Sesiia Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy (Third Session of the Ukrainian Parliament), Bulletin No. 97, 1995. 3 There were, in point of fact, 17 (4.2%), not 16, female deputies in the Ukrainian parliament. 4 An Amnesty International Report of 2007 informed that Ukraine’s Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family dictated that victims of domestic violence must be given a warning against ‘victim behaviour,’ perpetuating the myth that women are to blame for any violence inflicted upon them.’ 5 Women are beginning to challenge this practice as a 2009 posting on the Internet indicates. An activist group in Kharkiv went on record on 8 March 2009 to demand that women be addressed in a professional manner, reflecting respect for them. See Viktoria Kobyliat’s’ka, ‘Zhinky vyrishyly pryvitaty sebe sami,’ Den’. Available at http://www.day.kiev.ua/290619?id source=270898&mainlang=ukr. 6 Passage of the law required six years of lobbying and eight separate drafts before legislators, who, after persistent refusal to acknowledge the existence of a problem, finally passed it (see Mykytiuk 2008). 7 A reference to Ukraine as a matriarchal society, with a history of alleged female centrality since prehistoric times, was used to convince women that Western-style feminism is redundant. For a comprehensive treatment, see Rubchak (1996, 2009). 8 The ‘16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence’ is an international campaign emanating from the first Women’s Global Leadership Institute sponsored by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in 1991. Participants chose 25 November to begin its annual observance. 9 She was Oksana Kis, a prominent ethnologist and feminist scholar. 10 These statistical data were obtained from Tamara Melnyk. 11 Coincidentally, the three most outspoken critics of gender injustice, Mykola Tomenko, Victor Taran, and Olena Bondarenko, all belong to the Yulia Tymoshenko political bloc. Although Tymoshenko rejects the feminist label as a self-descriptor, in her way of life she conforms to its principles. 12 The current Ukrainian government offers an illuminating example of how difficult it will be to dispel the old stereotypes, to change entrenched regressive ideas about a woman’s ‘proper place.’ During the election campaign, Victor Yanukovych remarked that his competitor, Yulia

The Legislative Path to Equality 73 Tymoshenko, ought to pursue her whims in her kitchen, where women belong. His newly installed Prime Minister Mykola Azarov echoed this sentiment. When asked why there were no women in his cabinet he replied: ‘Conducting reforms is not women’s business . . . the current situation in Ukraine is too tough for women to handle’ ‘Feministky rozdiahly “Azarova” pered kabminom,’ Ukraina, 22 March 2010. Also available at http://.unian.net/ukr/news-368344.html. His comments set off a fire storm of opposition, and the media stoked the fires with extensive coverage.

REFERENCES Amnesty International. 2007. Report 2007: The State of The World’s Human Rights. Available at http://report 2007.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Europeand-Central-Asia/Ukraine on 1/13/2009 (accessed 26 April 2010). Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). 2005. An Interview with Olena Suslova, Founder and Chair of the Board of the Women’s Information Consultative Center (WICC). Available at http://www.awid.org/eng/Issuesand-Analysis/Library/Ukraine-and-the-recent-call-for-democracy-s-impacton-women-s-human-rights/(language)/eng-GB (accessed 3 March 2009). Buzawa, E.S., and C.G. Buzawa. 2003. Domestic Violence: The Criminal Justice Response. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Cornwall, A., E. Harrison, and A. Whitehead. 2007. Introduction. In A. Cornwall, E. Harrison, and A. Whitehead, eds., Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges, 1–20. London: Zed Books. Dobash, R.E., and R.P. Dobash. 1992. Women, Violence and Social Change. London: Routledge. Fedkovych, H. 2005. Legislative Trends and New Developments. Stop Violence against Women Website. Available at http://www.stopvaw.org/Legisla tive_Trends_and_New_Developments24.html (accessed 31 Dec. 2008). Johnson, J.E. 2007. ‘Contesting Violence, Contesting Gender: Crisis Centers Encountering Local Government in Barnaul, Russia.’ In J.E. Johnson and J.C. Robinson, eds., Living Gender after Communism, 40–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kandiyoti, D. 2007. Political Fiction Meets Gender Myth: Post-conflict Reconstruction, ‘Democratization’ and Women’s Rights. In A. Cornwall et al., eds., Feminisms in Development, 191–200. London: Zed Books. Molyneux, M. 2007. The Chimera of Success: Gender Ennui and the Changed International Policy Environment. In In A. Cornwall et al., eds., Feminisms in Development, 227–40. London: Zed Books.

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Mykytiuk, O. 2008. ‘Navishcho nam gender’? Den.’ Available at http://www. day.kiev.ua/2253910/ (accessed 22 Sept. 2008). Network Women’s Program (NWP). 2009. Sexual Assault. Stop Violence against Women Website. Available at http://www.stopvaw.org/Sexual_Assault.html (accessed 3 March 2009). Parliament of Ukraine (Verkhovna Rada). 1995. Tretia Sesiia Verkhovnoi Rady Ukrainy [Third Session of the Ukrainian Parliament]. Bulletin No. 97. Kyiv: Verkhovna Rada. Rubchak, Marian J. 1996. Christian Virgin or Pagan Goddess? Feminism versus the Eternally Feminine in Ukraine. In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 315–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2009. Collective Memory as a Device for Constructing a New Gender Myth. In L. Onyshkevych and M. Rewakowicz, eds., Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe, 139–53. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Standing, H. 2007. Gender, Myth and Fable: The Perils of Mainstreaming in Sector Bureaucracies. In A. Cornwall et al., eds., Feminisms in Development, 101–11. London: Zed Books. United Nations. 1991. Report on the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Available at http://www.stopvaw. org/10August2004.18.html (accessed 3 March 2009).

3 Electoral Reforms and Women’s Representation in Ukraine anastasiya salnykova

Despite its significant advances in democratic reforms compared with other former Soviet states (World Audit 2009; Campbell and Pölzlbauer 2010; Freedom House 2010), Ukraine falls short of meeting the criteria for gender equality. In terms of women’s political representation, Ukraine demonstrates poor results compared with world averages, ranking 112th in 2009 based on the proportion of women in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine) – worse than, for example, Côte d’Ivoire (108th), and only slightly better than Kuwait (114th). After the 2007 elections, only 8.2 per cent of Ukraine’s parliamentary deputies were women, while the world average was 18.6 per cent. This result was also lower than any of the world’s regional averages, including that of the Arab states, at 9.7 per cent (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2009). Thus, the need to improve gender equality in Ukraine’s parliamentary arena is pressing. In part, this requires a reassessment of the existing voting system, since voting systems are crucial institutional factors able to influence the number of women elected. The established view is that a singlemember district (SMD) plurality system tends to reduce representation of women;1 in contrast, proportional representation (PR), on average, leads to 10 per cent more women being elected (Electoral Reform Society 2009). Since gaining independence, Ukraine has undergone several electoral reforms and therefore presents an interesting case of recent electoral engineering. The country shifted from a majority to a mixed system in the 1990s and then from a mixed to a purely proportional system in 2005. This chapter evaluates the effects of both these reforms on gender balance in political representation in Ukraine. It first provides a

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summary of the available knowledge on the interaction between electoral systems and women’s representation. Another institutional tool, gender quotas, is also briefly addressed here. Then the case study of Ukraine is presented, followed by a discussion of probable outcomes of the current electoral system in terms of women’s representation. The chapter concludes that PR has not created an automatic change in terms of women’s representation in Ukraine, because other factors, including voter prejudices, internal political manipulations by political parties, and lack of mobilization in the women’s movement, have played a role. Future improvement in gender representation will thus depend on deeper changes to enable the potential positive effect of proportional representation. Electoral System and Women’s Representation There exists a wide consensus about the positive connection between a proportional electoral system and women’s representation, while many of the single-member district systems are thought to produce obstacles for women’s access to parliament. This consensus is based on both correlational evidence from comparative cross-national studies and an understanding of the specific mechanisms through which PR affects the decisions of political actors. Finally, the recognition of PR’s superiority is also shared by feminist political theorists (Williams 1998; Guinier 1994; Young 2000; Phillips 1998), although this recognition is based mainly on a critique restricted to the reality of the U.S. political system. Correlation between Proportional Representation and Women Elected A series of studies have confirmed the association between a ‘party list’ version of PR and higher entry of women into elected office in established democracies (see Norris 2004; Rule and Zimmerman 1992; Lijphart 1994; Matland 1998). Among the countries defined as ‘free’ or ‘partly free’ by the Freedom House, the ten leaders in terms of women’s representation all use PR electoral systems (Matland 1998, 106). Data for the year 2000 from 182 countries show that women made up an average of 15 per cent of members of parliament in countries using PR systems, compared with 11 per cent in those with mixed systems, and just 9 per cent in those employing plurality or majority systems

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(p. 117). Moreover, among countries with mixed member proportional (MMP) systems, where some of the candidates are elected by majority and another portion by proportional representation, women’s representation is usually higher in the proportional part of the system. Furthermore, when countries switch from a plurality or majority system to PR, there is an increase in women’s representation. These correlations have also been confirmed in a study of changes to electoral systems in Central and Eastern Europe (Matland 2003). Finally, statistical analysis demonstrates that the role of the electoral system is independent of levels of socioeconomic and political development (Norris 2000, 2). Nevertheless, it is known that PR is not enough; the relationship between the electoral system and women’s representation is influenced by other factors as well. While there are several striking cases of women gaining significant representation in developing countries with PR systems, there are many more cases where no gains have been made despite PR. The non-effect of the electoral system variable confirms an observation made by Matland (1998), which is that while institutions or rules may benefit a particular group, an effect will occur only if the group is sufficiently well organized to take advantage of the situation (p. 107). In Russia, for example, consistently more women are elected through the SMD part of the ballot than through PR (Moser 2003, 153). In addition, more women have been elected in ‘first past the post’ systems, such as those in Australia and Canada, than in some highly proportional party list systems, such as those in Israel and Belgium. By itself the electoral system is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to guarantee women’s representation. Nevertheless the electoral system functions as a facilitating mechanism that expedites the implementation of measures within parties, such as affirmative action for female candidates (Norris 2000, 2). Mechanism of the Proportional Representation Effect on the Number of Women Elected The theorized mechanism by which PR results in a positive effect on women’s representation is made up of several elements, including PR’s focus on political parties over individual candidates; the higher district and party magnitudes that characterize it; fewer wasted votes which, in turn, lead to a contagion effect in terms of women’s representation; and greater competition. An additional mechanism for the representation of

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women that is facilitated by PR is the possibility of the introduction of gender quotas under this electoral system. The PR system encourages participants in the electoral process to focus on parties and their policies, rather than on individuals. This party focus is seen as working for women because it shields them from built-in prejudices against women candidates among the electorate (Kethusegile-Juru 2003, 6). Yet the assumption that voters discriminate against women is not always correct. There are three levels of approval that any potential electoral contestant must pass: (1) self-selection, (2) selection by the nominating agent, and (3) selection by voters (Matland and Montgomery 2003, 20). Thus, when attitudes of the electorate are not discriminatory against women, or when an electorate is more in favour of women than the parties are, candidate-centred systems can actually facilitate women’s representation (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 11). Moreover, only a ‘closed list’ version of PR can combat voter prejudice; otherwise, in an ‘open list’ PR, voters can still express their preference for a male candidate when they choose individual candidates that they want to see on a party list. Another important consequence of the party focus is that parties may help women organizationally and materially, and thus enable a run for office that they might not be able to undertake on their own in a singlemember district. Conversely, because women often have fewer material resources than men, are less linked to informal networks of power, and find it more difficult to mobilize peers in support of their political aspirations, they may be disadvantaged by non-partisan competition (Birch 2003, 132). A second element of the PR mechanism is the use of multi-member districts, which implies higher district magnitudes (i.e., the number of seats per district), and, as a result, higher party magnitude (the number of seats a party can win in a district) (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 15). Party and district magnitudes affect party strategy when choosing candidates. Under PR, a woman candidate can be seen as a benefit to a party by attracting voters without requiring the most powerful intra-party interests, normally represented by men, to step aside, as would be required in a plurality or majority system (Matland 1998, 101). If parties can nominate more than one person, then they are more likely to nominate a balanced slate – in particular, in terms of gender – to attract a wider spectrum of voters. In contrast, if only one candidate is to be nominated, then it will often be the male incumbent, as he is seen as a more broadly accepted candidate. Moreover, since the

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top slots on candidate lists or in party hierarchies are often occupied by men, the bigger the party magnitude, the better the chances for women, as parties will then fill their subsequent seats with candidates other than their leaders (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 10). The importance of district magnitude is illustrated by the case of Ireland, which uses the single transferrable vote (STV)2 form of PR, but, due to small district magnitudes (three to five members per district), Ireland has lower levels of female representation than countries using plurality or majority systems, such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Matland 1998, 106–7). PR also functions with fewer wasted votes, which works in favour of women. If a plurality of votes is needed to gain a seat, as it is under the SMD system, then parties will be likely to give priority to their core group of voters. In contrast, in PR, where almost all votes count towards gaining the next seat, parties are more eager to appeal to all kinds of voters in a district, including marginalized groups (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 11). Because of the winner-takes-all nature of the plurality system, parties are reluctant to introduce more women candidates even if their competitors do so. In contrast, under the proportional rule, such contagion does happen, since the marginal increase in a party’s attractiveness to the wider number of voters can be more easily translated into seats under PR. In other words, because PR systems tend to produce more political parties, and thus the political distance between them is smaller, the threat that women voters could shift allegiances to another party is greater. As a result, party leaders feel a greater need to respond in kind when competitors start promoting women candidates (Matland and Montgomery 2003, 28). For example, the Norwegian Labour Party increased the number of women in winnable positions in those districts where it faced a challenge by the Socialist Left, the first party to adopt quotas in Norway. In contrast, in the Canadian SMD system, the Liberal Party has not been more likely to nominate women in those districts where the New Democratic Party had nominated women (Matland 1998, 102). PR is also viewed as enhancing competition by creating more parliamentary parties. In a highly competitive environment, parties are likely to try to appear fair and gender-balanced in order not to lose votes to any of the parties whose policies are close to their own. It should be noted, however, that a very high number of parties in the legislature can work against the representation of women, as party magnitude goes down in that case (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 11).

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These four elements of the mechanism by which PR tends to produce more winning female candidates are important. However, the electoral system is not enough to ensure equal representation. An additional institutional factor important for women’s representation is the electoral threshold, that is, the minimum percentage of votes required for a party to enter parliament. A high threshold discourages the creation of ‘mini-parties,’ which often elect only one or two representatives, who are usually male. In Israel, for example, despite a PR system and maximal district magnitude, women’s representation is only average (15%). This may be partially attributed to Israel’s low electoral threshold of 1.5 per cent (Matland 1998, 103–4). Thus, even though a multitude of parties increases competition, which in itself has positive implications for women’s nomination, having too many parties jeopardizes this positive effect. Another feature, that is not inherent in PR per se, is whether this electoral system is applied using open (voters choose which of the party’s candidates are elected) or closed (the party determines the rank-ordering of candidates) lists. The question, in terms of women’s representation, is whether in a particular context it is easier to convince voters to vote for women candidates or to convince party gatekeepers to include more women in prominent positions on the party list (Matland 1998, 104). Thus, in deciding between the closed versus open list versions of PR, it is crucial to understand that both the supply of women through party nomination and the demand for women politicians count (Wilcox et al. 2003, 43). For example, in Norway, where the parties are highly supportive of women candidates, preferential voting presupposed by open-list PR hurts women. In Poland, on the other hand, women do better with voters than they do with party committees; that is, the preferential vote leads to greater women’s representation (Matland 1998, 105). Finally, one of the reasons for PR’s popularity among proponents of women’s rights is that it is more appropriate for the introduction of gender quotas in the sense of places for women on candidates’ lists. Thus, part of the causal power of PR in terms of female representation comes from quotas, the introduction of which is considered easier under a proportional electoral system. Gender quotas work best in combination with a proportional representation electoral system with closed lists, the zipper or zebra principle of candidate placement (meaning that every second candidate on the list is a woman), a high electoral threshold, and a high district magnitude, as those structures stimulate

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parties to balance their electoral roll to be as inclusive and representative as possible. To summarize, based on comparative research, a consensus has emerged among researchers that PR electoral systems favour women’s representation. This is mostly explainable by the elements of PR’s electoral mechanism that have been outlined above. At the same time, however, this list of mechanisms is not exhaustive, and the correlation between PR and women’s representation is not absolute. As Norris put it, we know that PR is associated with more women, yet the precise reasons for this pattern remain a matter of speculation (2004, 23). Effects of Electoral Reform in Ukraine As mentioned at the outset, the Ukrainian electoral system has changed twice: from a majority to a mixed system in the 1990s and to proportional representation in 2005. Thus, the 1994 parliamentary election was by majority: one deputy was elected from each constituency, with a run-off held between the two candidates who received the highest number of votes if no candidate gained an absolute majority in the first round (Birch 1997, 48). By 1998, a semi-proportional system was in place, in which half of the deputies were elected by a plurality of votes (i.e., the first-past-the-post system) in single-member districts, and half from national party lists, with a 4 per cent electoral threshold. The same system was used in the 2002 national election, with 225 deputies elected through SMD and the other 225 elected under the proportional system (Harasymiw 2006, 2). The electoral law that was in effect 2005–11 was introduced as part of a pact between the incumbent political forces and the Orange Revolution opposition in 2004. According to this arrangement, the entire Rada is elected through party lists and the electoral threshold was lowered to 3 per cent (Fisun et al. 2006, 52). The consequences of introducing PR in Ukraine were unusual. According to Duverger’s (1965) law – which states that proportional voting tends to produce a multi-party system and that plurality/majority voting, in contrast, leads to a two-party system – the new Ukrainian electoral system should have aided in the creation of a greater number of parties in the Rada. Given the examples in other settings, it was also expected that PR would bring along an increase in women’s representation. However, these expectations were not realized. Under pure PR, the number of parties actually decreased. Even though no fewer

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than forty-five parties or party blocs were listed on the ballot for the 2006 elections, only five cleared the 3 per cent threshold (Harasymiw 2006, 4). Results from the subsequent early elections of 2007 were no different. The switch to pure PR in Ukraine has, therefore, been associated with less fragmentation in the party system, not the other way around (p. 9). This observation – as well as evidence from comparative research on Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian plurality voting systems, all of which failed to produce the expected bipartism, that is, a two-party system (Moser 1999) – suggests that the reach of Duverger’s law is limited. Another noticeable outcome of the change to PR was that the parties that did pass the 3 per cent threshold in Ukraine were bigger than those doing so in previous elections. In other words, PR did not produce better representation of previously marginalized groups by letting their parties into the Rada, but instead saw the success of the already dominant parties reinforced, irrespective of whether they represented diverse social groups. Although voters had a choice of more than forty parties on their ballots, popular support for small parties was negligible. In addition, those small parties predominantly expressed the ideological visions or personal ambitions of their leaders, rather than the interests of marginalized groups (Harasymiw 2006, 8). Finally, the parties that got into Rada were not ideological in nature (with the exception of the Communist Party), while classically centrist and rightist parties did not meet the electoral threshold (Fisun et al. 2006, 53–4). Thus, the usual expectation that PR favours parties with more clearly formulated ideologies (Lijphart and Grofman 1984) was not met in Ukraine either. In view of these peculiarities of the actual results of proportional representation in Ukraine, its impact on women’s representation there merits special attention. It is necessary to analyse whether the mechanism of interaction between electoral rules and women’s representation in Ukraine is similar to that at work in other European states. In general, the association between different electoral rules and women’s representation demonstrates that the number of women deputies did, indeed, increase with the change towards greater proportionality (from SMD to MMP and from MMP to PR) in the Ukrainian case. As Table 3.1 makes clear, however, discrete improvements were not very significant. Moreover, reductions in women’s representation took place twice: in 2002 and again in 2007. Finally, the overarching positive tendency might be explained by factors other than changes in the

Electoral Reforms and Women’s Representation 83 Table 3.1. Women’s Representation in Independent Ukraine, 1990–2007 (total seats = 450) National Election (year)

Electoral System

Women Elected n (%)

1990

SMD

13 (2.8)

1994

SMD

18 (4.0)

1998

MMP

35 (7.8)

2002

MMP

29 (8.2)

2006

PR

37 (8.2)

2007

PR

35 (7.7)

Source: www.vru.gov.ua. MMP = mixed member proportional; PR = proportional representation; SMD = singlemember district.

electoral rules. After all, the positive trend towards greater political representation of women began even before elements of PR or pure PR were introduced. The percentage of women elected was growing gradually since independence, including the years in which SMD and MMP systems were used. Therefore, this growth cannot be attributed entirely to PR. In her analysis of Ukraine’s first round of electoral reforms, from SMD to MMP, prior to the 1998 elections, Birch argues that the increase in women’s representation from 4 per cent in 1994 to 7.8 per cent in 1998 was clearly affected by the reform (2003, 139). That twenty-one women were elected through PR and fourteen through SMD in the latter year supports this view. Yet, the causal effect of the change in rules on the increase in women’s representation is not certain. If PR itself was able to produce such an increase in women’s representation, then we would expect it to do so with the shift from MMP towards pure PR as well. But as we can see in Table 3.1, the increase in women’s representation between 2002 and 2006 was less than 2 per cent (from 6.4% to 8.2%). Interestingly, a change from plurality to proportional elections has also led to fewer women elected on the local level in Ukraine. An activist working with local women candidates reported in an interview:3 ‘Women themselves expressed their concerns saying that under the current system it is more difficult to run; they need to build contacts with national parties and become someone’s protégé.’ Some researchers have similar doubts about the causal link between PR and female representation. In her study of mixed electoral rules

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and women’s representation in Russia and Ukraine until 1998, Andreenkova (2002) did not observe any advantages offered by any of the electoral systems as such. Similarly, Saxonberg concludes that while all the Eastern European countries that switched from majoritarian to mixed elections saw an increased level of women’s representation, it is not clear whether the change in electoral rules accounted for this increase, or whether it was part of a general trend after the original drop in female representation in the first post-communist elections (2000, 148). Future Trends According to classifications made by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), Ukraine’s electoral system as of 2011, which is a closed-list PR with a single electoral district and no quotas, is considered to be an adequate model in terms of women’s representation (Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 14).4 This system is generally expected to increase the chances of women being elected. However, a closer look at how PR is expected to affect women’s representation in Ukraine provides further insights. In general, the party focus of electoral campaigns under PR is expected to help combat voters’ prejudices against women candidates. In the Ukrainian case, however, this outcome is doubtful for two reasons. First, with no gender quotas in place or other responsibilities in terms of balancing gender representation, parties are not obliged to put forward more women on party lists. Moreover, if the population is prejudiced against women candidates, party gatekeepers will be especially reluctant to introduce more women on their candidates’ lists, and therefore, parties cannot be expected to become leaders in combating such gender stereotypes. Although 10 per cent of the candidates for most major parties were women in 1998, they were so far down the lists that they had little chance of being elected on the basis of PR (Pavlychko 2000, 250). In contrast, many strong women candidates were elected that year as independents through SMD. Both the leader of the Progressive Socialists, Natalia Vitrenko, and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko entered politics through SMD (p. 251). And although their parties have failed, the leaders of two right-wing extremist parties – Yaroslava Stetsko, of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Liudmyla Vansovska, of Menshe Sliv (Less Talk) – both won personal victories by gaining seats through SMD (p. 257).

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A director of the major alcohol distillery Artemida, Hanna Antonyeva, won through SMD as well (p. 258). These individuals cannot run as independents under the party-based electoral law, and unless they can sustain their own parties (as Tymoshenko or Vitrenko do), they are doomed to lose political independence, even if they get on some other party’s list of candidates. A second reason to doubt the assumption that PR will combat voter prejudice is that evidence regarding voter attitudes towards women candidates in Ukraine is contradictory, and it is unclear whether there is anything for PR to combat. On the one hand, about 30 per cent of men in Ukraine strongly agree and 70 per cent agree that men make better leaders; 60 per cent of women also agree with this statement (Wilcox et al. 2003, 45). On the other hand, another survey demonstrates that only eight out of 1,741 citizens interviewed before the 1998 elections listed the sex of the candidate as the principal factor for their choice (Birch 2003, 198). Even in Russia, where the electorate arguably holds even more traditionalist views, gender stereotypes have been shown not to be an obstacle for women to do better in candidate-based competitions than through party lists; there, political parties represent the main obstacle to women candidates, not the electorate (Moser 2003, 160). Therefore, the mechanism of combating prejudices through PR is not expected to change the picture of women’s representation in Ukraine significantly. A third aspect that is worth special attention is the expectation that PR’s increased party focus will lead to greater female representation because stronger parties will be more favourable for women who lack their own resources to enter politics. In the context of the growing feminization of poverty (Hankivsky 2008; Predborska 2005), as well as income inequality and structural imbalances in employment between men and women in Ukraine (see Chapter 11, in this volume), this mechanism could have positive results. On the other hand, the process through which party lists are formed in Ukraine is not transparent and is normally intertwined with major financial contributions or reciprocal services to the party from individuals who want to get on the list (Protsyk 2003). Such procedures nullify the socioeconomic levelling potential of PR and make it unlikely that it will counterbalance existing capacity discrepancies between potential male and female candidates. Moving on to another mechanism of PR, Ukraine has maximal district magnitude, with the whole country being a single electoral district.

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This feature of the voting system decreases the cost of introducing women onto party lists. Women can be nominated together with men so that incumbent men are not specifically challenged, and we can therefore expect that the magnitude mechanism will cause some degree of positive outcome in women’s representation in Ukraine. As for PR’s competition-enhancing mechanism resulting from an increase in the number of parties, its effect will not be present in the Ukrainian case because, as we have seen, the introduction of PR has been associated with a reduction in the number of parties. There are still about five major parties in Ukraine, as well as a number of smaller ones, which is enough to create a competitive environment. This competition cannot be attributed to the introduction of PR, however. Moreover, the competition mechanism assumes that parties trying to attract more voters will attempt to look fair and thus nominate more women on their lists. But for this to happen, a demand from the voters is needed first, and this is not yet present in Ukraine; gender is not an issue discussed in electoral campaigns in Ukraine. Other issues such as NATO and EU membership, Russian as a second language, and economic reform have much greater currency, making it unlikely that gender will become a major issue in political competition any time soon. Nevertheless, gender can become a second- or third-tier campaign issue. As the nature of the PR system produces fewer wasted votes, and thus provides incentives to appeal to marginalized groups, it can become an opportunity for a women’s party to enter the Rada. At the moment, however, there is no such party in Ukraine, and the women’s movement does not provide ground to hope for such a party in the nearest future. However, since in PR even a marginal increase in received votes translates easily into more seats in the Rada, it can become an incentive for parties to start playing the gender card in order to win at least a little bit more of a feminist vote, even from outside their own group of defined voters. In turn, this approach also has the potential to create a contagion effect, with other parties following the first mover. At the moment, there are no signs of this mechanism at work, but there are also no obstacles to it. For the contagion effect to start happening, a major party needs to be a first mover, a party that already has significant core support. To illustrate this point, in the 2002 and 2006 national elections, the Green Party of Ukraine used the zipper principle in its party list, but it did not manage to meet the electoral threshold nonetheless. During the 2007 elections, the Greens

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abandoned the zipper principle, demonstrating that for them it was only an electoral technology that did not bear fruit in terms of extra votes. The broader conclusion is that when gender is being picked up by a minor party, not only may it be of no use to that party, but it will also have no effect in terms of creating a contagion of nominating women candidates among other parties. Given the closed-list version of PR in Ukraine, the potential to guarantee electoral results in terms of women’s representation would exist if quotas were introduced. Until then, the list does not provide any such guarantees. To the contrary, the closed-list system, as well as the quota system, actually poses a danger in terms of putting token women in office who are entirely dependent on their party, and therefore will be reluctant to make any independent decisions, including those related to advancing gender equality. Discussion about the need to introduce open lists is ongoing in Ukraine, and an open-list system was supported by the former president, Viktor Yuschenko, in particular. At the moment, however, it is too early to say whether this change is probable. As has been shown, PR by itself is not enough to solve the problem of women’s representation, and it is quite possible that it may not bring the much-expected positive results in Ukraine. In fact, there are currently no signs of such change happening. Matland and Montgomery (2003) emphasize that we can expect women in countries with high magnitude PR to do better than women in less women-friendly systems. Yet as long as women are inadequately organized and public attitudes remain anti-feminist, women will be unable to fully utilize even favourable rules (p. 40). In the West, for example, electoral systems had no significant effect on the level of women’s representation until the ‘second wave’ feminist movement in the 1970s. Strong women’s movements have to convince parties in countries with PR to nominate more women candidates. If existing parties do not respond, the movement can simply create its own party (Saxonberg 2000, 148). In Ukraine, the situation does not look promising with respect to action by the women’s movement. Despite seven hundred registered women’s organizations,5 half of the gender experts interviewed for a recent research project reported that the women’s movement in Ukraine is highly ineffective in promoting gender equality.6 As one state official put it, ‘The women’s movement is not very influential and in recent years it got weaker.’ An NGO employee echoed this negative judgment, saying, ‘The women’s movement is very disorganized;

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there is no unity as in some countries.’7 As a result, women’s organizations have little influence on the state’s handling of women’s issues (WWICS 2007, 1), and they are not expected to make PR work for women in Ukraine any time soon. Because women’s political representation does not increase automatically with a certain electoral system, it is early to be overly optimistic about the introduction of PR. On the one hand, in the Ukrainian context, PR does open up a number of opportunities, and it is expected that women’s representation will benefit from the maximal district magnitude and fewer wasted votes aspects of the PR electoral process. These mechanisms are expected to result in a greater number of women nominated as well as a more salient role for gender issues in campaigns. On the other hand, such features as closed lists and a 3 per cent electoral threshold can affect women’s representation in both directions. In addition, the party focus of the PR electoral process is not expected to bring much change in relation to the broader Ukrainian context either in terms of combating prejudices or with respect to counterbalancing the economic gap between genders. Similarly, the enhanced competition mechanism is not working in Ukraine. Finally, although expected to bring results over time, PR is not very effective in the Ukrainian context today, primarily because of the lack of a strong women’s movement capable of using this instrument for its own benefit. Dangers Ahead The core problem with PR in the context of women’s representation is the danger of falling into the trap of a numerical approach. Policy recommendations suggesting closed-list PR plus a quota system as an optimal strategy (e.g., Larserud and Taphorn 2007, 12–13) assume that a higher number of women in parliament is the desired end goal. This view is in line with contemporary political theory that asserts the superiority of the politics of presence over the politics of ideas (e.g., Phillips 1998). This belief in the strength of numbers is also evident in the attitudes of Ukrainian women’s rights activists. In the words of one former state official, ‘when we have 35 per cent of women in the Rada this will change everything because a woman’s mind works better than a man’s.’ Yet, a high number of women politicians does not necessarily translate into an adequate representation of either women’s interests or the

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promotion of gender equality. As one parliamentary committee member commented, even quotas would not necessarily lead to that because ‘the women who are going to be on the [political party candidates’] lists will be the wives and daughters of the oligarchs, and they will only press voting buttons when told to do so.’ Indeed, despite the existence of quotas in the Soviet Union, and the presence of 36 per cent of women in the parliament in the mid-1980s (Hrycak 2005), no real improvements to gender equality took place, and as soon as quotas were removed, in 1990, women’s representation dropped to nearly nothing, down to 2.8 per cent in Ukraine (Hrycak 2001, 2005). In the 1998 elections, the Progressive Socialists, led by a woman (Natalia Vitrenko) and with the largest proportion of women candidates of all the major parties, made no mention of women in their program at all. The same was true for the Agrarian Party, also headed by a woman (Kateryna Vaschuk). The Women’s Initiative Party saw women as mothers. In contrast, the conservative Rukh (People’s Movement of Ukraine) Party vowed to promote the activity of women in civil society and business. Finally, the Green Party, with the smallest number of women on their candidates’ list that year, devoted the most attention among all the parties to women’s issues in their program, calling for equal rights, for women to work in leadership positions, and to have childbearing work counted for pension benefits (Birch 2003, 144–5). The failure of the numerical approach to women’s representation manifests itself in two ways. First, such instruments as closed-list PR and gender quotas (i.e., reserved seats) that ensure an increase in the number of women in parliament provide incentives for nominating token or proxy women instead of strong women politicians. Chowdhury (2002) submits that ‘in a way, the word “reservation” has a passive connotation in that it refers to numbers without much reflection upon the interface between numbers and outcome’ (p. 1). Reserving seats for women can even play out in a negative way by accentuating women’s dependence in politics and reinforcing their marginality (Lowe-Morna 2003, 7–8). Research has revealed many cases of purely symbolic representation of women, especially if the women elected have no power base in a constituency of their own or in strong movements outside the political institutions (Dahlerup 2006, 149). Such symbolic women feature on the party lists in Ukrainian politics as well. For example, Nina Matvienko, a pop-folk star popular among the middle aged and elderly,

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became Rukh’s token woman. Not only was she inactive in terms of political work, she was also the epitome of traditional Ukrainian womanhood (Pavlychko 2000, 254). Other examples include the well-known Soviet actress Valeria Zaklunna, with the Communist Party; Soviet pop-star Sofiya Rotaru, with the Soyuz (Union) Party; famous actress Ada Rohovtseva, affiliated with the Liberal Party and Party of Labour bloc; Olha Sumska, the actress who starred in the first Ukrainian soap opera, with the Party of National Economic Development of Ukraine (ibid.); and the Eurovision song contest winner Ruslana, as well as another pop-singer Oksana Bilozir – both deputies from Yuschenko’s Our Ukraine; and there are others. To be fair, there are also success stories of women who felt isolated and powerless at the beginning of their careers, but eventually gained confidence and influence (Dahlerup 2006, 149). Even in these cases, however, advancement of women’s interests or gender issues is not guaranteed. This leads to the second reason the numerical approach fails: in contrast to token women, who do virtually nothing in terms of actual decision making, there are also women who become politically active but are of no use to the women’s rights movement, as they do not have the interests of women as a group among their personal and political priorities. For example, Valentyna Datsenko, a leader of the All-Ukrainian Party of Women’s Initiatives, often expressed essentialist views about women’s nature: ‘Politicians squabble among themselves because they are men; politics need women because they are naturally peace-loving.’ These traditionalist attitudes extended to the party’s political program, which spoke of giving birth and bringing up children as the highest achievements in a woman’s life. Ukraine’s ex-prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, meanwhile, despite often being accused of manliness, is also a carrier of traditionalist gender views: ‘The problem is not that we have too few women in politics; rather we have too few real men’ (Pavlychko 2000, 256). Most Ukrainian women deputies were not even supportive of the 2005 Gender Equality Law, which is why it took six years and pressure from the European Union for the Rada to finally adopt a mild version of it. In reference to the first gender bill proposed in 1999, one woman deputy said that Ukraine could not afford this law before it solved the problem of needy children (Hrycak 2005, 75). Women deputies ridiculed the notion of equal rights legislation, claiming that women are already equal if not over-emancipated and need to devote themselves more to motherhood (Hrycak 2001, 141). A scholar

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who worked on a draft of the law remembers: ‘I could not appeal to women either. Lilia Hryhorovych – our “great genderist” today – was one of the first against the law. I had to fight with the women’s movement at the time for the idea of gender equality.’ This illustrates a major paradox: that women’s representation often does not lead to the advancement of gender issues, which include both women’s and men’s interests in relation to one another and which require attention and transformation to bring about meaningful equality. The next danger that could emerge in the future relates to the closed-list form of PR, such as that used in Ukraine. Although it is considered more effective for women’s representation, it also suffers from a democratic deficit in other respects, such as poor accountability of elected officials to their constituency. As Norris (2000) has put it, underlying arguments about electoral systems are ‘contested visions about the fundamental principles of representative democracy, the central normative criteria that an electoral system should meet, and whether the virtues of strong and accountable government are more or less important than social representation, including women and ethnic minorities’ (p. 1). Therefore, in assessing the overall desirability of the list PR system, we need to consider not only women’s representation in isolation, but also broader societal needs, so that women’s rights do not come at the expense of some other rights. In addition, if voters, both men and women, prefer male politicians to female, even though their preference is the result of gender prejudices, it is undemocratic to force society into having more women in the Rada, in particular through quotas. A more democratic – and more effective – solution is working with people’s attitudes directly, through education or the media, thus creating a demand for women in politics. Finally, the introduction of proportional representation, and even more so the introduction of a quota system in the future, could become an incentive to wait passively for the desired result of increased female representation instead of mobilizing the women’s movement to actually use institutional advantages to create the change. According to an interviewed parliamentary committee worker, such passivity followed the passing of the Gender Equality Law in 2005: ‘Women’s NGOs fought for the law for so long that when it was finally adopted, they took it as a happy end and did not know what to do next. In fact, the law is only the beginning.’ The main implication of this discussion is that the numerical approach to women’s representation is not at all satisfactory, and achieving

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results in terms of gender equality requires transcending it. The instruments aimed at a numerical increase in women representatives do not account for the problem of token women and unenlightened women who are of little use to the program of advancing gender interests. In addition, there is a danger of promoting a democratic deficit when raising the number of women politicians through administrative means rather than by nourishing a change in voters’ attitudes and in women’s capacities. Finally, an overly optimistic view of PR may also carry the risk of creating undue passivity within the women’s movement. In her study of gender in development, Tiessen (2005) defines three approaches to gender mainstreaming: (1) technical or operational, (2) subtle, and (3) networking. The technical approach involves strategies such as gender-sensitive policies, increasing the number of gender advisers and providing gender-training sessions. The subtle approach involves strategies such as resistance and subversion conducted by women within a given organization. Networking refers to the building of coalitions and committees (especially ones that include sympathetic men) that make gender concerns a matter of group responsibility as opposed to just a personal commitment by individuals. The first approach is unlikely to lead to any notable advances in gender equality, whereas the second and third approaches have the potential to challenge mainstream and patriarchal norms (ibid.). Based on the present review of the introduction of PR in Ukraine, the change to the electoral system is clearly a technical solution, and by itself, it will not lead to the attitudinal shifts that are required for gender mainstreaming to be effective. Conclusions Despite the introduction of proportional representation in Ukraine, it is still too early to celebrate.8 Analysis of trends in women’s representation in association with a change in electoral rules demonstrates that, overall, the Ukrainian case is in line with established expectations. As the proportionality of the electoral system has increased over the years, the number of women elected to the Rada has also increased. At the same time, it is also clear that improvements following the introduction of elements of PR or pure PR have not been very dramatic and have been followed by reductions of women’s representation. Therefore, it is more plausible that other significant factors have

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been at play as well, with PR not being a crucial force for the advancement of women’s representation in Ukraine. A closer look at the mechanism by which PR in Ukraine might affect women’s representation gives us reason to be only moderately hopeful that, despite the social reality of discrimination against women, their political representation will increase, at least numerically. This expectation is grounded in the fact that PR does indeed open up a number of opportunities for women’s representation, including maximal district magnitude and fewer wasted votes. Nevertheless, it is also important to face the potential dangers associated with a move towards proportionality. The first danger is trading quantity for quality, which allows token women or women who are unaware of women’s interests to ‘represent’ women in parliament. The second danger is the democratic deficit related to the lower accountability of elected officials in PR, as well as the lack of democratic spirit in mechanisms that force society to have more women representatives despite the will of voters. Finally, enthusiasm for PR could decrease the much needed mobilization of the women’s movement if activists expect the institutional incentives to work by themselves. The introduction of PR is only a technical solution that by itself will not effectively lead to gender equality in political representation. The crucial factors that can enable the electoral system’s functioning to support gender equality are: strengthening of the women’s movement’s ability to pressure political parties; economic empowerment of women that decreases their dependence on men in general and on male party members in particular; and transformation of societal attitudes to create demand for women politicians and for women’s issues and – even more importantly, gender issues – to be represented in mainstream politics. In a nutshell, deeper transformation and much more work is needed for Ukrainian society to reap the gender dividends promised by the introduction of PR.

NOTES 1 A single-member district (SMD) system can exist in the form of majority system or plurality system (also known as ‘first past the post’). 2 The single transferable vote (STV) is a voting system based on proportional representation and preferential voting. Under STV, votes are initially

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3 4

5

6

7 8

allocated to the voters’ most preferred candidate and then, after candidates have been either elected or eliminated, any surplus or unused votes are transferred according to the voters’ stated preferences. Author’s interview with Oleksandra Sorokopud, August 2010. Ukraine’s system of 2005–2011 falls into IDEA’s medium-fit category of models, meaning that it is not yet the best-practice system, but it is at least not antagonistic towards women. This number used to be even higher, at more than 1,200, according to O. Sydorenko, Zhinochi Organizatsiyi Ukrayiny: Dovidnyk (Kyiv: Tsentr Innovatsiyi ta Rozvytku, 2001). Interviews with 32 gender experts in Ukraine (from civil society, government, and academia) were conducted in 2006–7 for a research project on gender mainstreaming led by Olena Hankivsky and myself. The results of this study are most fully presented in Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova’s Chapter 16 in this volume and in their article in the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 26/3 (2010), 383–408. For more on the women’s movement in Ukraine, see sources in n6 above. Also see Alexandra Hrycak (2005). When this book was in press in 2011 the electoral system was changed back to a mixed one.

REFERENCES Andreenkova, A.V. 2002. Women’s Representation in the Parliaments of Russia and Ukraine. Sociological Research 41(2): 5–25. Birch, S. 1997. Ukraine: The Perils of Majoritarianism in a New Democracy. In International IDEA, ed., The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral Systems, 48–50. Stockholm: International IDEA. Also available at http://twistedmatrix. com/users/z3p/files/esd_english.pdf (accessed on 28 Sept. 2009). – 2003. Women and Political Representation in Contemporary Ukraine. In R. Matland and K. Montgomery, eds., Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, 130–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, D.F.J., and G. Pölzlbauer. 2010. The Democracy Ranking 2009 of the Quality of Democracy: Method and Ranking Outcome. Comprehensive Scores and Score for the Dimensions. Vienna: Democracy Ranking. Available at http://www.democracyranking.org/downloads/ method_ranking_outcome_2009_A4.pdf. Chowdhury, N. 2002. The Implementation of Quotas: Bangladesh Experience – Dependence and Marginality in Politics. Presented at the International

Electoral Reforms and Women’s Representation 95 IDEA Regional Workshop on the Implementation of Quotas: Asian Experience. Available at http://www.quotaproject.org/CS/CS_Bangladesh.pdf. Dahlerup, D. 2006. Increasing Women’s Political Representation: New Trends in Gender Quotas. In International IDEA, ed., Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers, 141–84. Stockholm: International IDEA. Duverger, M. 1965. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. Translated by B. North and R. North, with a Foreword by D.W. Brogan. London: Methuen. Electoral Reform Society (U.K.). 2009. Campaigns: Women. Available at http:// www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=35 (accessed 20 July 2009). Fisun, O., T. Mosentseva, and O. Drobotenko. 2006. Transformation of the Political System of Ukraine. In O.S. Vlasiuk, ed., Ukraine: Strategic Priorities: Analytical Assessment-2006, 49–55. Kyiv: National Institute for Strategic Studies. Also available at http://www.niss.gov.ua/book/Vlasyuk_ mon/01–5.pdf (accessed 28 Sept. 2009). Freedom House (FH). 2010. Freedom in the World 2010: Erosion of Freedom Intensifies. Available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw10/ FIW_2010_Tables_and_Graphs.pdf (accessed 22 July 2010). Guinier, L. 1994. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness of Representative Democracy. New York: Free Press. Hankivsky, O. 2008. Globalization, Trafficking, and Health: A Case Study of Ukraine. In C. Patton and H. Loshny, eds., Global Science/Women’s Health, 175–99. Amherst: Cambria Press. Harasymiw, B. 2006. Ukraine’s 2006 Parliamentary Elections in Dynamic Perspective. Paper presented at conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists, York University, Toronto, 29 May. Hrycak, A. 2001. The Dilemmas of Civil Revival: Ukrainian Women since Independence. Journal of Ukrainian Studies 26(1–2): 135–58. – 2005. Coping with Chaos: Gender and Politics in a Fragmented State. Problems of Post-Communism 52(5): 69–81. Inter-Parliamentary Union. 2009. Women in Parliaments Database. Available at http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm (accessed 20 July 2009). Kethusegile-Juru, B.M. 2003. Quota Systems in Africa: An Overview. Paper presented at the IDEA Workshop on the Implementation of Quotas: African Perspective, Pretoria, 11–12 Nov. Available at http://www.quotaproject. org/CS/CS_SADC_Overview_Bookie_27_7_2004.pdf (accessed 28 Sept. 2009). Larserud, S., and R. Taphorn. 2007. Designing for Equality: Best-Fit, Medium-Fit and Non-favourable Combinations of Electoral Systems and Gender Quotas. Stockholm: International IDEA.

96 Anastasiya Salnykova Lijphart, A. 1994. Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, A., and B. Grofman. 1984. Choosing an Electoral System: Issues and Alternatives. New York: Praeger. Lowe-Morna, C. 2003. Beyond Numbers: Quotas in Practice. Paper presented at the IDEA Workshop on the Implementation of Quotas: African Perspective, Pretoria, 11–12 Nov. Available at http://www.quotaproject.org/CS/ CS_Lowe%20Morna-1–6-2004.pdf (accessed 28 Sept. 2009). Matland, R.E. 1998. Enhancing Women’s Political Participation: Legislative Recruitment and Electoral Systems. In International IDEA, ed., Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers, 93–111. Stockholm: International IDEA. – 2003. Women’s Representation in Post-Communist Europe. In R.E. Matland and K.A. Montgomery, eds., Women’s Access to Political Power in PostCommunist Europe, 321–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matland, R.E., and K.A. Montgomery. 2003. Recruiting Women to National Legislatures: A General Framework with Application to Post-Communist Democracies. In R.E. Matland and K.A. Montgomery, eds., Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, 19–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moser, R.G. 1999. Electoral Systems and the Number of Parties in PostCommunist States. World Politics 51(3): 359–84. – 2003. Electoral Systems and Women’s Representation: The Strange Case of Russia. In R.E. Matland and K.A. Montgomery, eds., Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, 153–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norris, P. 2000. Women Representation and Electoral Systems. In R. Rose, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Elections, 348–51. Washington DC: CQ Press. Available at http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/WOMENELE.PDF (accessed 7 Sept. 2010). – 2004. Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlychko, S. 2000. Women’s Discordant Voices in the Context of the 1998 Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine. In A. Bull, H. Diamond, and R. Marsh, eds., Feminisms and Women’s Movements in a Contemporary Europe, 244–60. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Phillips, A. 1998. The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Clarendon. Predborska, I. 2005. The Social Position of Yong Women in Present-day Ukraine. Journal of Youth Studies 8(3): 349–65. Protsyk, O. 2003. Semi-Presidentialism and Stability in Ukraine. Europe-Asia Studies 55(7): 1077–95.

Electoral Reforms and Women’s Representation 97 Rule, W., and J.F. Zimmerman. 1992. Electoral Systems in Comparative Perspective: Their Impact on Women and Minorities. Westport: Greenwood. Saxonberg, S. 2000. Women in East European Parliaments. Journal of Democracy 11(2): 145–58. Tiessen, R. 2005. What’s New about Gender Mainstreaming? Three Decades of Policy Creation and Development Strategies. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 26: 705–19. Wilcox, C., B. Stark, and S. Thomas. 2003. Popular Support for Electing Women in Eastern Europe. In R. Matland and K. Montgomery, eds., Women’s Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe, 43–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, M. 1998. Voice, Trust and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). 2007. Women’s NGOs in Ukraine and End of Western Aid. Kennan Institute U.S. Alumni Series 14. June. Available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index. cfm?fuseaction=events.event_summaryandevent_id=237920 (accessed 28 Sept. 2009). World Audit. 2009. Democracy Audit. Available at http://www.worldaudit. org/democracy.htm. Young, I.M. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 Global Campaigns to Combat Violence against Women: Theorizing Their Impact in Post-Communist Ukraine alexandra hrycak

Since the 1980s – when international women’s organizations first placed the issue of gender violence on the agenda of international institutions – states have come under considerable international pressure to adopt the policy recommendations made by transnational campaigns to combat violence against women (Keck and Sikkink 1998). In 1992, gender violence was added to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW; Joachim 1999, 2007). In 1993, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. In 1995, the need for all states to take action to prevent violence against women was made a top priority for the Beijing Call for Action and the Beijing Platform for Action. A broad range of global campaigns and projects have mobilized at regional and national levels to place further pressure on states to develop policies to prevent gender violence. In response to the diffusion of the ‘global policy scripts’ that these international treaties and global campaigns against violence promote, activists have struggled to persuade states to pass legislation and implement comprehensive programs bringing them into compliance with their treaty obligations to take action to prevent violence against women. Despite extensive international pressure, however, these efforts have met with uneven success. In some countries, global campaigns to combat violence against women have resulted in extensive legislative and policy responses, in others, there has been relatively little or no response (Coomaraswamy 2003; Webhofer 2009). Ukraine holds the distinction among post-Soviet countries of responding first and most extensively to the policy recommendations of global campaigns to address gender violence. In 1998, Ukraine became the first

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post-Soviet country (and one of the first countries in Europe) to formally criminalize human trafficking (Pyshchulina 2003; Lutsenko et al. 2005). In 2001, Ukraine introduced further changes to bring its human trafficking legislation into closer conformity with international treaties against trafficking. That year, Ukraine also became the first post-Soviet country to pass a law to combat domestic violence (Hrycak 2010a). After the Orange Revolution brought Western-leaning leaders to power in 2004, state officials further increased support for the prevention of violence, opening new shelters for victims of domestic violence and new crisis and rehabilitation centres that provided a wide range of services to battered or trafficked women. They also created gender advisory bodies within government ministries to provide access for women’s rights advocates to introduce gender mainstreaming measures that would help harmonize Ukrainian law with the stringent standards of the European Union (Hrycak 2010b). Lawmakers passed comprehensive gender equality legislation, and gave women’s and human rights groups the opportunity to discuss the shortcomings of the implementation of laws and policies with lawmakers and state authorities (e.g., through parliamentary hearings on gender violence and equality of opportunity held in November 2006; see Chapter 2 in this volume) and to amend the 2001 Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family to bring it in line with the recommendations made by women’s rights advocates and such human rights groups as Amnesty International. Ukraine’s early response to global campaigns to prevent violence against women, and its extensive recent efforts to respond further to pressure from domestic women’s and human rights activists, are improbable and puzzling when compared with the later and less positive responses to global activism that have occurred in most countries in the former Soviet region. In recent years, most post-Soviet countries have passed legislation to criminalize human trafficking, in large part to avoid economic sanctions that the United States threatens to use against non-compliant states ( Johnson 2009). But, as of 2009, there was still no specific legislation to prevent domestic violence in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.1 Aside from Ukraine, the only post-Soviet countries that have passed laws to prevent domestic violence are the Kyrgyz Republic (in 2003), Georgia (in 2006), and Moldova (in 2007) (Fábián 2010; Hrycak 2010a, 2010b). I argue in this chapter that Ukraine’s response cannot be explained by the leading theoretical approaches to the effects of global campaigns

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on policy making: world polity theory, world civilization theory, and global feminism theory. If we follow the expectations of the world polity approach, which stresses that global norms and global policy scripts (disseminated via international organizations) are the primary influence informing policy regime choices, we would expect that all postSoviet states would have acted quickly to develop policies that are in line with the international treaties they sign, including those that call for states to take action to combat violence against women (Boli and Thomas 1997). This is not what happened. If we follow the expectations of the world civilization approach, which argues that states adopt global policy scripts in order to signal their Western geopolitical orientation (Beckfield 2008), we would expect that the early adopters of anti-violence policies would have been Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where government elites embraced a Western geopolitical orientation when they restored their independence and seceded from the Soviet Union. This is also not what happened. Finally, if we follow the expectations of global feminism approaches, which consider transnational feminist networks to be the main actors that help local women’s groups develop the capacity to pressure states to enact policies to protect women’s rights (Moghadam 2005), we would expect that the earliest adopter of global policies among post-Soviet countries would arguably have been Russia. In the post-Soviet region, Russia became the first target of global feminist advocacy. It has received the most extensive funding to support the activities of local advocates who promote global feminist frames regarding the prevention of domestic violence, and its local activists were also the first in the post-Soviet region to draft legislation against domestic violence (Hemment 2007; Johnson 2009; Johnson and Brunell 2006). However, more than forty draft laws later, legislation on the prevention of domestic violence has not been passed in Russia. Instead, Ukraine overtook Russia to become the leader among postSoviet countries in passing and implementing policies to address violence against women. Why did the Ukrainian state react earlier than others to pressure to address violence against women? Following recent calls to ‘bring the state back in’ to studies of women’s activism (Randall and Waylen 1998; Stetson and Mazur 1995), this chapter sheds light on the development in Ukraine of special units charged with promoting women’s rights – such as offices, commissions, agencies, ministries, and committees devoted to raising the status of women and promoting equality of men and women. Through a reconstruction of the process by

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which such organizationally based women’s rights initiatives in Ukraine aided the development, revision, and implementation of policies to prevent violence against women, it lays the groundwork for future research to address two related puzzles. The first concerns Ukraine’s early adoption of laws against various forms of gender-based violence. The second concerns why, despite this state’s early adoption of these ‘global policy scripts,’ policies to combat violence remain partially unimplemented today. The explanation suggested in this chapter for why Ukraine is an early adopter is consistent with the conclusions made by Keck and Sikkink (1998) in their cross-national studies of transnational advocacy networks. Keck and Sikkink argue that the influence of human rights campaigns on the behaviour of target states depends upon activists’ ability to ‘mobilize shame,’ that is, use compromising information strategically at moments of government vulnerability or state legitimacy crisis. As I show below, such moral leverage is created for women’s rights activists in Ukraine because government power holders are deeply divided over the country’s geopolitical orientation. Consequently, government actors belonging to rival factions use evidence of their own responsiveness to accusations of non-compliance with international treaties to enhance their own moral leverage over their political rivals, thus creating periodic legitimacy crises. The chapter explores domestic bids for legitimacy in relationship to two main dimensions of global advocacy campaigns that previous research confirms shape local openness to global women’s activism: (1) international exposure to new global campaigns through international conferences and (2) the priorities of international funders. The chapter starts with an assessment of the impact of the Beijing World Conference for Women, which exposed all post-Soviet countries to new global policy scripts that raised the visibility and salience of violence against women. It then considers the mediating impact of international donors who singled out Ukraine as a priority country and violence against women as a focus for aid, thereby initiating projects that focused on implementing global policy scripts. It then moves on to explore the importance of increased political access given to women reformers who worked on developing a new legislative and policy framework for addressing violence against women. It next examines the problems that continue to prevent the establishment of programs to aid victims of violence. The chapter ends with suggestions for a theoretical framework that draws upon sociological studies

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of social movements and could be used to further explore the conditions under which global advocacy campaigns influence policy agendas in post-Soviet countries. Before going further with this analysis, my standpoint on the complexities of Western intervention into post-Soviet transition needs to be acknowledged. This chapter is part of a larger research project that examines the impact of Western-funded initiatives that were established in Ukraine to address women’s issues. Women’s organizations in Ukraine have received considerable support from Western donors, with the largest sums devoted to the prevention of trafficking in women and somewhat smaller sums dedicated to fighting domestic violence. As I argue elsewhere, these two types of anti-violence initiatives are frequently billed as promoting women’s political empowerment and strengthening support for women’s rights. But they nonetheless also serve to promote Western government interests by preventing women from migrating abroad illegally to Western countries and aiding in the return of undocumented migrants to their communities of origin (Hrycak 2011). Anti-violence initiatives have provided aid to some migrants. They have also given rise to a complex field of women’s organizations and an elite stratum of expert organizers and professional activists in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who act as gatekeepers of Western aid aimed at strengthening civil society. Ironically, these projects have provided financial support mainly to professional NGOs that operate job skills seminars or offer training in self-empowerment, rather than to the grassroots women’s voluntary associations that, at least according to their mission statements, Western women’s NGO projects were designed to assist (see Hrycak 2006). As Hemment (2004) notes, in her research on such NGO development initiatives in Russia she has found that Western ‘support for NGOs . . . comes with strings attached; NGOs that accept donor support are required to take on the responsibilities of the retreating state, picking up the slack for the radical free market,’ meanwhile, generally, such ‘NGO-ization’ acts to ‘demobilize social movements’ by minimizing local concerns about the transition and creating ‘new hierarchies [that have] allowed former elites to flourish’ (p. 821). As I demonstrate below, Western anti-violence projects have led to positive changes in state policy and legislation that protect women from abuse and can be used to prosecute human traffickers. But so far, initiatives to fight human trafficking and domestic violence have been

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unable to reverse the broader socioeconomic decline that is provoked by the neo-liberal reforms promoted by Western donors. They leave largely unaddressed the economic conditions that unleashed the tide of illegal immigration and contribute to rising rates of domestic abuse, conditions that are likely to be exacerbated further by privatization. Nor do anti-violence projects aid in reintegrating most of the migrants who are deported from Western countries through anti-trafficking programs and who are compelled to return home to communities plagued by economic insecurity. Instead of working to protect the rights of women migrants (most of whom go abroad to work as nannies or nurses), antitrafficking crusades continue to direct resources towards rehabilitating the ‘victims of sex slavery.’ By continuing to code women who cross borders as victims of sex trafficking (‘fallen women,’ if not prostitutes), these projects to ‘promote women’s empowerment’ may unintentionally disempower women by reaffirming damaging stereotypes, in some cases leading migrants to be labelled negatively and rejected by their communities upon their return. Bearing in mind that Western aid to post-Soviet countries has had a range of consequences that are contradictory, complex, and often negative, it is my contention that anti-violence initiatives have also had decidedly different policy outcomes in Ukraine than in neighbouring countries. There is much to be gained, therefore, by investigating the surprising effectiveness of legal and policy reform initiatives in Ukraine. Conceptualizing Violence against Women Violence against women was not recognized as a political issue during the Soviet era. The leaders of the Communist Party claimed that Soviet women had achieved equality and emancipation and denied that any systematic violations of women’s rights took place in the Soviet Union ( Johnson 2009). In practice, state policies on women’s issues served to bolster the participation of women in the labour force and reverse declines in the birthrate – while failing to address gender-based income inequality and a host of other issues affecting the status of women. When restrictions on independent organizing were relaxed in the late 1980s, advocates of new women’s issues became active in public life and began organizing women and raising new issues (Hrycak 2002). But violations of women’s rights attracted the interest of small circles of intellectuals and human rights activists. Instead of addressing gender

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discrimination, most of the women’s groups that emerged during the late 1980s voiced various other concerns (Buckley 1997). In particular, women activists challenged the Soviet state to recognize violations of human rights that occurred during military service. Many activists also sought enhanced state assistance to mothers of large families, single mothers, mothers of disabled children, and other categories of needy mothers. Violence against women first began to be viewed as a social problem in need of state action after the Soviet Union collapsed and the post-Soviet states were established. At that time, a broad range of international actors placed pressure on post-Soviet states to develop policies based on global human rights treaties. The most visible were international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank; foundations such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation; and development agencies and related projects sponsored by the United States, Canada, and other Western countries. Pressure to adopt comprehensive policies to defend women’s rights intensified in response to an external event: the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing. The Beijing Conference exposed post-Soviet states to new policy norms, models, and practices. The NGO Forum introduced post-Soviet women activists to new understandings of violations of women’s rights and new tactics utilized by transnational advocacy networks to pressure states into honouring their international treaty commitments. Bringing states into compliance with the Beijing Declaration and with the mandates of international treaties (e.g., CEDAW) became a central focus for subsequent women’s activism. Participation in preparations for the conference and the NGO Forum triggered new political processes that enhanced the salience and visibility of violations of women’s rights, creating potential political opportunities to place violence against women (and other new issues, such as gender equality) on the agenda of local women’s organizations as well as their allies. Among the most crucial results of participation in Beijing was the collection of credible information on the status of women and its dissemination to potentially sympathetic actors in the state, international NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and foundations. The gathering of credible information on an issue, which Keck and Sikkink (1998) call ‘information politics,’ is central to human rights work but had been suppressed in the Soviet

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era. All states that participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women were expected to hold public discussions and parliamentary hearings to examine the information that explored the status of women in their country (Rudneva 2000). State officials in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states were faced for the first time with the opportunity to collect, analyse, and publish data assessing the country’s progress towards complying with CEDAW. Ukraine had ratified CEDAW in 1980. In accordance with its provisions, officials submitted periodic country reports to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women on measures the state had taken to remove barriers standing in the way of equality for women. However, they had never conducted an independent assessment of the effectiveness of these measures, as earlier reports were submitted during the Soviet era, when the Communist Party leadership dictated the conclusions of reports to the United Nations.2 The preparations for Beijing thus created new discursive opportunities for advocates of women’s empowerment. Women legislators, state officials, scholars, and heads of women’s organizations were tasked with organizing the hearings, gathering data, providing testimony, and participating in identifying concerns they had about the status of women.3 It was in response to these activities that violence against women first began to gain recognition as a distinct policy issue. Government representatives issued a series of specific recommendations for government activities to protect women’s rights. Among the measures they called for was the establishment of shelters, crisis centres, and rehabilitation centres for battered women, as well as comprehensive legal and institutional reforms that would protect women from violence (Laboratoriia zakonodavchykh initsiiatyv 2004). Beijing marked a crucial turning point for how women’s organizations and state officials in post-Soviet countries discussed, understood, and worked on women’s issues. Notably, participation in this event initiated a paradigm shift in how violence against women was framed. Domestic violence came to be seen as a distinct social problem that required legislative and policy remedies.4 Yet, only some of the post-Soviet countries that participated in Beijing responded to the conference’s mandates by passing legislation to address gender violence. Therefore, exposure to global policy scripts and frames cannot explain why countries adopt new policy models, nor can it explain why Ukraine stands alone among post-Soviet countries as an early adopter of global policy recommendations regarding violence against women.

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International Assistance Resources are needed to mobilize credible information and promote support for new causes. Funding is a second crucial force that greatly influenced the local impact of global campaigns to address gender violence and other women’s issues. The Soviet state had long promulgated institutional arrangements that disabled potential loci of criticism or opposition and constrained efforts to engage in political reform. Surveillance, repression, and control over public expression left a legacy of ‘atomization’ and ‘alienation’ from ‘meaningful political or collective activity’ (Verdery 1991). There is widespread agreement that Western funding set women’s rights activism in motion in post-Soviet states by offering grants, opportunities for travel, and other inducements to organizers (Hrycak 2002, 2006; Johnson 2009; Sundstrom 2005). After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Western donors became the key supporters of initiatives to promote state reform. They set up numerous projects to promote economic restructuring and political reforms and provide humanitarian assistance. They also provided crucial financial support for local human rights groups. The donors that became the most active in efforts at what came to be called ‘civil society building’ and ‘democracy promotion,’ for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and George Soros’s Open Society Institute, dedicated significant resources to support local initiatives to address women’s issues. At first, within the former Soviet Union, donors directed their activities mainly towards projects located in Russia. But in the mid-1990s, Ukraine rose in prominence as a target of Western aid after the Clinton administration made the country a centrepiece of its post-Soviet transition programs (Pishchikova 2006).5 Once the U.S. government singled out Ukraine as a priority country for democratization, other donors followed suit.6 In the late 1990s, new pools of resources became available to pursue the two issues that commanded most interest among international donors: human trafficking and domestic violence (Richter 2002). The U.S. government was the first Western donor to make the prevention of human trafficking a priority of its post-Soviet foreign aid program. Prevention of domestic violence also became a principal focus for international aid at this time, because the U.S. government considered

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domestic violence to be a root cause of trafficking (Pishchikova 2006).7 And because the U.S. government, and other Western donors, came to consider it to be a ‘priority country,’ Ukraine began receiving more direct funding for women’s issues than it had in the early 1990s, when aid providers tended to cover most of the post-Soviet region through offices based in Russia. The increasing centrality of violence prevention activities in Ukraine among Western women’s initiatives is illustrated by the shifting aims of the main projects USAID funded to address women’s issues in post-Soviet countries. The first major project USAID supported to strengthen women’s activism in the post-Soviet region was the New Independent States – United States (NIS – US) Women’s Consortium, a network of post-Soviet and U.S. women’s NGOs headquartered in Moscow and Washington, DC (Hrycak 2002).8 The original mission of the consortium was to foster partnerships and exchanges between women’s NGOs in the United States and post-Soviet countries, thereby strengthening the capacity of post-Soviet women’s groups to provide training that would help local women to become political leaders, entrepreneurs, and providers of services to women, as well as advocates of changes in policies affecting women. In 1997, the consortium moved its office from Moscow to Kyiv. Subsequently, USAID narrowed the focus of its women’s rights program to the prevention of human trafficking. In 1999, USAID began disbursing multimillion dollar grants for anti-trafficking projects in Russia and Ukraine.9 USAID projects to fight trafficking established nationwide networks of crisis centres and business incubators throughout Russia and Ukraine. They also funded a broad range of other activities related to violence prevention in Russia and Ukraine, including the development, refinement, and implementation of new policies on the prevention of trafficking that were coordinated through the American Bar Association – Central and East European Law Initiative (ABA–CEELI). USAID also provided additional support for other projects to strengthen local organizations working to fight trafficking and domestic violence. One such key program was the Project Harmony Domestic Violence Community Partnership Program. In 1999 and 2000, under the auspices of this program, groups of representatives of civic organizations and state agencies travelled from several Ukrainian cities to sister cities in the United States, where they received training in the prevention of

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domestic violence and human trafficking and visited crisis centres and shelters for battered women. Upon their return, they were given further financial and technical support to transplant these organizations to the Ukrainian context. Another important source of funding that channelled resources towards projects addressing violence against women was the Ukrainian branch of philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute – the International Renaissance Foundation. The International Renaissance Foundation set national women’s rights advocacy in motion in Ukraine in the early 1990s by sponsoring seminars that introduced Western conceptions of women’s rights, by funding local projects to raise women’s issues, and by facilitating attendance by women’s advocates at the NGO Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women and other international women’s rights conferences. After Beijing, from 1996 until 2004, the Renaissance Foundation operated a project in Ukraine called ‘Woman in Society,’ which drew attention to new issues and transformed understandings of women’s rights. Women in Society helped initiate interest in domestic violence, which was one of its priority issues. The program provided grants that helped local advocates who were interested in violence prevention to participate in international conferences and exchanges, engage in the development of crisis centres to aid victims of abuse, and participate in projects to change the state’s handling of violence. Also of central importance to initiating and sustaining these new efforts to reform the state’s handling of violence against women was the women’s rights program of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) (Mel’nyk 1999). In 1997, as part of a broader U.N. initiative to provide assistance to post-communist countries, the UNDP Gender in Development Program started a project called ‘Equal Opportunities in Ukraine,’ whose aim was to promote the ‘mainstreaming’ of gender and human rights concerns in the organization’s programs and activities (Smolyar 1999, 2001; UNDP 2003). A unit referred to as the Gender Bureau was placed in charge of this project’s activities. The bureau was delegated the role of working directly with Ukrainian state agencies and government officials on programs to protect women’s rights, in particular, developing comprehensive legal measures to address violence against women. Western donors were crucial intermediaries in stimulating new forms of women’s activism that raised awareness of violence against women among women activists in the newly independent states of the

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former Soviet Union. Most aid providers initially focused their energies on Russia, which became the first gateway to international assistance. However, by the late 1990s, they began to differentiate among postSoviet countries and singled out Ukraine as a country whose transition was of particular significance. Simultaneously, international assistance providers began to encourage projects to address violence against women in Ukraine. International assistance facilitated exposure of Russian and Ukrainian women’s rights advocates to global policy scripts through international conferences. It provided further incentives to direct attention to violence against women. U.S. funding priorities had a dramatic impact on local women’s movements in post-Soviet countries, encouraging both a proliferation of new groups and a shift among women activists away from other issues towards the prevention of domestic violence and human trafficking (Hemment 2004, 2007).10 In both Ukraine and Russia, Western funding became the main source of support for a rapidly growing field of professional women’s organizations (Suslova and Karbowska 2003; Sundstrom 2005).11 Generally, studies have found that Western funding has not been able to achieve its broader mission of empowering women as political actors (Hemment 2004, 2007; Henderson 2003; Hrycak 2002). Many activists, who previously had worked on other issues, began to identify the prevention of domestic violence as one of their priorities in order to vie for grants and other forms of support and encouragement. The intervention of Western donors raised the salience of domestic violence as a policy issue. But it has had complicated effects on local efforts to pass and implement national laws against violence, to reform the criminal justice response to violence, and to mobilize a public following for women’s activism ( Johnson 2009; Hrycak 2010b). In Russia, international assistance to women’s rights advocates was extensive, enabling many valuable projects to be undertaken: crisis centres were established, public awareness campaigns were undertaken, and research on violence conducted. However, policy initiatives experienced little success, as illustrated by the fate of projects to pass a new law against domestic violence. In 1994, a draft law was submitted to the state Duma, but it failed to pass. Since then, more than forty drafts of a law against domestic violence have been rejected by the Duma, which has become increasingly dominated by anti-Western political blocs. As the Russian case demonstrates, sustained and extensive international assistance will not result in the passage of policies to combat domestic violence when political

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structures and participatory channels are closed to Western-style policy models. The following section turns to examine a crucial mediating factor that explains Ukraine’s early adoption of legislation to combat violence against women: the openness of state actors to Western policy recommendations. State Openness to Campaigns against Domestic Violence Political openness is often assumed to encourage political activism, while ‘closed’ political opportunity structures are often assumed to discourage it. Crucial differences characterized the political opportunity structure activists faced in Russia and Ukraine. The early 1990s was a time of great optimism regarding post-Soviet democratization. Government elites throughout the former Soviet region exhibited openness to mobilization by civic actors, relaxed prior restrictions on political life, and declared commitments to Western and international policy models. But by the end of the 1990s, only Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had successfully democratized and were actively pursuing integration with the West. Meanwhile, the governments of all other post-Soviet countries had become noticeably more repressive and more hostile to Western ideals, although to varying degrees. Government repression of political opponents and civic groups and hostility to Western states and their efforts to promote democracy ranged from more moderate and intermittent in such countries as Ukraine and Moldova, to extreme in Belarus and, later, Russia. By the late 1990s, Russia, Belarus, and most of the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, were ruled by authoritarian regimes that expressed antagonism towards Western donors and their efforts to promote the development of legal and institutional reforms. Authorities unleashed an increasing wave of repression against civic groups, the media, and opposition politicians. In most post-Soviet countries, this wave of repression succeeded in consolidating political power in the hands of authoritarian leaders. But it backfired in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and the Kyrgyz Republic in 2006, when growing blocs of Western-leaning political groups successfully ousted authoritarian regimes through ‘coloured revolutions.’ All post-Soviet countries that experienced ‘coloured revolutions’ also passed legislation to prevent domestic violence and exhibited greater responsiveness to their women’s rights treaty obligations than did either the consolidated democracies of the Baltics or the post-

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Soviet states that became authoritarian by the late 1990s. Why did this happen? In Ukraine, the efforts of political blocs to compete for power involved numerous contests for legitimacy: these created opportunities for women’s rights advocates to become seen as potentially valuable allies. It was President Kuchma himself who created the most important political opportunity for women’s rights activism by agreeing, in the mid-1990s, to establish a new state agency devoted to gender issues. A chief priority of the Beijing Platform for Action was the establishment of ‘national machinery’ to advance women’s rights. CEDAW requires national machinery within the state apparatus to monitor the problems of women, to enhance women’s rights, and to ensure equality of opportunity. There was, however, no state agency in Ukraine for coordinating state activities to advance women’s rights (Mel’nyk 1999). Before attending the Beijing World Conference, exParty functionaries approached President Kuchma. Arguing that ‘administrative structures’ focused on ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s problems’ existed throughout the world and that Ukraine also needed to adopt such an approach, they requested that he create a state unit to coordinate policies in this domain.12 He gave his consent. In 1995, at the national level, a new unit was formed to raise the status of women, mothers, and children: the Committee on Women, Maternity, and Childhood under the Authority of the President.13 The following year, this structure was expanded, becoming the basis for the Ministry for Family and Youth, whose mandate was expanded to include the development and implementation of policy on the family, women, youth, and children (Kulachek 2005). The ministry proposed a number of legislative bills, presidential decrees, and government decisions that adapted global policy scripts to define and defend women’s rights in Ukraine.14 The ministry was successful in placing violence and the other issues identified by the Beijing Action Plan on the state policy agenda. The National Action Plan for 1997–2000 to Improve the Status of Women in Society, for instance, outlined violence as a key area of concern for the status of women and defined mechanisms for fighting it. The ministry also created new access points for women’s rights activists by establishing two expert advisory boards: a Gender Council and a Coordinating Council on Women’s Issues. These two bodies brought together representatives of new women’s NGOs to develop joint projects with state agencies and the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine). One of their most important tasks was working with parliamentary deputies

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to draft legislation that would advance women’s rights. The councils also worked to bring together women’s rights groups and legislators who were interested in developing laws on gender equality and domestic violence. The ministry developed the first measures to reform the state’s handling of domestic violence. Its official policy recommendations closely followed the global policy script suggested by CEDAW and the Beijing Platform for Action. Following the recommendation of international gender experts, the ministry’s representatives vowed to direct state funds to create a ‘set of networks to link international organizations, foreign foundations, state officials, and local women’s NGOs that were involved in advocacy against domestic violence, the reform of laws, and the provision of social services to victims’ (Kolos and Danyleiko 1999). Second, they also promised funding to help local civic organizations provide support to victims of violence and unveiled a plan to offer seminars on domestic violence to raise awareness among state officials of the need to create a nationwide network of local crisis centres and shelters providing support for victims of violence. Ministry officials stressed that they planned to work on violence through the establishment of cooperative networks that brought together state officials and local women’s NGOs. The measures recommended, and the discourse adopted in framing violence prevention as a cause, were quite new to Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries. They were called for by the Beijing Platform for Action and by international assistance providers. Ministry officials encouraged women’s NGOs to single out domestic violence and human trafficking as hot button issues. The increasing salience of gender violence became evident in 1998, at the First Congress of Women in Ukraine, an event the ministry sponsored and organized (Dovzhenko 1998; Kolos and Danyleiko 1999). A distinct sub-unit of the congress was devoted to discussing policies to prevent various forms of violence against women, in particular, human (or sex) trafficking. The congress issued resolutions calling on the public and the government to develop concrete solutions to fight violence against women and human trafficking. Among the steps the congress recommended were, first, for the Rada to amend the Criminal Code of Ukraine and other legislation in order to define three new categories of violence against women: domestic violence, forced prostitution, and trafficking in women. Second, the congress recommended that the state create particular institutions to assist victims of violence,

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including ‘service networks, centres of rehabilitation for women who have suffered from violence, including within the family,’ and that it support all the crisis centres for women that had come into existence in Ukraine (Dovzhenko 1998). As in the case of the 1995 recommendations of the parliamentary hearings, these proposals were based on the global scripts provided by international treaties and global campaigns to combat violence against women. The openness of the Ukrainian state to Western policy proposals is further illustrated by efforts to create and refine new legislative and policy measures to fight human trafficking and domestic violence. In 1998, Ukraine became the first post-Soviet country to pass a law criminalizing human trafficking, Article 124.1 of the amended Criminal Code of Ukraine. The following year, Ukraine became the first postSoviet country to launch a comprehensive state program to prevent and combat human trafficking. In 2000, specialized criminal investigation units were established within the Interior Ministry and Security Service to prosecute trafficking cases. The Ukrainian state subsequently responded with speed to international efforts to refine state handling of human trafficking. After Ukraine signed the U.N. Palermo Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, hearings were held in the Verkhovna Rada that later led to the passage of a draft law to amend the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Ukraine’s legislators also displayed considerable openness and relatively little resistance to global policy models, passing the first piece of legislation in post-Soviet countries to address domestic violence using the comprehensive approach called for by the Beijing Platform for Action (Government of Ukraine 2004).15 A working group set up by the UNDP Gender Bureau helped to draft this law in the late 1990s. In 2000, the law’s sponsors introduced it to the Rada and it passed its first reading with little opposition. In 2001, after a second reading elicited little debate, the Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family was passed and entered into force. Exposure to global policy models and the resources provided by international assistance to address violence against women together encouraged women’s rights advocates in Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states to focus on domestic violence and human trafficking. But openness to Western models among state actors (particularly pro-Western legislators) was the third crucial facilitating factor that helps to explain why Ukraine became an early adopter of global policy recommendations for women’s rights. At the same time that

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international assistance providers focused on pressuring Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states to enact policies to fight gender violence (specifically, domestic violence and human trafficking), authoritarian regimes throughout the region were growing increasingly hostile to Western policy recommendations. In Ukraine, however, the president and legislators both continued to support the passage of Western-style reforms. Campaigns to enact policies to address violence succeeded in politically divided Ukraine and in the few countries where authoritarian consolidation did not take place (Georgia and the Kyrgyz Republic). In sum, international resources and pressure appear to achieve the greatest policy success where the polity is decentralized, but they tend to fail when it is centralized. Implementation of New Women’s Rights Projects New women’s rights projects were initiated in Ukraine during a politically turbulent era when deep political divisions emerged over Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation, initiating frequent symbolic contests for legitimacy. One political bloc embraced a pro-Western orientation and sought membership for Ukraine in both the European Union and NATO. Another bloc opposed this geopolitical orientation and expressed support for retaining close political and economic relations with Russia. Increased political competition between these two blocs created political opportunities for women reformers, but also limited their ability to implement new policies and establish new programs to assist women. This section focuses on problems that have befallen projects to address gender violence as the political fortunes of institutional sponsors have waxed and wane. Implementing policies to prevent gender violence requires sustaining the commitment of high-level sponsors of new projects. The fate of the state agency charged with developing and implementing legislation and policies to prevent violence illustrates several of the main challenges such projects have faced in response to fluctuations in the commitments of their high-level sponsors in the government. The Ministry for Family and Youth was created in order to serve as the ‘national machinery’ for coordinating state efforts to implement treaties and laws addressing women’s rights. As such, it was also the main state agency responsible for developing and implementing policies to address violence. But in 1999, before the ministry’s projects had been implemented, it was dismantled. Paradoxically, this was done in

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order to demonstrate Ukraine’s compliance with Western donors’ neo-liberal agendas, which called for evidence that recipients were reducing the size of their states. Women’s issues were bundled together with child and youth welfare as well as sports and tourism, and placed under the jurisdiction of a series of state agencies that were repeatedly dissolved. In 2005, following the Orange Revolution (which ended Leonid Kuchma’s time as president and led many of his allies to lose their government posts, at least temporarily, thus perhaps lessening the need to show symbolic support for Western-style women’s activism), the government initiated a further reorganization of these units that resulted in the merging of the Ministry for Family, Children, and Youth with the State Committee on Sport and the establishment of a new ministry, the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport. Within this new ministry, the unit charged with addressing women’s issues is small, has low status, and is devoted mainly to the family. Furthermore, the budget of the ministry is devoted mainly to organized sports, in particular, participation in the Olympics and other international athletic competitions (Kulachek 2005, 204).16 In sum, the national machinery that was so crucial for the success of earlier campaigns to prevent violence against women lost the capacity to carry out its own policies. This administrative move has undermined the machinery for promoting gender issues, leaving state officials concerned with women’s rights struggling to sustain themselves and reliant mainly on funding from international donors. In the absence of coordinated pressure from central state authorities, municipalities have failed to respond to new legislation and national government programs obligating municipalities to fund local organizations that provide services to survivors of violence. Indeed, the Kyiv municipal authorities have recently attempted to close the country’s oldest shelter for battered women. As mentioned above, moments of political vulnerability have been crucial determinants of the local impact of international pressure and assistance; however, as these examples suggest, in Ukraine, openness to reform appears to be cyclical and seems to occur mainly during moments of intense competition between Western-leaning political reformers and their opponents. The impact of transnational advocacy campaigns, global frameworks, and international pressure on state policy is thus clearly mediated by the structure of domestic political opportunities. Whenever Western-leaning parties or leaders have emerged

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victorious and taken control of the government, new political access points have been created for introducing new approaches to women’s rights based on global policy paradigms. But before these changes have been implemented successfully, parties and leaders who oppose a proWestern geopolitical orientation have retaken control over the government and cut off support for policies and programs associated with Western integration. A return has been initiated to a state policy that adopts a more traditional Soviet definition of women’s issues, which identifies women with motherhood and the family. The government has reduced its support for fighting domestic violence and human trafficking because these issues are associated with ‘gender mainstreaming’ efforts intended to bring Ukraine closer to membership in the European Union. Reformers’ efforts at building new state agencies to address women’s issues have nonetheless resulted in several achievements. First and foremost, they led to official recognition of several new women’s issues, in particular, domestic violence and human trafficking. State acknowledgment, in turn, has spurred the development and refinement of new state policy that places greater priority on preventing violations of women’s rights. State policy created new access points for partnerships between the state and civic groups, and this has created a potential new local source of support for the activity of civic organizations that raised women’s issues. Such partnerships between state officials and local women’s NGOs led to the passage of the 2001 Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family and several other laws and state programs that made international treaties and global models the basis for Ukrainian policy on issues of violence. However, the creation of state administrative structures to address women’s issues also has had negative effects; once high-level political commitments shift when the balance of power tips away from Western-leaning political forces (Hrycak 2007). Leaders of women’s rights groups, who worked with state agencies on the development of the law on domestic violence and related projects based on international women’s rights advocacy, noted with bitterness that during President Kuchma’s second term, it seemed that the women’s movement lost its earlier leverage over the state and, as a consequence, was unable to monitor or participate in the implementation of the state programs that resulted from earlier collaboration with women’s NGOs (Skoryk 2006). As the state became increasingly authoritarian, officials lost interest in partnering with civic actors and this, in turn,

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led to a decline in the overall activity level of civic organizations concerned with women’s issues. Furthermore, just as in many other countries, the state agencies that came into being to advance women’s equality for the most part were treated as peripheral and were bundled with an amorphous set of assistance categories that typically included children and mothers. New political opportunities were created after President Viktor Yushchenko assumed office in 2004, and pro-Western politicians came to power. As mentioned earlier, state authorities increased support for state-funded hotlines, shelters, and other forms of practical support for victims of domestic violence. They also opened six new shelters for victims of domestic violence, eighteen new crisis centres that provided a wide range of services to women going through crises such as divorce or domestic violence, and twenty-four new centres for psychological and medical assistance. Gender equality legislation was passed, and gender advisory bodies were created within government ministries to provide expertise from women’s rights groups on how to further harmonize Ukrainian and European Union policies. Women’s and human rights groups also were given the opportunity to discuss the shortcomings of the implementation of laws and policies with lawmakers and state authorities through a Parliamentary Hearing on Gender Violence held in November 2006.17 In 2007, as mentioned earlier, the Rada held the first discussion of a new draft law to amend the law on domestic violence to bring it in line with the recommendations made by women’s rights advocates and Amnesty International (Amnesty International 2008). The Rada passed this amended legislation in 2008. The amendment was an important step forward for protecting women from violence, as it deleted a clause that could lead women to be blamed for provoking violence, and thus permit perpetrators to avoid prosecution (see Chapter 2 on discussion of this issue). However, with the decline of President Yushchenko’s power, broader implementation of antiviolence programs has slowed. Conclusions What conclusions can be drawn from the preceding analysis of activities to combat violence against women? Ukraine’s early and positive response to global advocacy around issues of gender violence makes Ukraine what social scientists call an exceptional or ‘deviant’ case – that is, one that behaves differently from the other cases with which

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it is generally compared. Typically, such cases are used to disprove a theory (because proving a theory would require more cases). They may also be used to suggest avenues for future research on omitted conditions or variables of interest in explaining an outcome that diverges from theoretical predictions. Indeed, I argue above that the case analysed here helps disprove the three main theories typically used to explain response to global policy regimes and transnational advocacy to combat violence against women: world polity theory, world civilization theory, and global feminism theory. World polity theory stresses exposure to global scripts and world civilization theory stresses the resonance of national and global values, while global feminism theory typically places greatest emphasis on ties to transnational feminist advocacy groups. I argue above that exposure to global scripts cannot account for Ukraine’s divergence from other post-Soviet countries. All post-Soviet countries participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing, the principal international policy event that introduced countries to global policy scripts and created normative pressure for them to adopt women’s rights models in line with the Beijing Platform for Action. Support provided by international aid helped domestic reformers forge ties to foreign feminists, thus spurring local advocacy campaigns, but it alone cannot account for Ukraine’s divergent outcome, as aid to Russia began first, and arguably exceeded aid to Ukraine. Analysing a deviant case requires a focus on differences from other similar cases, as looking for ‘differences in initial conditions’ helps ‘to account for differences in outcome’ (Emigh 1997, 680). Studying an early adopter of transnational feminist advocacy projects also helps to shed light on the mediating conditions that enabled women’s rights advocates in Ukraine to be more successful in using global policy scripts to reshape their country’s gender regime than has been the case in other post-Soviet countries. So, if the main conditions pointed to by other theories are necessary but not sufficient, what is the crucial mediating condition that helps us to explain when we should expect global scripts to be adopted? I argue above that the crucial difference between such early adopters as Ukraine and such non-adopters as Russia lies in the structure of domestic political opportunity. Three of the post-Soviet countries that have passed laws against domestic violence experienced ‘coloured revolutions’ (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and the Kyrgyz Republic in 2005). Somewhat similarly, Moldova, the one exception, witnessed similar protests against alleged

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electoral fraud in 2009 in what some have called the Twitter Revolution. Shortly thereafter, Moldova also passed an act for the prevention of domestic violence. By contrast, non-adopters of such policies fall into two categories: the Baltic States (which made their turn to Western-style democracy before the wave of global advocacy against violence); and Russia, Belarus, and the remaining post-Soviet countries (all of which were becoming consolidated authoritarian regimes when the wave of global advocacy peaked). My analysis suggests that domestic political opportunities for local anti-violence advocacy result less from Western aid itself than from deep divisions within the polity that render power holders in Ukraine more open to the policy proposals advocated by global women’s rights advocates. This hypothesis is broadly in line with general social scientific findings on social movements in other regions of the world. Theorists of activism have found that infusions of external resources (such as those provided to post-communist countries by Western donors) are unable to explain the success of social movements and may even weaken them. Shifting political opportunities are far more important, because they significantly reduce the costs of mobilization by increasing perceptions that mobilization is likely to achieve success. Typically, the most important dimensions of shifting political opportunity are: (1) the opening up of access to the political system for new actors, (2) shifting political alignments among elites, (3) the appearance of new allies within the polity, (4) the emergence of splits within the elite, and (5) a decline in the state’s willingness or ability to repress challengers (Tarrow 1998, 76). The relative openness of the political system, the stability of elite alignments, the presence of elite allies, and the state’s capacity for repression all shape the ability of challengers to mobilize (McAdam et al. 2001). The emergence of social movements in post-Soviet countries as well as in other non-democratic contexts often follows favourable changes in a political system – such as the rise or success of opposition parties that may see alliances with new challengers as beneficial. Also important as initiators of such mobilization are ‘negative opportunities’ – such as the crises that eroded public support for regime elites in the countries that experienced ‘coloured revolutions.’ Indeed, future research should explore how deep and growing divisions within post-Soviet political systems have affected policy on other issues that are not coded as ‘women’s issues.’ A further crucial conclusion can be offered regarding globalization. Some scholars of globalization argue that the rise of supranational

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institutions and an increasingly integrated global economy signals the decline of the nation state, but this study suggests that such a conclusion is premature at best. The state still matters in conditioning the possibilities for activists not only to engage in political campaigns that cross national boundaries but also to put into practice the policies they recommend. Its response to global campaigns suggests that state-level actors are central to understanding the factors that mediate between supranational institutions and nation states. It is particularly important to ‘bring the state back in’ to study women’s activism in postSoviet countries, most of which are governed by authoritarian and semi-authoritarian political dynamics. Finally, future research should look comparatively across countries to determine what mechanisms and approaches facilitate the implementation of new state programs against violence. Because adopting global policy models involves an encounter between local activists and ideas from elsewhere, it is instructive to examine what helps in the reception of new types of language and discourses that have developed within the new policy domain concerned with violence against women. As has been noted in analyses of global women’s rights advocacy, many American phrases (e.g., ‘gender,’ ‘empowerment,’ ‘training of trainers’) and, more broadly, an American discourse of self-empowerment, have migrated from Western projects into the vocabulary of the NGOs that work on women’s rights campaigns in post-Soviet states (Hrycak 2006). Similarly, various American phrases and discourses have made their way into state programs against trafficking and domestic violence in Ukraine. The adoption of new vocabulary solves some problems: most importantly, it creates new visibility and legitimacy for concepts that have no easy equivalent in local parlance. But it creates new problems as well. Law enforcement personnel in Ukraine have levelled much criticism at the confusing terminology employed in anti-trafficking legislation. Global policy models introduced new terms such as ‘debt bondage,’ ‘sexual exploitation,’ and ‘exploitation of work’ without providing guidance as to their definition or application. Prosecutors have complained that the law’s provisions cannot be applied as long as the main elements of the crime had not been defined in practical terms. Similarly, law enforcement officers are normally given specific procedures to follow in enforcing new laws, but the initial legislation was not accompanied by instructions for handling cases of human trafficking. As a consequence of

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such problems of translation and application, prosecutors were initially reluctant to initiate cases against traffickers (Fedkovych 2007).18 Considerable efforts have been made to further refine new anti-violence campaigns so that new policies can be used as intended. Donors have funded various programs to retrain law enforcement personnel and fine-tune legislation. Their efforts have met with some success, as with every passing year, more trafficking cases are prosecuted. Nonetheless, the most recent anti-trafficking legislation – which was intended to be an improvement over the previous law – continues to employ terminology that law enforcement personnel find unclear and confusing. Future research should explore the puzzle of implementation: what works and what does not work for bridging the discursive gap between recipients and producers of new state policy to prevent violence. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fieldwork and interviews were conducted for this project with leaders of women’s NGOs in Kiev, Lviv, and Kharkiv. I am grateful to the women scholars and activists whom I interviewed, and to the International Research and Exchanges Board and Reed College for financial support. NOTES 1 I have compiled this information mainly from the Stop Violence Against Women website (STOPVAW), available at http://www.stopvaw.org/ Country_Pages.html (accessed 5 April 2009). Another useful source is the Council of Europe’s webpage on violence against women in members states, available at http://www.coe.int/T/E/Human_Rights/ Equality/05._Violence_against_women/. 2 For instance, the introduction to the initial report of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (CEDAW/C/5/Add.11) at its 16th and 21st meetings, held on 5 and 10 August 1983 (CEDAW/C/SR.16 and 21) stated: ‘As a result of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the principle of equality of the sexes had come to be applied for the first time in history and had become an integral part of the policy of the State.’ Experts on the committee noted the strong similarity between the reports submitted by the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR, and also indicated in their review that statistics and data were not provided to assess progress towards gender equality.

122 Alexandra Hrycak 3 For the text of this hearing, see http://www.rada.gov.ua/zakon/skl2/ BUL23/120795_97.htm. 4 In the case of Ukraine, many prominent women’s rights advocates I interviewed noted that Beijing initiated a dramatic shift in how the status of women was conceived (interview, League of Women Voters 50/50, Kyiv, 3 May 2001; interview, National Council of Women, Kyiv, 12 July 2001; interview, president and founder, Ukrainian Women’s Union, Kyiv, 8 June 2001; interview, Women’s Information Consultative Centre, Kyiv, 22 March 2001; interview, Ukrainian Women’s Studies Centre, Kyiv, 27 June 2005; interview, Kharkiv City Women’s Fund, Kharkiv Oblast Diia, Kharkiv, 29 May 2001). 5 During the crucial first decade and a half of independence, the U.S. government outspent all other Western donors in Ukraine. Using U.S. government sources, I estimate that the U.S. government provided over three billion U.S. dollars for various assistance projects since independence in 1991; see U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants, available at http://qesdb. usaid.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe (accessed 9 May 2007). 6 For instance, Canada also later came to view Ukraine as a ‘priority country’ for democratization; indeed, it was the only country in Eastern Europe given this classification. 7 Western projects to halt illegal immigration tied together the issues of domestic violence and trafficking in women because they assumed that victims of domestic abuse could not remain in the country and fell into the hands of cross-border human trafficking rings. 8 The consortium was created using funding the Clinton administration earmarked for women’s leadership training in the former Soviet bloc. In 1994, Winrock received two initial grants: a $95,000 grant from the Eurasia Foundation, and a $750,000 grant from USAID. The consortium’s initial aim was to create partnerships between established NGOs in the United States and newly formed women’s groups located in post-Soviet countries. Through partnerships with a sister NGO in the United States, local NGOs were to learn to advocate on behalf of women. 9 In addition to these two anti-trafficking projects, in 1999 Winrock International started two other projects that were also related to the prevention of trafficking: Women’s Economic Empowerment and Supporting Micro, Small, and Medium-Size Enterprise Development. The former was awarded a total of $3,612,399 in funding from USAID; the latter received $1,544,294. 10 Interview, Women’s Information Consultative Centre, Kyiv, 22 March 2001.

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11 In Ukraine, the number of women’s organizations increased from five in 1991 to well over 1,200 by 2001 (Sydorenko 2001). Similarly, in Russia, women’s organizations experienced rapid numerical growth. However, the impact of activities funded by Western initiatives has been complex and hard to assess. Sundstrom, for instance, notes that, ‘growth in numbers of NGOs themselves cannot be considered an accurate indicator of movement success, because foreign donors sometimes encourage growth in numbers of organizations through their grant programs, but those numbers may not indicate high levels of movement activity. Many organizations remain hollow with few members and even one person forming several organizations, largely as a result of donors’ preference to grant funds to many different organizations over time’ (2005, 424). 12 In response to Beijing and other events that introduced them to international women’s rights activism, several of these state-builders embraced new Western models of women’s rights advocacy that focused on achieving gender equality (interview, former deputy director, Ministry of Family and Youth, Kyiv, 27 July 2001). 13 Interview, League of Women Voters 50/50, Kyiv, 3 May 2001. 14 In 1999, the ministry was transformed into the State Committee for Family and Youth, which took responsibility for the status of women and gender equality. A further series of reorganizations has taken place, with a variety of state units given responsibility for women’s issues. 15 The Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family calls for the state to provide funding to crisis centres, shelters, hot lines, and other facilities that provide medical and social rehabilitation to victims of domestic violence. It specifies conditions under which temporary restraining orders are to be issued. It also requires perpetrators of domestic violence to attend training sessions on non-violent behaviour patterns. 16 For more detailed information on the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sport, see http://www.kmu.gov.ua/sport/. 17 Women’s rights advocates were concerned by the lack of state support ensuring adequate short-term and long-term alternative housing for victims of domestic violence as well as elements of the original law that they deemed harmful to women. 18 According to information provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 2001, only 30 criminal trafficking cases were filed during the first two and a half years after the adoption of Article 124.1 in 1998 until 2001 (Rudneva et al. 2005). Subsequently, the number of cases filed increased steadily: 2 in 1998, 11 in 1999, 42 in 2000, 91 in 2001, 169 in 2002, and 289 in 2003 (Lutsenko et al. 2005).

124 Alexandra Hrycak REFERENCES Amnesty International. 2008. Ukraine. Amnesty International Country Reports. Available at http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/regions/europe-andcentral-asia/ukraine (accessed 8 Nov. 2008). Beckfield, J. 2008. The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation and Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations. Social Problems 55(3): 419–42. Boli, J., and G.M. Thomas. 1997. World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization. American Sociological Review 62(2): 171–90. Buckley, M., ed. 1997. Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Coomaraswamy, R. 2003. Integration of the Human Rights of Women and the Gender Perspective: Violence against Women. Addendum 1: International, Regional and National Developments in the Area of Violence against Women, 1994–2003. Paris: UNESCO. Dovzhenko, V., ed. 1998. Zhinka na porozi XXI stolittia: Stanovyshche, problemy, shliakhy sotsial’noho rozvytku: Zbirnyk materialiv Vseukrains’koho Konhresu Zhinok, Kyiv, 21–23 travnia 1998 roku [Women on the Threshold of the 21st Century: Status, Problems, and Methods of Social Development: The materials of the Ukrainian Women’s Congress, Kyiv, 21–23 May, 1998]. Kyiv: Ukrains’kyi instytut sotsial’nykh doslidzhen’. Emigh, R.J. 1997. The Power of Negative Thinking: The Use of Negative Case Methodology in Building Sociological Theory. Theory and Society 26(5): 649–84. Fábián, K., ed. 2010. Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fedkovych, H. 2007. Violence against Women: Does the Government Care in Ukraine? Budapest: Open Society Institute. Government of Ukraine. 2004. Ukraine: Beijing +10 National Reports on the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action. Progress Report Prepared by the Government of Ukraine for the United Nations Beijing +10 Review in March 2005. Available at http://www.cities-localgovernments.org (accessed 26 May 2007). Hemment, J. 2004. Global Civil Society and the Local Costs of Belonging: Defining Violence against Women in Russia. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29(3): 815–40. – 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Hrycak, A. 2002. From Mothers’ Rights to Equal Rights: Post-Soviet Grassroots Women’s Associations. In N. Naples and M.K. Desai, eds., Women’s Community Activism and Globalization: Linking the Local and Global for Social Change, 64–82. New York: Routledge. – 2006. Foundation Feminism and the Articulation of Hybrid Feminisms in Post-Socialist Ukraine. East European Politics and Societies 20(1): 69–100. – 2007. Gender and the Orange Revolution. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 23(1): 152–79. – 2010a. Transnational Advocacy Campaigns and Domestic Violence Prevention in Ukraine. In K. Fábián, ed., Domestic Violence in Postcommunist States, 74–122. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. – 2010b. Orange Harvest? Women’s Activism and Civil Society in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia since 2004. Canadian American Slavic Studies 44(1–2): 135–58. – 2011. Women as Migrants on the Margins of the European Union. In M. Rubchak, ed., Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Ukraine. New York: Berghahn. Joachim, J.M. 1999. Shaping the Human Rights Agenda: The Case of Violence against Women. In M.K. Meyer and E. Pruegl, eds., Gender Politics in Global Governance, 142–60. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. – 2007. Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Johnson, J.E. 2009. Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, J.E., and L. Brunell. 2006. The Emergence of Contrasting Domestic Violence Regimes in Postcommunist Europe. Policy and Politics 34(4): 578–98. Keck, M.E., and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kolos, L., and O.M. Danyleiko. 1999. Uchast’ derzhavnoho komitetu Ukrainy u spravakh sim’i ta molodi v realizatsii polozhen’ kompleksnoi prohramy po zapobihanniu nasyl’stvu v sim’i [The Participation of the State Committee of Ukraine for Family and Youth in the Implementation of the Comprehensive Program to Prevent Violence in the Family]. In O. Rudneva, ed., Problemy nasyl’stva v sim’i: Pravovi ta sotsial’ni aspekty [The Problem of Violence in the Family: Legal and Social Aspects], 83–6. Kharkiv: Pravo. Kulachek, O. 2005. Rol’ zhinky v derzhavnomu upravlinni: Stari obrazy, novi obrii [The Role of Women in State Administration: Old Models, New Perspectives]. Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo Solomiii Pavlychko ‘Osnovy.’

126 Alexandra Hrycak Laboratoriia zakonodavchykh initsiiatyv [Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives]. 2004. Svitova praktyka to Ukrains’kyi dosvid vykorystannia mekhanizmu parlaments’kykh slukhan’ ta slukhan’ u komitetakh iak instrument kontrol’noi funktsii parlamentu. Chastyna 3. Laboratoriia zakonodavchykh initsiiatyv, Prohrama spryiannia parlamentu Ukrainy Universytetu Indiany SShA [World Practices and the Ukrainian Experience of Using Parliamentary Hearings and Committee Hearings as an Instrument for Monitoring the Functions of Parliament: Part 3. The Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives, Indiana University Parliamentary Development Project for Ukraine]. Available at http://www. parlament.org.ua (accessed 28 May 2007). Lutsenko, Y., L. Matiaszek, S. Scanlan, and I. Shvab. 2005. Trafficking in Ukraine: An Assessment of Current Responses. Kyiv: UNICEF. McAdam, D., S.G. Tarrow, and C. Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mel’nyk, T. 1999. Henderna polityka v Ukraini [Gender Policy in Ukraine]. Kyiv: Lohos. Moghadam, V.M. 2005. Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks, Themes in Global Social Change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pishchikova, K. 2006. Lost in Translation: USAID Assistance to Democracy Building in Post-Communist Ukraine. Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Pyshchulina, O. 2003. An Evaluation of Ukrainian Legislation to Counter and Criminalize Human Trafficking. Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 11(3): 403–11. Randall, V., and G. Waylen, eds. 1998. Gender, Politics and the State. London: Routledge. Richter, J. 2002. Evaluating Western Assistance to Women’s Organizations. In S.E. Mendelson and J.K. Glenn, eds., The Power and Limits of NGOs: A Critical Look at Building Democracy in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 54–90. New York: Columbia University Press. Rudneva, O. 2000. Ukraine. In M. McPhedran, ed., The First CEDAW Impact Study: Final Report, 215–32. Toronto: York University Centre for Feminist Research. Rudneva, O., G. Khrystova, I. Kononenko, O. Pyshchulina, and O. Kochemyrovska. 2005. Alternative Report on CEDAW Implementation in Ukraine. Kharkiv: Kharkiv Centre for Women’s Studies. Skoryk, M. 2006. Na shliakhu do hendernoi polityky [Developments in Gender Policy]. In Z. Bezpiatchuk, I.L. Bilan, and S.A. Horobchyshyn, eds., Rozvytok demokratii v Ukraini, 2001–2002 [The Development of Democracy

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in Ukraine, 2000–2001], 71–92. Kyiv: Ukrainskyi nezalezhnyi politychnyi tsentr. Smolyar, L. 2001.The Women’s Movement as a Factor of Gender Equality and Democracy in Ukrainian Society. In O. Sydorenko, ed., Zhinochi orhanizatsii Ukrainy: Ukrainian Women’s Non-Profit Organizations, 27–44. Kyiv: Innovation and Development Centre. Smolyar, L., ed. 1999. Zhinochi studii v Ukraini: Zhinka v istorii ta s’ohodni [Women’s Studies in Ukraine: Women in History and Today]. Odessa: Astroprynt. Stetson, D.M., and A. Mazur, eds. 1995. Comparative State Feminism. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sundstrom, L.M. 2005. Foreign Assistance, International Norms, and NGO Development: Lessons from the Russian Campaign. International Organization 59(2): 419–49. Suslova, O., and N. Karbowska. 2003. ‘Zhinoche krylo’ hromads’kykh orhanizatsii. Zaluchennia koshtiv dlia pidtrymky zhinochykh initsiatyv [The Women’s Wing of Civic Organizations: Fund-Raising to Support Women’s Initiatives]. Available at http://portal.uwf.kyiv.ua/index.php/article/libraryview/36/1/4/ (accessed 28 May 2005). Sydorenko, O. 2001. Zhinochi orhanizatsii Ukrainy: Tendentsii stanovlennia. In O. Sydorenko, ed., Zhinochi orhanizatsii Ukrainy: Dovidnyk [Women’s Organizations in Ukraine: Developmental Tendencies], 45–52. Kyiv: Tsentr innovatsii ta rozvytku. Tarrow, S.G. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. United Nations Development Program (UNDP). 2003. Gender Issues in Ukraine: Challenges and Opportunities. Kyiv: UNDP. Verdery, K. (1991). Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the ‘Transition.’ American Ethnologist 18(3): 419–39. Webhofer, R. 2009. Wave Country Report 2009: A Reality Check on European Services for Women and Children Victims of Violence. Vienna: WAVE Network.

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PART II Gender and Social Structures

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5 Gender, Nation, and Reproduction: Demographic Discourses and Politics in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution tatiana zhurzhenko

Alarmist discourses about a ‘demographic crisis’ are not new in contemporary Ukraine. They have existed since the mid-1960s, when it became obvious that the decline in fertility in the European part of the USSR was not just a temporary response to the difficulties of the postwar era, but a stable tendency. Some pro-natalist political interventions led to a short-term improvement in fertility rates in the second half of the 1980s (Rivkin-Fish 2003). However, in the next decade the economic recession and neo-liberal reforms of the socialist welfare system, which caused economic insecurity and mass impoverishment, led to a dramatic deterioration of social and demographic indicators. Indeed, with its total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.2, Ukraine belongs to the group of European countries with very low fertility. Since 1993 the Ukrainian population has been shrinking: it dropped from 52.5 million in 1993 to 46.6 million in 2007; that is, by more than 10 per cent. By 2050 it is likely to have fallen to 29 million. Another problem is high mortality rates, particularly among males. Life expectancy in Ukraine for men is only 62.5 years, for women 74.2, a particularly large gender gap (the second worst in Europe after Russia). And, despite some progress in recent years, maternal and infant mortality rates remain relatively high. In Ukrainian public and political discourses the ‘demographic crisis’ is associated with the shortage of labour resources and the ‘brain drain,’ with problems of the pension system due to aging of the population, and even with the issue of territorial integrity and national security. Labour migration of Ukrainians abroad, which affects first of all young educated people and women in their reproductive years, is another subject of public concern. The importation of labour

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as a possible solution is usually viewed with scepticism, because it might raise problems with social integration and even lead to ethnic conflicts. As in other post-socialist societies, ‘demographic anxiety’ has been used by various political forces. The Communists and the left populists have been using the discourse of a ‘dying nation’ for criticizing market reforms, whereas market liberals tend to blame the low fertility in Ukraine on the poor economic conditions inherited from the Soviet era. Nationalists, for their part, usually see depopulation to be a result of the abandonment of traditional values by the Ukrainian ethnos and connect it with the genocide politics of the communist regime, that is, the Holodomor (Great Famine) of 1932–33. As in other countries of Eastern Europe, demography is at the core of reconstructing the nation, because it concerns such issues as territorial sovereignty, regional development, relations with the neighbours and the family, national culture, and interethnic relations. The discourse about a ‘demographic crisis’ in Ukraine is also highly gendered. Women are usually made responsible for low fertility because they selfishly prefer a professional career, consumption, and self-fulfilment to duty to their family. On the other hand, high mortality is perceived first of all as a men’s issue. Ukrainian men are represented as an ‘endangered species’ because they have to carry the burden of breadwinner and are exposed to the risks of market capitalism. Therefore, the state’s attempts to regulate demographic dynamics have important implications for gender equality. This chapter addresses gendered demographic discourses and politics in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution,1 an event that made manifest a new political approach to nation building. Feminist debates on demographic politics, gender, and transition draw on the classical comparative study of welfare regimes by Esping-Andersen (1990) and their development in the post-socialist countries (Standing 1996; Deacon 2000). In Eastern and Central Europe, ‘the new global ideology, conservative and populist endeavours and path-dependency, all play a part, resulting in producing faceless or mixed systems, some of them close to what is called “ill-fare” ’ (Ferge 2001, 127). From this point of view, demographic and family politics should be understood in the contexts of the neo-liberal deconstruction of the paternalist socialist state, the backlash of patriarchal values, and the emergence of new gender inequalities (Klenner and Leiber 2009), as well as the heritage of Soviet pro-natalism (Rivkin-Fish 2010). Another important factor in the re-

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gion is nation building and the return of nationalism. Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) revealed profound links connecting gender, nation, and demographic discourse and demonstrated that women not only provide the biological reproduction of the nation, but also carry the burden of its symbolic representation; this approach is certainly applicable to the Ukrainian case. I was also inspired by the work of Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (2000a, 2000b), who underline the central importance of gender and reproductive issues to political and economic transformations in post-socialist societies and combine the analysis of politics and institutions with the analysis of discourses. Last but not least, the anthropological approach to demographic politics (Douglass 2005; Rivkin-Fish 2003, 2010) offers a bottom-up analysis of the ‘cultures of reproduction’ and focuses on the meaning of children and parenting under different social conditions. I start my analysis with the role of familialist and traditionalist values in the ‘Europeanization’ project proclaimed by the leaders of the Orange Revolution. As a next step, a closer look at new state initiatives aimed at stimulating fertility explains why, despite public anxiety about the demographic situation and despite the popular familialist rhetoric, pro-natalism remains half-hearted. Under conditions of a market economy and consumer capitalism, the socially and politically prioritized model of a ‘responsible’ middle-class parenthood and the changing gender roles put limits on traditional pro-natalist politics. Finally, I discuss the gender dimensions of demographic discourses and politics in Ukraine, their impact on family gender roles, women’s economic status, and women’s reproductive rights. This chapter is based on media materials, political speeches, and demographic research, as well as on expert interviews and focus groups conducted in Kyiv and Kharkiv in March 2009. Ukrainian Nation Reloaded: Familialism with a European Face According to Gal and Kligman (2000a) reproduction is at the heart of redefining a nation and of legitimizing a new democratic order, while Rebecca Nash (2005) points that ‘reproductive politics is about geopolitical belonging’ (p. 95). The Orange Revolution corresponds with both statements as it can be seen to be a project aimed at a new democratic quality of the Ukrainian nation and a pro-European geopolitical choice. The ‘ideology’ of the Orange Revolution, and the political rhetoric of its

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leader Viktor Yushchenko, exemplified the dilemmas of nationalism/ traditionalism versus Europeanism embedded in the project of democratic reconstruction of the Ukrainian nation. The dominant discourse of the Orange Revolution was the discourse of the ‘birth of the Ukrainian nation,’ an emotionally loaded phrase with a new feeling of ‘Us.’ In opposition to Leonid Kuchma’s Ukraine, characterized by the alienation of citizens from the state and associated with corruption and fraud, the ‘new’ Ukrainian nation was reimagined as a community united by love, trust, and common values, while the new democratic leader presented himself as a caring father possessing high moral authority. The ‘birth of a nation’ as staged on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) referred to the powerful myth of a ‘new beginning.’ Not by accident, one of the popular stories particularly loved by the ‘Orange’ media told about young couples who first met on the Maidan. This narrative related a public event to the sphere of intimate human emotions and, at the same time, to the symbolism of procreation and the nation’s future. Paradoxically, the metaphor of the ‘family,’ referring to an ‘organic community’ united by common origins and destiny, was central in reinventing the Ukrainian nation as modern, democratic, and European. In his election program Viktor Yushchenko promised Ukrainian voters a strong social policy. Among the priorities listed in his program ‘Ten Steps towards the People’ was the promise of ‘five million new jobs,’ increased pensions and social benefits, reduced taxes, increased support of families, and the defence of children’s rights. This social program, quite similar to the one suggested by his political opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, was, however, presented as a moral alternative to the cheap populism of the ‘old regime.’ References to ‘family values’ and iconic images of his own family were actively used in the election campaign. Yushchenko’s pro-familial attitudes and his fertility (he has two adult and three young children) represented his potential as a man and a politician. President Yushchenko’s young children in particular became a symbol of the nation’s future, of a new ‘innocent’ Ukraine in contrast to the corrupted and alienated society burdened with the Soviet past. His family sets an example to follow: it demonstrates that modern Ukrainians with higher education and professional ambitions can have at least three children. His family also represents a ‘truly Ukrainian family’: it takes part in most important cultural events, uses the Ukrainian language both in public and private, and often appears in Ukrainian ethnic clothes.

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The familialist values supported by President Yushchenko correspond with his rather traditionalist attitude to gender issues. For example, in May 2006, in one of his regular radio speeches (this time devoted to Mother’s Day and the International Day of the Family), Yushchenko directly addressed the demographic situation in the country. Characteristically, he began his speech with references to the traditionally high value of the family in Ukrainian culture and the highly respected status of the mother. As interpreted in this speech, demographic policy was practically reduced to state support of women as mothers, of children, and of families. Yushchenko (2006a) stressed that the mission of the Ukrainian authorities is ‘to preserve the nation, and to do everything [to ensure] that every year more and more healthy babies are born in Ukraine, that all children have strong and happy families.’ Praising the first steps of the state in this direction, he suggested that every Ukrainian family should now dare to have two or three children. Although Yushchenko mentioned the need for a modern system of preschool education, he did not actually go beyond the traditional understanding of the family and the role of the mother. He did not address issues of gender inequality or family violence, and at the end of his speech he referred to the notorious motto ‘We should become 52 million!’2 In another radio speech on the occasion of the Day of Children’s Rights in June 2006, Yushchenko (2006b) stressed the need to increase the child care allowances for parents with children under 3 years of age, arguing again in a rather traditional way: ‘In the first years of children’s lives mothers should always be around. The state should create all necessary conditions for this.’ Characteristically, Ukrainian men were not addressed in their social role as fathers, and the only appeal of Yushchenko to the male audience was related to alcoholism: hard drinking, according to him, has never been part of Cossack tradition. Two important projects directly related to demography that have been personally supported and supervised by Viktor Yushchenko reflect his preoccupation with both ‘Europeanization’ and familialism. These are a comprehensive reform of the orphanage system, encouraging the adoption of orphans by Ukrainian families, and the charitable program ‘Warm Up a Child with Your Love!’ focusing on social support of families with many children. The first project, known as the ‘national adoption’ program, is administrated by the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport. This is an ambitious attempt to radically improve the material and social situation of

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orphan children and children without parental care, to provide them with a family environment, and to raise their chances for social integration, better education, and employment opportunities. The core of the project is the deinstitutionalization of the state orphanage system inherited from Soviet times and its profound reform according to the European model. This implies that adoption, foster care, and ‘family type’ children’s homes become the preferable forms of raising orphans. The funding mechanism has been reformed to support a child, not an institution (the so-called money follows child principle). The decree of the president proclaimed 2008 the Year of National Adoption. New legislation enacted in October 2008 encourages the adoption of orphans by Ukrainian families, guaranteeing them a one-time social benefit equivalent to the benefit parents receive now at the birth of the first child (12,240 UAH in 2008). One of the adopting parents is now entitled to a paid leave of fifty-six days, which is supposed to help with the integration of the child into its new family. ‘National adoption’ is advertised in the media, referring to examples of famous Ukrainians (such as 1996 Olympic champion Lilia Podkopayeva). New regulations enacted in 2009 make adoption rules for Ukrainians more transparent and less bureaucratic, while introducing additional requirements and controls for foreign citizens who wish to adopt a child in Ukraine. The reform of the orphanage system is seen by the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport as a contribution to improving the demographic situation and as a budget-saving measure, given the inefficient management of the state orphanage system (Katrychenko 2008). But the project also carries particular ideological values, assuming that the family is the only natural environment for a child and claiming that Ukraine as a ‘civilized’ nation is able to care for its own children. The hidden ideology of the project connects familialism with the Europeanization of Ukrainian society while opposing both the ‘false Soviet values’ of communist collectivism and the ideological indoctrination in children’s education. At the same time, the life chances of the majority of children in the state orphanages, who cannot be adopted because of serious health defects or psychological problems and who need professional treatment and rehabilitation, are rarely discussed. The reform is also supposed to stop the notorious corruption in the field of adoption and improve the reputation of Ukraine, which has become known as one of the biggest adoption markets. Last but not least, by giving priority rights to Ukrainian adoptive parents over foreigners it attempts to close this ‘population leak.’

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The second project – the charitable program ‘Warm Up a Child with Your Love!’ – was initiated by the president in December 2007. It has been implemented together with big business and is chaired by Yushchenko’s eldest daughter, Vitalina. In 2008, the program focused on social support for families with many children: on improving their living conditions, providing medical services, helping with formalities, and so on. The program includes close monitoring of such families and their needs, and is creating a database (the so-called pasportyzatsiia). However, only families with ten or more children are eligible for material and social support. Needless to say, such families constitute only a tiny minority. For example, in the Kharkiv oblast, where the program works in partnership with the Olexandr Feldman Foundation, there are only nine such families. This program provides substantial help (e.g., funding a new apartment, renovating an old one, or installing a gas supply), but reaches only a very limited target group. Its main dimension is symbolic, as it contributes to the construction of the Ukrainian nation as a ‘family,’ with the oligarchs as patriarchal benefactors of the poor. At the same time, the charitable program honours traditional motherhood and promotes the value of childbearing. Demographic Anxiety and Half-Hearted Pro-Natalism From the mid-1990s, the dramatic worsening of the demographic indicators in Ukraine became obvious, but the capacity of the new state to deal with this issue was rather limited. Because of the economic crisis, even minimal family support payments were often delayed for months. Since 2001, the economic boom and growing public concern with the ‘demographic crisis’ brought the political elite to reconsider the possibilities of state welfare for population engineering. In June 2003, special hearings on ‘the demographic crisis in Ukraine, its causes, and consequences’ took place in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament). Underlining the alarming developments of the previous decade, including the rapid fertility decline and mortality increase, which ‘hamper the economic development and threaten national security’ (Parliament of Ukraine 2003), the Rada recommended the preparation of a program document dealing with demographic issues. It was supposed to take into account ‘the experience of the advanced European countries’ and was to be aimed at ‘decreasing mortality, raising fertility, the protection, rehabilitation, and recreation

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of the Ukrainian gene pool, and at preventing migration, which worsens the demographic situation in Ukraine’ (ibid.). The ‘Concept of Demographic Development of Ukraine’ for the period 2005–15 was developed by the Institute of Demography and Social Research of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and approved by the Cabinet of Ministers (at that time headed by Viktor Yanukovych) in October 2004, at the peak of the presidential election campaign. After the Orange Revolution, the new political leadership ostentatiously gave priority to social issues and the Concept was developed into the ‘Strategy of Demographic Development of Ukraine.’ In May 2006, the new document was presented to the Rada and, a month later, was approved by the government. The Strategy explains the demographic crisis in Ukraine first of all by ‘the fertility decline to a critical level.’ As one of the first tasks, it proposes to reinstall ‘family values’ in Ukrainian society and to promote the two-child family as a model. At the same time, pro-natalist goals seem rather declarative, as no pathbreaking measures to achieve them are suggested. The Strategy declares as its main aim, not fighting depopulation, but ‘improving the quality characteristics of the population’ and the ‘harmonization of the population’s reproduction’ (Parliament of Ukraine 2006). In professional publications and debates, Ukrainian demographers are even more sceptical about pro-natalism. According to Ella Libanova (2008a), deputy director of the Institute of Demography and one of the main authors of the Demographic Strategy, decline in fertility and population aging are tendencies all across Europe, and the tools of a state to influence reproductive behaviour are rather limited. These tendencies reflect women’s rising educational level and their professional career orientations, but also the new opportunities of self-realization and consumption which emerge as alternatives to childbearing. A similar position is shared by another Ukrainian demographer, Iryna Pribytkova (2008), who is also sceptical about the capacity of state policy to raise fertility significantly and change women’s attitudes to childbearing. If politicians are often tempted to call on Ukrainian families to produce more children, Ukrainian demographers do not insist on an absolute population size and propose, instead, to focus on improving health indicators. In Ukrainian demographic discourse it is not so much low fertility (which Ukraine shares with some other European countries), but high mortality, low life expectancy, and poor indicators of health that exemplify the ‘backwardness’ of the country. In this respect Ukraine differs from Russia, where the absolute population size has a

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geopolitical and strategic value for the political elites. Consequently, ‘Europe’ as a symbol of modernization plays a different role in Ukrainian and Russian demographic discourses. In the Russian debates ‘Europe’ is often seen as a source of individualism and moral decay undermining the Russian family. At the contrary, Ukrainian demographers see Ukraine following the pattern of low fertility as ‘natural’ for a European country. Has Ukrainian policy become more pro-natalist since 2004? Politicians, public officials, and experts have different answers to this question. Indeed, in 2005, many of the family benefits and child care allowances were raised. The biggest sensation was certainly the radical increase of the one-time benefit paid upon child birth. From April 2005, the one-time benefit upon the birth of the first child was raised up to 8,500 UAH, a sum that is 11.7 times higher than it was in 2004. From January 2008, this sum was raised again to 12,240 UAH, while upon the birth of the second child a mother gets 25,000 UAH and upon the birth of the third (and every next) child – 50,000 UAH. A relative increase in the total number of births since 2006 has been interpreted by the Ukrainian president and his supporters as evidence for the success of the new policy and of people’s growing optimism. At the opening of the local maternal hospital in Kryvyi Rih in March 2009, Yushchenko celebrated the new tendency of increasing fertility, explaining it as a success of state pro-natalist measures by stating: ‘Never before in Ukraine was fertility stimulated at such a high level.’ While politicians view the new system of benefits as stimulating fertility, experts consider them, rather, an instrument of social protection for the most vulnerable social groups and have doubts about their sustainable effect on fertility. In the research monograph Marriage, Family, and Childbearing Attitudes in Ukraine, published in 2008 by the Institute of Demography, the authors explain the growing number of births since 2006 by the social and economic stabilization in the country and the post-crisis ‘compensation’ of postponed births as well as by the more numerous cohort of young women who are now reaching reproductive age (Libanova 2008b). Comparing the reform of 2005 with the pro-natalist measures introduced by the Soviet government in 1982, Ukrainian demographers argue that such policy can have only a shortterm effect, as the measures cannot compensate for the low family income and changed attitudes to childbearing (pp. 33–4). Admitting that the new benefits upon child birth are supposed to stimulate fertility, the authors are sceptical about the possibility of a significant fertility

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increase, at least as long as the average family income remains low and the housing problem is not solved. To summarize, for the first time in post-Soviet Ukraine, substantial economic incentives were introduced to increase fertility, but this measure has not been supplemented by a corresponding tax and investment policy or programs of social housing and child care. Moreover, pronatalist incentives clash with the new challenges of post-communist transition that influence reproductive choices of families and individuals: consumer capitalism, new models and standards of parenthood, and the changing gender roles in Ukrainian society. ‘Middle-Class Parenthood’ and the Limits of Pro-Natalist Politics Alison MacIntosh (1983) has summarized several barriers to installing pro-natalist policies in Western countries: (1) lack of public demand, (2) limits to the governments’ ability to finance them, (3) doubts about the efficiency of material incentives as a means to encourage childbirth, and (4) a weak nationalist rationale. Carrie Douglass adds, in this respect, that ‘in liberalizing democracies any restriction or pressure on individual liberty and autonomy seems inappropriate’ (2005, 8). Drawing on interviews of experts and on focus groups conducted in Ukraine, I suggest one more argument: in the liberalizing post-Soviet state, reproduction becomes a class issue. Children are supposed to be born into families that can take full responsibility for their material provision, education, health, and preparation for adult life. The norm of ‘middleclass parenthood’ assumes that a couple should wait until it can ‘afford’ a child and offer it proper material and living conditions. Normative arguments around middle-class parenthood work through the media, advertising, and other forms of cultural production, turning child rearing into a ‘consumption project.’ Requirements of modern parenthood may include, for example, a separate child’s room or a private nanny, extra English lessons, or expensive toys. The ‘culture of responsibility’ associated with middle-class parenthood poses particular expectations on parents. In the case of Ukraine, this culture of responsibility can include, for example, private medical consultations (because parents have little trust in the public health care system) or extra cooking for a child because of imagined and real dangers of environmental pollution or unhealthy food. This makes parenthood extremely time-consuming

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and financially demanding, and partly explains the persistence of the one-child family model. Middle-class parenthood is not just a cultural phenomenon; it is also explicitly or implicitly encouraged by state institutions and policies. The Strategy of Demographic Development openly declares that one of its main aims is the ‘formation of a “middle class” family model, which is characterized by material well-being, by investments in family, and by childbearing as a stimulus and object of such investments.’ This approach is reflected, for example, in the state housing credit program for young families, which aims to help them finance a separate living space. The program offers its clients partial refunds of bank interest payments and is funded through the state budget. In 2005, after allegations of corruption, a new, more transparent regulation (based on a score system) was introduced. Because of the small budget of the program, only a very limited number of families can profit from it. Since 2006, the program has suffered from debts and insufficient funding. But, more importantly, the program is available only to those young people who already have a permanent and well-paid job. The main criteria are income level and the ability to repay loans. In fact, the program is oriented to well-educated and career-oriented young people under the age of thirty-five. The new regulation gives priority to young academics and promising athletes, while more children hardly improve the score. Only a minority of young families fit these requirements, which assume professional success and material wellbeing. The ideology of middle-class parenting is reflected in the ambiguous attitudes that state institutions and society have towards families with many children. Demographers argue that the culture of high fertility has practically disappeared in Ukraine. At the same time, families with many children should be rewarded by the state as they can slow depopulation to some extent (Libanova 2008b, 20–1). However, the main reason such families get special attention is not demographic but social and economic. Household surveys demonstrate that there is a direct correlation between the number of children in a family and its level of well-being. The majority of families with three or more children live in poverty, and many of these families could not survive without state support, however limited it is. In the late Soviet era, as a part of the pro-natalist agenda, families with many children were entitled to numerous privileges and benefits,

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most significantly concerning housing. Although high fertility was already stigmatized in urban Soviet society as old-fashioned and irrational behaviour, the state encouraged childbearing by supporting families with many children. Mothers of five or more children were rewarded with special medals; mothers of ten or more were honoured as ‘Mother Heroines’ and entitled to higher pensions. At first glance, politicians in post-Soviet Ukraine continue this kind of policy. In 1999, by presidential decree, Kuchma introduced ‘Measures for Improving the Situation of Families with Many Children,’ who, as part of this program, pay only 50 per cent for school lunches and child care and should have privileged access to higher education. In addition, regional authorities can introduce other forms of social support (and they often have done so, especially before elections). In 2001, the honorary title of ‘Mother Heroine’ was re-established. Viktor Yushchenko initiated a special charitable program aimed at social and material support of families with many children and introduced a special one-time benefit for ‘Mother Heroines.’ In contrast to Soviet policy, however, which was motivated by pronatalist goals, in the Ukrainian approach, social protection dominates over encouraging births. In practice, families with many children can enjoy material support only if they belong to the low-income strata. But, only a few families fit the ‘low-income’ criteria, as they have to be under the (very low) official minimum wage. In 2008, only 150,000 families (9%) were registered as ‘low income,’ which does not correspond with the official statistics of poverty (Poda 2009). The new amendments from the end of 2008 make it even more difficult for a family to meet these criteria: a family cannot claim social support if one of its members does not work (or does not study) longer than three months, if it has a plot of land bigger than 0.6 hectare, owns another apartment, or has other sources of support. Almost 40 per cent of lowincome families which get social support in Ukraine are families with many children. Experts warn that such families can be particularly hit by the economic crisis which began in 2008, because regional authorities have also introduced cost-saving measures. Public servants responsible for the social support of families with many children often share common stereotypes about them as marginal and even deviant. In their eyes, such families behave irresponsibly because they count on state support and are not able to control childbearing. Such non-rational, non-modern reproductive behaviour does not correspond with the model of middle-class responsible

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parenthood. Local authorities focus their attention on the control and monitoring of such families, checking their eligibility for social support and their use of child allowances for the intended purpose. The honorary title of the ‘Mother Heroine’ can be awarded today only if a woman has raised her children at least until the age of eight and if, for example, none of the children has ever been criminally punished. This means she has to be not just a biological mother, but also a socially responsible one. For their part, the associations of families with many children present them as being ‘more responsible’ than one-child families. They praise the values of mutual support and altruism that dominate in their families and stress their contribution to improving the demographic situation. Thus, families with many children find themselves at the centre of various political dilemmas: between liberal ideology and familialism, between the state’s pro-natalist desires and public fears of ‘poverty proliferation,’ and between traditionalist values supporting the extended family model and the modern ethos of ‘responsible parenthood.’ Demographic Policy and Gender Equality Women as bearers of children are the first to be affected by state efforts to regulate the demographic dynamics. This particularly concerns measures to raise fertility. There is an ongoing debate in gender studies whether or not pro-natalist ideologies and policies inherently conflict with women’s rights and gender equality (Heitlinger 1991; Yuval-Davis 1997). Although, in some cases, pro-natalism is inspired by nationalism and neo-traditionalist ideology, reducing women’s role to the biological reproduction of the national ‘body,’ in other cases welfare policies encouraging fertility can be women-friendly and gender-aware. Leslie King (1998) argues that ‘pro-natalist programs are specifically relevant to women in at least three ways. First, pro-natalist policies may include measures to limit access to contraceptives as part of an overall plan to increase births. Second, policies can affect women’s economic status through birth allowances, singleparent benefits, or state-run child care facilities that make it easier for women to participate in the labour force. Finally, pro-natalist policies can influence gender roles by promoting particular family forms, such as families where the mother remains at home with the children’ (p. 33). A glance into Ukraine’s newest demographic policies through this angle helps in understanding its gender dimension.

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In Eastern Europe, at least two examples of pro-natalist politics were heavily based on denying women’s control over their bodies: in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Ceausescu’s Romania. However, banning abortion (and limiting access to contraception) with the aim of increasing births was also practised in liberal countries, historically. In Poland, where the restoration of moral and religious values in the post-communist society was the main impetus of the anti-abortion initiatives, demographic considerations also played a role (Zielinska 2000). In contemporary Russia, the issue of low fertility and the stillhigh number of abortions are often discussed in connection with one another, as abortions are seen to be a potential ‘resource’ of increasing births. Conservative politicians as well as the Russian Orthodox Church consider sex education at school and knowledge about contraception harmful to Russian family morals, and abortions are seen as worsening the demographic situation; in some regions such educational programs have been suspended. In this context, Ukraine is one of the few European countries where abortion has not become a political issue. As in Russia, in Ukraine, the high number of abortions is discussed in moral terms, but unlike in Russia, abortion is rarely connected to the problem of depopulation. Abortion issues concern the demographic situation only in one respect: the popularity of abortion is seen by experts to be the main reason for women’s reproductive health problems, which contribute to low fertility. Mass use of abortion is seen as a regrettable Soviet heritage,3 a barbaric habit to be overcome through education and the use of modern contraception. Indeed, the number of abortions in Ukraine has dropped almost by half in recent years (from 34.1 per 1,000 females of fertile age in 2000 to 17.3 in 2007) and by 80 per cent compared with 1991 (DKSY 2008, 185). However, the number still remains high compared with European indicators. Family planning workers stress that in Ukraine there is no systematic opposition to publicly funded sex education programs and propaganda of modern contraception. With the exception of Western Ukraine, where some local initiatives have recently appeared, there is no pro-life movement in Ukraine. Opinion polls show little public interest in this issue, and they demonstrate that only a tiny minority of Ukrainians (even among religious persons) would support the idea of strengthening abortion regulations.4 What is probably more important is the fact that there is no consolidated conservative political force in the country interested in

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raising this issue. Ukraine’s regulations on abortion from 2006 are rather liberal, as they allow abortions to be carried out up to twelve weeks’ gestation without restrictions. Between the twelfth and twenty-second weeks, women are eligible to request an abortion for health reasons and specific social reasons (such as pregnancy resulting from rape). Earlier regulations on abortion (1993) allowed abortions for health and social reasons until the twenty-eighth week and listed among social reasons three or more children in the family, divorce, death or illness of the husband during pregnancy, imprisonment of the husband, and so on. In fact, unemployment or a severe financial situation sometimes was also considered a sufficient reason. In 2006, the Cabinet of Ministers significantly reduced the list of social reasons for abortion, a fact that went practically unnoticed by the Ukrainian public. Because abortion in the second trimester remains an exception anyway, these restrictions can hardly be related to pro-natalist intentions. To summarize, even the radical opponents of abortions in Ukraine believe that the problem can be solved neither by banning measures nor by measures that would help to raise fertility. Thus, concerns with the dramatic demographic situation in Ukraine have not been translated into restrictive policies on abortion and access to contraception. On the contrary, sex education programs supported by the state, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international donor organizations seek to improve women’s reproductive health as one of the factors of higher fertility.5 The next question concerns the way demographic policies in Ukraine (either already practised or just planned) might affect women’s economic status and their situation in the labour market. Women’s relatively low economic status and persisting discrimination against them remain a serious problem, despite their high level of education and active participation in the labour force. The gender wage gap in Ukraine is more than 30 per cent, and women constitute 68 per cent of the registered unemployed. Despite the new 2005 Gender Equality Law, an effective mechanism preventing gender discrimination in the labour market has not yet been created. Women with small children, especially those with low qualifications and without a work record, have little chance to get a job, and young married women, that is, prospective mothers, are particularly discriminated against in the labour market. The Labour Code guarantees women with small children the right to a part-time job, but employers often are not interested in providing such an opportunity, especially in the private sector.

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Although increased child care allowances (and particularly significant benefits upon child birth) might improve the economic situation of women as legally acknowledged beneficiaries of state support (which is particularly relevant for single mothers), they can hardly improve women’s status in the labour market in the long term. Moreover, the Ukrainian system of family and maternal benefits hardly encourages women to return to the labour market after maternity leave. It also does not encourage a combination of maternal duties with professional obligations, as it does not offer special compensation for kindergarten fees or for private child care, as in other countries. A policy aimed at providing mass availability and high-quality of child care would be much more important from a gender equality point of view (and at the same time would stimulate fertility). Some Western countries such as Germany also concerned with low fertility recently made significant investments in the child care system. In Ukraine, the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport recognizes the current shortage of places in the daycare centres. Many kindergartens were closed during the 1990s, when the demand for places in them was low and funding was insufficient, and their premises were privatized and used for other purposes. Today, property developers often do not keep up with the regulations that oblige them to provide child care facilities in new residential areas. The lack of available and good child care, especially for children with special needs and health problems, impedes not only women’s careers but also the rise of fertility. And finally the last question: how do demographic policies in Ukraine, particularly measures aimed at increasing fertility, affect gender roles in the family and in society? Are demographic politics in Ukraine gender sensitive? Krause (2005) points out the ‘moralizing effects of alarmist demographic discourses’: without naming them explicitly, women are made responsible for low fertility. Ukraine is not an exception in this respect. Moreover, public discourse in Ukraine is highly gendered: if women are held ‘responsible’ for low fertility, high mortality appears first of all as a ‘men’s problem’; as a result of the high consumption of alcohol, unhealthy lifestyle, and hazardous labour conditions, mortality among men, particularly those between the ages of 20 and 45, is much higher than among women. Both demographers and journalists tend to focus on women’s childbearing attitudes as if men did not participate in reproductive decisions. They see women’s emancipation as a main factor of low fertility without taking into account the changes in post-Soviet masculinity

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and men’s social roles. At the same time, the problem of men’s high mortality is usually discussed without taking into account women’s and family problems. In many ways, this approach continues the old Soviet discourse on the ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2002), which presented men as an endangered species and passive victims. The problem with Ukrainian men as presented in the media is twofold: on the one hand, men are ‘spoiled’ by women from childhood on and remain infantile boys, unable to take responsibility for a family, looking for pleasure (alcohol, smoking), and enjoying risk; on the other hand, men suffer from permanent stress related to the high competitiveness and insecurity of the modern market economy, and from the all-too-heavy burden of being the breadwinner. Both demographic problems, however – low fertility and high male mortality – should be approached jointly, as they require both radical changes in the dominant model of masculinity and an improvement in the social position of women. Ukrainian demographers have already suggested consideration of new forms of demographic policy, based not only on family values, but also on principles of gender equality. In particular, Scandinavian countries achieved one of the highest levels of fertility in Europe by creating opportunities for women to combine their maternal role with professional life and by actively involving men in child care. For example, in Norway men have a statutory right to be granted a father’s portion of parental leave and they actively use it. An enlightened and gender-aware pro-natalism based on the active promotion of new gender roles can also be more effective in the long run. At the same time, promoting ‘new’ models of masculinity oriented to such values as family, health, and a safe way of life will contribute to reduce mortality. A shift to such an approach can be found in Ukraine, both in state policy and in civil society. Along with women’s NGOs, new men’s groups and initiatives are emerging that deal with the issues of parenthood, children’s rights and education, and family violence. Also successful are the so-called schools of fatherhood (‘daddy schools’) or schools for responsible parenting which promote new gender roles (supported by the Equal Opportunities United Nations Development Program in Ukraine). Several NGOs have launched an initiative on establishing a Father’s Day in Ukraine (similar to Mother’s Day) in order to bring attention to the issue of fatherhood. Problems like avoiding paying alimony, a father’s right to regular contact with his child after divorce, among others, which have been silenced until

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now, have become the subject of public discussion. The Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport also supports new gender roles in the family. Ukrainian law now allows fathers to make use of child care leave until the age of three years, and makes fathers eligible for all family and child care benefits. Moreover, amendments on the statutory right for fathers to ten days of paid leave upon the birth of child and for paid care leave in case of a child’s illness are under consideration. However, because of women’s lower wages, the choice of who takes a child care leave in most cases is decided automatically. Ukrainian men and Ukrainian families in general can only profit from these new opportunities if women’s status in the labour market is improved. Conclusions Disturbing demographic tendencies, first of all a dramatic decline in fertility and a high mortality, have forced the Ukrainian political elites to reconsider the role of social welfare for population engineering, while the economic recovery at the beginning of this century has allowed the introduction of substantial material incentives for bearing children. The Orange Revolution endowed these reforms with the ideological values of Europeanization and neo-traditionalism. However, the pro-natalist ambitions of the Ukrainian state are limited, not only by economic and social insecurity, but also because of the changing gender roles and the dominant values of ‘middle-class parenthood.’ The new demographic policies are liberal regarding the reproductive rights of women, but they neither encourage women to combine a family and a professional career nor do they improve their economic status. The problems of low fertility and high men’s mortality can only be solved by a gender-aware demographic politics that encourages new models of masculinity and new gender roles in the family. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful to the ERSTE Foundation (Austria) for supporting my research. NOTES 1 For a review of earlier family politics and its gender implications in Ukraine, see Zhurzhenko (2004).

Gender, Nation, and Reproduction 149 2 In the summer of 2005, about 500 billboards in Kyiv displayed the slogan: ‘Let’s make love! We should become 52 million!’ It remained unclear who commissioned this ‘social advertising,’ but the action had significant public resonance. 3 Abortions were liberalized in the USSR in 1955. 4 See also the complete findings of a sociological survey published in Natsional’na bezpeka i oborona (National Security and Defence) 3 (2001): 21–4. Available at http://www.razumkov.org.ua/ukr/journal. php?y=2011&cat=159. 5 For example, the educational project ‘Together towards Health’ (2006–10), supported by USAID, is aimed at improving women’s and men’s reproductive health and it promotes modern practices of family planning.

REFERENCES Deacon, B. 2000. Eastern European Welfare States: The Impact of the Politics of Globalization. Journal of European Social Policy 10(2): 146–61. Derzhavnyj komitet statystyky Ukrainy/State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (DKSU). 2008. Dity, zhinky ta sim’ia v Ukraini [Children, Women and the Family in Ukraine]. Kyiv: DKSU. Douglass, C.B., ed. 2005. Barren States: The Population ‘Implosion’ in Europe. Oxford: Berg. Esping-Andersen, G. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Ferge, Z. 2001. Welfare and ‘Ill-Fare’ Systems in Central-Eastern Europe. In B. Sykes, B. Palier, and M. Prior, eds., Globalization and European Welfare States: Challenges and Change, 127–52. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gal, S., and G. Kligman. 2000a. The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gal, S., and G. Kligman, eds. 2000b. Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heitlinger, A. 1991. Pro-natalism and Women’s Equality Policies. European Journal of Population 7: 343–75. Katrychenko, T. 2008. Ne chuzhi dity [They Are Our Children, Too]. Glavred 47(96): 28–31. King, L. 1998. France Needs Children: Pro-natalism, Nationalism and Women’s Equity. Sociological Quarterly 39(1): 33–52. Klenner, C., and S. Leiber. 2009. Wohlfahrtsstaaten und Geschlechterungleichheit in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag.

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Krause, E.L. 2005. Toys and Perfumes: Imploding Italy’s Population Paradox and Motherly Myths. In C.B. Douglass, ed., Barren States, 159–82. Oxford: Berg. Libanova, E., ed. 2008a. Borot’ba za kozhnu dytynu [Fighting for Every Child]. Interview with Ella Libanova. Available at http://dialogs.org.ua/dialog. php?id=23andop_id=611#611 (accessed Feb. 2009). – 2008b. Shliub, Sim’ia ta Ditorodni Oriientatsii v Ukraini [Marriage, Family, and Childbearing Attitudes in Ukraine]. Kyiv: ADEF-Ukraina. MacIntosh, A.C. 1983. Population Policy in Western Europe. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Nash, R. 2005. The Economy of Birthrates in the Czech Republic. In C.B. Douglass, ed., Barren States, 93–114. Oxford: Berg. Parliament of Ukraine. 2003. Rekomendatsii parlamentskyh slukhan ‘Demografichna kryza v Ukraini: iiii prychyny ta naslidky’ [Recommendations of the Parliamentary Hearings ‘Democratic Crisis in Ukraine: Its Causes and Consequences’]. Available at http://zakon.nau.ua/doc/?uid=1071.610.0 (accessed 4 Sept. 2004). – 2006. Strategiia demografichnoho rozvytku v period do 2015 roku [Strategy of Demographic Development for the Period until 2015]. Available at http:// zakon1.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=879–2006-%EF (accessed 7 June 2007). Poda, V. 2009. Maloobespechennykh v Ukraine pochti net [There Are Almost No Low-Income Families in Ukraine]. Kommentarii, 13 Feb. Pribytkova, I. 2008. Expert: Demograficheskaia situatsiia v Ukraine stabilizirovalas’. [Expert: The Demographic Situation in Ukraine Is Stabilized]. Available at http://newsukraine.com.ua/news/101642/ (accessed 17 Nov. 2008). Rivkin-Fish, M. 2003. Anthropology, Demography, and the Search for a Critical Analysis of Fertility: Insights from Russia. American Anthropologist 105(2): 289–301. – 2010. Pro-natalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Towards a Feminist Anthropology of ‘Maternity Capital.’ Slavic Review 69(3): 701–24. Standing, G. 1996. Social Protection in Central and Eastern Europe: A Tale of Slipping Anchors and Torn Safety Nets. In G. Esping-Andersen, ed., Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, 225–55. London: Sage. Yushchenko, V. 2006a. Mother’s Day Address. Address to the Nation by President Yushchenko, 13 May. Available at www.president.gov.ua/news/3206. html (accessed 20 June 2006).

Gender, Nation, and Reproduction 151 – 2006b. Address on Children’s Rights. Address to the Nation by President Yushchenko, 3 June. Available at www.president.gov.ua/news/3400.html (accessed 20 June 2006). – 2009. Narodzhuvanist’ v Ukraini stymuliuiet’sia iak nikoly’ [Fertility in Ukraine Is Stimulated as Never Before]. 3 March. Available at http://ua.for-ua.com/ ukraine/2009/03/05/150712.html (accessed 20 June 2009). Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Zdravomyslova, E., and A. Temkina. 2002. Krizis maskulinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse [Masculinity Crisis in the Late Soviet discourse]. In S.A. Oushakine, ed., O Muzhe(n)stvennosti [On Masculinity], 432–51. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Zhurzhenko, T. 2004. Strong Women, Weak State: Family Politics and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine. In K. Kuehnast and C. Nechemias, eds., Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition, 23–43. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zielińska, E. 2000. Between Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense: The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland. In S. Gal and G. Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender, 23–57. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

6 (Re)Constructing Ukrainian Women’s History: Actors, Authors, and Narratives oksana kis

Initial historical and ethnographic research on Ukrainian women emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, a number of eminent Ukrainian scholars researched women’s issues and published a range of original works revealing various aspects of the lives of ordinary Ukrainian women, on topics ranging from premarital sexual relations to women’s status under the law.1 In fact, research on women was one of the most advanced and rapidly growing areas of Ukrainian studies at the turn of the twentieth century. Those writings, however, had their shortcomings. As early as 1929, Kateryna Hrushevska (1900–1943), then a young historian and ethnographer, was expressing serious concern about the male bias inherent in these works. Her article, ‘Towards a Study of Sex Groups in Primitive Societies’ (1929) became a kind of academic manifesto for new – feminist – principles of research into the history and anthropology of women. Hrushevska identified the main problem of historical research as follows: ‘It tends to treat women outside the cultural context.’ Her insight into the androcentric (male-dominated) character of scholarship anticipated Simone de Beauvoir’s idea of the female as a second sex. ‘Since for some reason,’ Hrushevska wrote, ‘the men’s world – male-public aspects of culture – happened to be researched more thoroughly it makes an impression that it is in fact the norm, whereas the women’s realm constitutes just a variation, episode, or fragment’ (pp. 26–8). Hrushevska stressed the need to take into account women’s perspectives in order to create an accurate and complete picture of the past. That very promising direction, however, was brutally disrupted in Soviet times, when the majority of Ukrainian scholars (including

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Hrushevska) were repressed.2 In Ukraine, basic principles of feminism were distorted by Soviet ideology and discredited by state-imposed, socialist practices.3 This ultimately resulted in profound misconceptions of, and prejudices against feminist scholarship among Ukrainian historians. Ukrainian women’s history stagnated as a subject; no significant research emerged during this period.4 What took its place were publications on Soviet women’s lives and achievements. Written by order of the Communist Party leadership, however, these were strictly ideologically framed and thoroughly censored to serve the goals of Soviet propaganda. As such, they can hardly be used as informative sources for reconstructing women’s history during that time. When the USSR collapsed, Ukrainian scholars recognized women’s history as an underdeveloped research area. Desperately searching for a new start, they identified two possible jumping-off points: (1) they could return to works on women’s issues by pre-Soviet Ukrainian historians and ethnographers (published in the Russian and AustroHungarian empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), or (2) they could turn to writings emerging from the Ukrainian diaspora (published mainly in the United States and Canada after the Second World War). At that time, in the early 1990s, post-Soviet Ukrainian social sciences and humanities were in crisis; there was a methodological vacuum, theoretical chaos, and very poor access to the principal Western works on women’s history. That crisis helps explain the admiration and uncritical perception by fledging historians of women in Ukraine of their predecessors’ works. During that first decade after the collapse of the totalitarian order, Ukrainian scholars struggled to fill gaps in their theoretical knowledge of, and research into Ukrainian women’s pasts. This was by no means easy; the academy did not consider women’s history as a fully autonomous field and therefore provided minimal (if any) support for it.5 Despite this hostility, feminist historians continued their work, which has resulted in numerous scholarly publications, students’ essays, doctoral theses, and even elective university courses taught all over Ukraine. Thus, it is undeniable that women’s history has, in fact, become a research field of its own in contemporary Ukraine, although it is still maturing. History is never a politically neutral subject, of course, and Ukraine’s past remains a battlefield in many areas, including women’s history. Politically invested approaches to and interpretations of Ukrainian women’s historical legacies continue to influence the development of

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further research into the field, while the field itself has become an object of political manipulations and is used as a point of reference for those involved in developing instruments and policies to implement gender mainstreaming in Ukraine. But a true understanding of today’s gender order is impossible without a clear understanding of the genesis and historical transformations of that order in this specific cultural context, and this, in turn, requires a clear view of women’s history and how it has been interpreted over time. In this chapter, I map Ukrainian women’s history by exploring the origins and peculiarities of four prevailing narratives in the field. Each of these narratives constructs its own version of the past and carries particular political messages (both implicit and explicit). Based on a careful overview of the body of work on Ukrainian women’s history published in Ukraine and available to Ukrainian readers (including original research by Ukrainian scholars and Ukrainian translations of foreign authors), these narratives are as follows:(1) Berehynia, in which adherence to an eternal Ukrainian ‘matriarchal’ past is stressed, as well as the concept of a feminine Ukrainian mentality; (2) the great woman narrative, where outstanding Ukrainian women are praised and their personal achievements lauded; (3) national feminism, which argues for a unique movement beyond existing feminist paradigms and explores women’s contributions to the Ukrainian national cause; and (4) woman’s devotion, which highlights ordinary women’s experiences. After describing each of these narratives in detail, I discuss the role of official/political history in framing women’s history as a research field as well as the impact on the field of dominant national narratives. I demonstrate the extent to which women’s history has been entwined with politics over time. I conclude that, in Ukraine, the feminist paradigm was not embedded in research on women’s history during the 1990s, and thus the national discourse (with its patriarchal implications) has framed the field and determined its developments in terms of themes, approaches, interpretations, and conclusions. Finally, I address some recent problems and challenges faced by Ukrainian women’s history. Berehynia The narrative of Berehynia is based on the idea of matriarchy as inherent to Ukrainian society from ancient times up to the present day. This idea first originated in the works of Ukrainian ethnographers and

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folklorists publishing at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, the evolutionist theory of matriarchy was very popular in the social sciences, and Ukrainian scholars attempted to find and to expose its traces in Ukrainian culture.6 These scholars highlighted women’s special roles in ancient rituals and the relative autonomy women enjoyed in Ukrainian society as an indicator of how progressive this nation was compared with neighbouring nations. The influence of these writings was powerful, carrying over time. Ivan Franko, a distinguished Ukrainian ethnographer and poet, expressed these views in 1883 (in Franko 1980, 210): ‘Since ancient times all the educated people who have looked closely at Ukrainian life have admitted that Ukrainians treat their women in a much more gentle, more humane and liberal way than their neighbouring nations. Women occupy very respected and honourable positions in the family.’ The Berehynia narrative was also strengthened by Ukrainian literature, which reflected the culture of a stateless nation and therefore often praised folk culture. In popular novels, Ukrainian writers at the fin de siècle (some of whom shared a feminist world view) created vivid portrayals of strong, self-sufficient, and powerful women.7 Written in a realistic manner, these works were (and sometimes still are) perceived as a mirror of everyday life. Together, the ethnographic works and Ukrainian literature impacted Ukrainian mass consciousness during the time of the national revival in the 1980s; people began to believe that Ukrainian women always enjoyed broad rights, privileges, and respect in the family and society. None of those writers or scholars working at the turn of the twentieth century, however, used the actual term Berehynia. The modern concept of Berehynia – a symbolic matriarch and guardian of Ukrainian national culture and ethnic identity – was invented much later. It seems to have emerged at the time of the Ukrainian national upheaval during perestroika in the late 1980s through the writings of several authors. It is quite remarkable that patriotically spirited male Ukrainian writers conceived of an allegedly ancient Ukrainian pagan goddess, Berehynia, to further their cause.8 Works by these writers were widely read and cited, allowing the concept to filter into the public discourse of post-Soviet Ukraine. Although heterogeneous, representing a combination of pagan beliefs, matriarchal myth, and Christian ideas as well as popular folk motifs, Berehynia pretended to represent an ‘authentic’ Ukrainian femininity.9 In the early 1990s, at a time of a desperate lack of substantial studies of Ukrainian women’s history, the idea of Ukrainian matriarchy

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was easily revived in the academy, and scholars took for granted the conclusions of their predecessors, including the (never proven) idea of the Ukrainian matriarchal past. Modern adherents of this concept saw themselves to be the heirs and successors of fundamental (and unjustly interrupted) research on Ukrainian women’s history conducted a century before.10 The actual history of matriarchy among ancient Ukrainians, meanwhile, was never examined in depth, and to this day no comprehensive study either confirming or disproving it has been published. Instead, in the 1990s, Berehynia spread unchecked inside academia and beyond. Authors of numerous publications on women’s issues, regardless of their field of inquiry, steadily referred to the ‘native traditions of matriarchy.’ For example, in the chapter ‘The Status of a Woman in the Historical Past’ from her book A Woman: Self-Fulfilment in the Family and Society (1999), sociologist Natalia Lavrinenko fills her pages with unsubstantiated statements such as ‘since the period of matriarchy’ and ‘the protracted remains of matriarchy among Ukrainians.’ Even the most solid and substantial works written by professional historians are sometimes affected by the Berehynia narrative, as demonstrated in the volume Women’s Studies in Ukraine: A Woman in History and Today (Smolyar 1999). The first chapter, ‘Matriarchal Beliefs in Ukrainian Culture: Feminine Principles in Ukrainian Mentality,’11 by Olena Lutsenko, repeatedly strikes the reader with groundless statements such as ‘Ukrainian woman as the peculiar and independent female type,’ and ‘the image of Berehynia is deeply rooted in the matriarchal family cult of spirit-protectors’ (pp. 15–17). The chapter also presents quotations from other works without any clear theoretical or critical approach. The narrative ultimately leads the reader to conclude that Ukrainian women always experienced exceptionally high social status and gender equality (if not all-out dominance) and that these realities are inherent to Ukrainian culture. Normally, texts framed by the Berehynia narrative contain no analysis of empirical data. Instead, certain favourable historical facts about Ukrainian women (from archaeology, ancient history, rituals, religion, folklore, literature, history of law, and social history) are taken out of context, uncritically exaggerated, and used to confirm the inherently egalitarian (if not matriarchal) character of the gender order in Ukraine. Since Ukrainian women have allegedly never experienced discrimination, the logical conclusion the reader is left to draw is that a feminist approach is totally irrelevant to research on Ukrainian women’s history.

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This problem is caused mainly by the fact that, while adherents to the Berehynia narrative may be experts in various academic areas, they are not professional historians. As dilettantes in women’s history, they merely repeat the opinions of prominent figures, some ‘commonplaces,’ or both, without ever questioning or critically reconsidering them. In fact, their pseudo-scientific ‘historical’ revelations become vehicles for the popularization of a distorted vision of Ukrainian women’s past and the legitimization of outdated theories. The impact of these publications on mass consciousness is detrimental: invested with the authority of science, they appear as reliable and trustworthy references for schoolteachers, activists, and journalists who then spread further the dubious idea of an ‘eternal Ukrainian matriarchy.’ Thus, while scholarship surrounding the Berehynia narrative is feeble, its impact on public discourse in Ukraine has been paradoxically important. During the 1990s, parties to literally every public discussion on women’s issues applied the notion of Berehynia and corresponding rhetoric to argue for a special Ukrainian path to women’s emancipation that precluded feminism. At the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s, Ukrainian politicians, both men and women, used and promoted the concept of Berehynia for various political purposes. This happened at all levels of political authority, in different forms, on a wide variety of occasions, particularly in International Women’s Day speeches.12 Thus, the official greeting from the former speaker of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), Oleksandr Tkachenko, on 8 March 2000, entitled ‘Berehynias of Our Immortal Family,’ addressed Ukrainian women in the traditional way: ‘Woman-Mother, Woman-Wife, a Berehynia of our family . . . I sincerely wish you eternal beauty, strong health, happiness, and a sincere love’ (Tkachenko 2000). Three years later, Volodymyr Lytvyn, who is the current speaker of the Rada, congratulated women with similar language: ‘Woman in her various representations – as mother, wife, sister, lover – is the most blessed among all of us . . . She is a crown of nature, a sacred object, mother, housewife, girlfriend, worker, Berehynia of a family hearth, embodiment of the highest human virtues . . . I wish you strong health, a spring mood, kindness and family happiness’ (Lytvyn 2003). Local authorities reiterated this kind of address, as we can see in the following examples: ‘The words “family,” “kin,” “mother,” “Berehynia” are a single whole, namely, Life. Our mothers, eternal Berehynias of a family hearth, have the most beautiful eyes, the tender hands, and the most faithful hearts’ (Nikolayev Vecherniy 2003); and ‘the 8th of March

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is the holiday of our Berehynias. Our present and our future achievements, the fortune of each family and the prosperity of the region depend on them’ (Reporter 2003). One of the most revealing cases of Berehynia’s hold on the public consciousness was the construction of the Monument of Independence, erected in 2002 at Majdan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square, in Kyiv, Ukraine’s central symbolic space). The monument consists of the figure of a woman in Ukrainian national dress standing on a column and holding a snowball tree branch over her head,13 a symbol of the triumph and glory of the independent Ukrainian nation. At the unveiling, which took place on the eve of Independence Day, then-President Leonid Kuchma called the figure ‘the embodiment of the Berehynia of our Ukrainian family.’ Other officials joined him in attesting to her maternal qualities (Kuchma 2002). Such rhetoric was quite typical of political discourse at the time of Kuchma’s presidency: politicians tended to concentrate on one aspect of the Berehynia myth – the idea of Universal Motherhood – while neglecting other possible implications of the image.14 A woman’s ‘natural’ role as mother was applied to the nation-state and merged with notions of nation and patriotism. Such visual representations of the Berehynia narrative (in monuments, book illustrations, traditionalist women’s organizations’ logos, and so on15) all tend towards this kind of essentialism: the concepts of womanhood, motherhood, nationhood, and Christianity merge and ultimately displace other possible matriarchal implication (such as authority, responsibility, assertiveness, and power). Over time, the Berehynia narrative, which originated as a part of Ukrainian national mythology, has thus become a core element of a new national ideology and has been incorporated into the official national narrative. As such, it resists criticism and deconstruction. The Great Woman The second significant narrative of Ukrainian women’s history was conceived by Ukrainian diaspora scholars like Oles Kozulia (1993), Oleh Luhovy (1993), and Ivan Kuzych-Berezovsky (1994), whose writings were republished in Ukraine in the early 1990s. These works forward an epic narrative about the special role that Ukrainian women have played in the history and cultural advancement of the nation. They focus on the biography of Ukraine’s most outstanding women from different historical epochs. Given the aforementioned shortage of

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research and publications on women’s history in Ukraine in the early 1990s, these widely publicized books became very popular and helped frame the entire field. The distinctive feature of these studies is the glorification of prominent Ukrainian women whose contribution to the national cause can be clearly defined and measured. The list includes iconic personalities and, occasionally, names of distinguished but forgotten women – writers, scientists, artists, educators, and philanthropists. This is perhaps the most important contribution of the biographical perspective: that it makes some unsung women visible in national history. In recent years, one can observe a noticeable increase in the number and variety of biographies of women – historical personages and contemporary figures alike. These include original archival documents, stout monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings, reference books, educational brochures, and even wall calendars. Scholarly editions vary in genre and publishing quality. Take, for example, two works: The Outstanding Women of Ukraine and Their Contribution to the Progress of National and World Scholarship (From the Second Half of the 19th to the Mid-20th Centuries) (2003), a monograph by Lyudmyla Shumrykova-Karagodina; and Ukrainian Women in History (2004), a volume edited by Valentyna Borysenko and produced by a collective of authors, including scholars, writers, and journalists. At first glance, the books are alike; both offer life histories of a range of outstanding Ukrainian women. However, Shumrykova-Karagodina’s monograph is poorly printed (paperback, no illustrations, cheap paper, 300 copies), whereas Borysenko’s volume is done exquisitely (hard cover, artistically designed, luxurious paper, huge circulation).16 This striking distinction is easily explained: the latter came out as a part of the national program supporting so-called socially significant publications under the personal patronage of then-first lady Kateryna Yushchenko, whereas the former was published by Dnipropetrovsk University Press at the author’s expense. Why such a glaring disparity in publishing quality between two otherwise similar books? The answer lies in the texts. Borysenko’s volume is clearly shaped by national historical discourse: all the heroines are ethnic Ukrainians, and their personal achievements are assessed based on their contribution to the overall consolidation and progress of the Ukrainian nation. The nationalist tone is supported by the book’s illustrations as well. Shumrykova-Karagodina’s biographies, on the contrary, describe each woman’s attainments in a particular academic

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domain with little reference to the national cause. One may conclude from this comparison that the Ukrainian state encourages and supports studies in women’s history that conform to the national paradigm and serve to further legitimize the nation. In fact, only those female historical figures who have directly contributed to the national cause ultimately achieve the highest levels of recognition by the state. Usually, three names come to mind when discussing prominent Ukrainian women of the past: Queen Olha, Roksolana, and Lesya Ukrainka. The Grand Duchess Olha is invariably presented as a model of women’s statecraft.17 But, despite her versatile activities as leader of the first proto-Ukrainian state, Kyivian Rus, she is known first and foremost as the symbol of Christian women’s devotion to the country. Ironically, the attempt by the state to show appreciation for this outstanding figure turned into another latent mechanism for women’s marginalization. In 1997, President Kuchma issued a decree establishing the new insignia ‘The Order of the Grand Duchess Olha.’ This decoration was to be awarded to women ‘for important personal merits in governmental, industrial, public, academic, educational, cultural, charitable, and other spheres of social activity, and for child rearing in a family’ (Kuchma 1997). This implies that women’s achievements in any of these areas are very special and incompatible with those of men, as if women can compete only among themselves. It is by no mere chance that the iconography for the insignia resembles the famous ancient inlay of Our Lady Preaching, from the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kyiv, which implies that certain Christian ideas are in play as well. Meanwhile, the public monument to Saint Olha brings tangible national and Christian ideas inscribed into the image of a strong (matriarchal) femininity.18 The monument’s location between Ukraine’s two most honoured Orthodox cathedrals (St Sophia and St Michael the Gold-domed) further strengthens this complex of ideas. The second emblematic figure of the great woman narrative is Roksolana, an enslaved Ukrainian woman who succeeded in gaining great authority in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century.19 Despite Roksolana’s highly mythologized life story and the problematic reconstruction of her biography, her public representation is as a model of women’s self-sacrifice for the sake of the fatherland.20 This idea was central to the epic 1997 TV mini-series about her, Roksolana, produced by the state-owned channel UT-1.21 That enormous financial resources from the state budget were allotted to the production of Roksolana

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during a time of economic hardships testifies to the story’s exceptional political significance in mobilizing women to the national cause. In 1999, this popularity continued when a monument to Roksolana was erected in her hometown to commemorate the patriotism of thousands of Ukrainian women trafficked abroad. Lesya Ukrainka, an outstanding Ukrainian writer, is a third iconic figure in this tradition and a symbol of women’s fortitude and national dedication, although her feminist views remained unknown until recently.22 Because she was considered to be a classic writer in Ukrainian literature long ago, Lesya Ukrainka’s name and works were celebrated even under socialism. She is one of a very few prominent Ukrainian women whom ordinary citizens always recall. In independent Ukraine, state commemorative practices include using portraits of the nation’s most prominent figures on the national currency.23 When the new currency, the Hryvnya, was introduced in 1996, all of the new banknotes (from 1 to 100 Hryvnya) featured male personages. A few years later, inflation required the introduction of a new 200-Hryvnya note. Lesya Ukrainka’s likeness was selected to appear on this note.24 Thus, partially by chance, a woman was symbolically valued more highly than the most outstanding men. From this point on, Lesya Ukrainka was virtually canonized in the pantheon of great Ukrainian national heroes. There are a huge number of outstanding Ukrainian women whose personal achievements in various spheres deserve to be thoroughly studied and appreciated, but many of them do not fit into the narrative of ‘the great woman,’ which includes only those who have contributed to the national cause. Official political history affects Ukrainian women’s history as a field when politics promote research and publication on a specific selection of female personages whose life stories are closely intertwined with Ukraine’s national history. As a result, the nation-state effectively appropriates women’s history, foisting its own – politically determined – principles on it. National Feminism In 1988, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak published a groundbreaking study entitled Feminists despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939, which was translated into Ukrainian and published in Kyiv in 1995. The study energized the field of Ukrainian women’s history and led to a new branch of research into the history

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of the Ukrainian women’s movement. Bohachevsky-Chomiak introduced the concept of ‘pragmatic feminism’ to describe the distinctive feature of this movement. She argued that pre-Soviet Ukrainian women activists contributed to women’s emancipation by their practical activities even though they did not identify themselves as feminists in the West European sense. Bohachevsky-Chomiak showed that, during the period when Ukraine was a stateless nation (especially before 1939), the Ukrainian women’s movement consciously subordinated the feminist agenda to the national liberation struggle.25 This insight became a point of reference for subsequent research on the Ukrainian women’s movement and constitutes the cornerstone of the narrative of national feminism. Since the late 1990s, a number of substantial works exploring the activities of women’s organizations in various regions of Ukraine in pre-Soviet times have followed. Some use a feminist framework and are notable for their thorough and comprehensive historical research (see, e.g., Smolyar 1998). In most cases, however, the authors’ knowledge of feminist epistemology and methodology is questionable. As a result, their writings are factual and descriptive at best. The monograph Women in Public Life in Western Ukraine (1998) by Borys Savchuk stands as a vivid example of this type of research. The chapter ‘Origins and Nature of World Feminism’ cites hardly any recent studies; instead, it is based on citations from Brockhaus-Efron’s Encyclopedia (1890 edition) and other century-old publications. The author’s attempt to explore Ukrainian women’s emancipation is striking for its lack of a theoretical basis. Savchuk praises female activists’ contribution to the promotion of national education and national awareness among western Ukrainians while diminishing the importance of women’s achievements in advancing the feminist agenda itself. Ignorance of feminist scholarship often renders authors who work in this area helpless when it comes to analysing empirical data. If this was excusable in the early 1990s (a time of scarce access to basic theoretical works), it cannot be so now, particularly among experts in women’s history. Thus, a recent monograph by the high-profile historian Oksana Malanchuk-Rybak, The Ideology and Social Practices of the Women’s Movement in Western Ukraine (2006),26 while factually rich and accurate, fails in its theorization: a scant eight lines are devoted to summarizing Joan Scott’s contributions to women’s and gender history, but a full eight pages detail Mykhaylo Hrushevsky’s reflections on family relations among medieval Ukrainians.27 In so doing, Malanchuk-Rybak

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makes clear her political loyalties: Hrushevsky’s historical work, although important, is simply not as relevant here, and it is to his position as a founding father of the Ukrainian nation that the author’s attention pays homage. This situation echoes practices during Soviet times, when every scholar was expected to cite the ‘brilliant theoretical ideas’ of communist leaders, no matter what the research subject. Furthermore, while Malanchuk-Rybak points to the intersection of nationalism and feminism as the major challenge for the ideological consistency of the Ukrainian women’s movement, she fails to scrutinize the origins, unique interplay, and long-term consequences in particular contexts of this issue using modern theories of gender and nation. Instead, she offers hasty explanations of compromises in the women’s movement due to Ukrainian women’s paramount dedication to the national cause. Names of authors like Nira Yuval-Davis, Cynthia Enloe, Jill Vickers, and other scholars whose theoretical insights into current debates on women/gender and nation are extremely relevant to the analysis are never even mentioned. In the end, the women’s movement is presented as an essential part of the overall Ukrainian national liberation movement, and as such, it is appreciated mainly for its contribution to national consciousness-raising. Almost two decades after Bohachevsky-Chomiak’s groundbreaking work was published, Malanchuk-Rybak’s conclusions do not add much to her conclusions: ‘Feminism in the Western Ukrainian women’s movement was closely related to nationalism and patriotism. Actually, nationalism as an awareness of a group’s distinction and/or originality based on ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogeneity . . . along with the necessity to maintain and protect such an originality constituted a foundation for the functioning of feminist ideology’ (Malanchuk-Rybak 2006, 456). Despite the unquestionable factual value of this kind of research, it is essentially descriptive. In it, the positivist, androcentric paradigm for studying the past remains unquestioned. These scholars tend to use non-academic instruments to interpret empirical materials. Their conclusions are predictable and opportunistic, catering to the dominant political discourse instead of resulting from an unbiased and comprehensive critical analysis. Ultimately, the main message of publications on the history of the Ukrainian women’s movement is approval and justification for the subordination of the feminist agenda to the goals of the Ukrainian national liberation struggle and nation building. This has had direct implications for women’s activism: during the first decade of Ukrainian independence, some Ukrainian women’s

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NGOs attempted to follow their foremothers’ steps, declaring that the subordination of women’s issues was needed to meet the goals of nation building.28 Their constitutions stressed the principal mission: ‘to contribute to the revival of the Ukrainian nation and firmly establish it among the other free peoples of the world’ (Zhinocha Hromada 1993, 2); to ‘establish the democratic ideal and national awareness in the society, to preserve the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of Ukraine . . . to promote patriotic education of future generations . . . of the Ukrainian language and spirituality revival’ (Olena Teliha 1997, 2); to ‘struggle for the nation’s physical and spiritual revival, to build an independent Ukraine as a national state’ (Ukrainian Christian Women’s Party 1993, 4); and to ‘join in women’s activities for the consolidation and development of the Ukrainian nation-state’ (Nova Doba 1995, 1). In short, within the post-Soviet paradigm for the social sciences, which continues to value ideological compliance over critical analysis, Ukrainian women and their Her-story are still used for political purposes: the narrative of national feminism serves to (historically) substantiate the priority of national interests over any other group interests and thus legitimizes the subordination of any social movement to the goals of nation building. Women’s Devotion Recently, there has been a real publication boom in Ukraine of books about individual women’s experiences of the recent past. Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, diaries, personal correspondence, biographical reference books, and more have appeared. Their format and style vary greatly – from amateurish and journalistic essays, to professionally edited and published personal documents and biographies. Meanwhile, the everyday experience of ordinary women under state socialism and in post-Soviet times in Ukraine has yet to be properly studied. The monograph Women in the History of Ukrainian Culture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (2002) by Olena Styazhkina is the only exception.29 In it, Styazhkina explores the gendered aspects of professional work and creativity and reconstructs the peculiarities of the daily life of several women – writers, musicians, and actors – within a wider artistic and cultural context. Unlike many others, Styazhkina is knowledgeable in the theory and methodology of women’s history, so she consistently examines the empirical data through a gendered

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lens. However, this important study is limited to a particular category of women – artists – whose way of life is hardly typical of the majority of ordinary Ukrainian women. Reference books still constitute the majority of publications on Ukrainian women. These normally consist of short biographical sketches of women who have excelled in different spheres – from motherly heroines to top politicians. Women of Ukraine (2001), edited by Maria Orlyk, is a leading example of this kind of work.30 In each of its 2,500 entries, a photograph accompanies a brief description of the woman’s key achievements and awards. The significance of her contribution to the particular domain is also stressed.31 Women’s participation in and contribution to the national guerrilla movement in the mid-twentieth century is perhaps the favourite subject of recent publications in women’s history,32 especially in Western Ukraine.33 Mainly presented in the form of individual initiatives, however, such studies are usually targeted towards more or less clearly articulated political and/or ideological goals, such as patriotic education of the youth, national consciousness-raising, exemplification of individual heroism during the national liberation struggle, and so on. Besides these numerous memoirs (both written recollections and oral testimonies), two other types of publications on this subject include biographical reference books of female partisans and works summarizing women’s experiences in the guerrilla movement. The former type is exemplified by the book Ukrainian Women in the Liberation Struggle in the 1940s and 1950s (2006), edited by Nadia Mudra.34 It contains more than 1,600 entries – all short biographical notes about ordinary Ukrainian women participants in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army who dedicated their lives to the national cause. Beyond the essential biographical facts, however, there are few details of women’s clandestine activities. On the one hand, this publication makes women’s agency in the national liberation movement visible and thus partially enacts historical justice; on the other hand, it tells us next to nothing about the gendered peculiarities of women’s contributions and practices in the guerrilla movement, or about their motives for, or the long-term effects of, such participation. When it comes to understanding women’s overall participation in the national liberation struggle, the situation is worse: no comprehensive research on this subject has yet been published. Individual, local studies are the only (feeble) attempts so far to summarize women’s roles in the national underground movement, and their approaches raise many

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questions. Death Gave Them Immortality (2003) by Bohdan Savka is typical in this regard. The book presents a chaotic collection of biographical data, photographs, and personal documents assembled and published by a schoolteacher who fails to analyse or even properly edit or comment on the empirical material. Instead, we get highly emotional and moralist nationalist rhetoric. Life stories of women partisans are used to exemplify the extreme patriotism, self-sacrifice, and unconditional devotion to the nation of female champions of the struggle. Needless to say, reconstruction of women’s history per se is not the central objective of this work; their stories are used to articulate and substantiate the utter superiority of national interests. For this reason, and because of other failings, this book is truly the anti-model of what a women’s history should be. The narrative of women’s devotion contrasts that of the great woman. If glorification of some outstanding Ukrainian women is the distinctive feature of the latter, victimization of ordinary women is typical of the former. For Ukrainians, as for people in other emerging nations, the very idea of Nation is personified by a woman. She may serve as a symbolic representation of spiritual firmness and victory (as in the case of the Monument of Independence), but national tragedies and losses are also often imagined and visualized as a suffering woman. This is apparent in the most recent developments around official recognition of the tragedy of the Holodomor of 1932–33 (the Great Famine) and corresponding commemorative practices.35 Holodomor memorials often feature an exhausted or dead woman’s body, symbolizing the tribulations suffered by the nation. Scholarly publications on the tragedy, meanwhile, tend to exemplify the horrors of starvation with creepy stories of desperate women (Kis 2010). Thus, a strong association between womanhood and victimhood is constructed, and women’s historical experiences are conceptualized mainly in terms of eternal suffering and loss. The same trend is noticeable in studies on women’s experiences in the Ukrainian national guerilla movement in the 1930s to 1950s. Although it is undeniable that women endured enormous hardships and losses at the time, it is wrong to reduce all their experiences to suffering only. Constructing an image of a Ukrainian woman as an eternally helpless victim of historical developments ultimately displaces the possibility of exploring and recognizing women’s versatile agencies in history, their survival strategies, and their numerous practices of active or passive resistance or accommodation to circumstances. Such a one-sided view

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of Ukrainian women as passive objects of history is both incorrect and unjust. A more promising trend in research into Ukrainian women’s history from an individual perspective is the development of women’s oral histories. These are increasingly being used in Ukrainian social sciences today. As a methodology, oral history has proven to be an effective tool for studying formerly overlooked or totally silenced aspects of the Soviet and post-Soviet past. The variety of oral history research projects in Ukraine also proves that gender is an essential category for fieldwork and analysis; women constitute the majority of Ukrainian oral historians and subjects, regardless of research area.36 Thus, all kinds of women’s experiences and views are coming to the fore, disclosing formerly muted women’s perspectives on the past. Furthermore, feminist oral history is a growing research sub-field. A few research projects focusing especially on women’s personal memories have recently been carried out in Ukraine (Kis 2007).37 Feminist methodologies of this kind challenge traditional historiography in many ways, introducing unusual research topics and innovative methods of analysis, and drawing less conventional conclusions. Women’s oral history can be a kind of gender-sensitive, alternative methodology for historical research, allowing first-hand women’s historical accounts to be heard, studied, and included in the general historical record. Oral history has problems of its own, however. The project ‘Women’s Oral History: The Restitution,’ under the leadership of Halyna Datsyuk, exemplifies the advantages and shortcomings of doing women’s oral history beyond academia.38 The study resulted in a published volume containing twenty-eight fragments of women’s recollections of the most significant historical periods – as defined by the national historical narrative – that they had witnessed and survived (Datsyuk 2003).39 Thus, although some historical experiences of women are voiced, thereby balancing the existing gender bias in our knowledge of the recent past, the presentation of these memories fails to question the androcentric framework of historiography. In fact, the editor has chosen to publish certain fragments of women’s stories because they appear to be meaningful in the framework of already constructed national history. Women’s lives as such count less than their attendance to certain ‘historically significant’ events. In this way, we can see how women’s oral history may be used as another supplement to official history. The spontaneous ‘feminization’ of oral history in Ukraine, however, along with advancements in feminist oral history, create a sense of

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optimism, as this approach could create a substantial counterpoint to the traditional way of writing history in Ukraine. The study of the past from the perspective of individual women’s lives can reveal the variety of women’s agencies in recent Ukrainian history. Conclusions Rapid socioeconomic and political transformations in Ukraine, accompanied by progress in the field of gender studies, have resulted in a considerable rise in gender awareness in Ukrainian society. This trend has ultimately led to an increased public interest in publications on women’s and gender issues that could be extremely promising and beneficial for the advancement of women’s history. However, this will only happen if the authors are professional historians knowledgeable in modern feminist scholarship, which will ensure both factual accuracy and innovative critical approaches. Right now, however, the outstanding feature of current publications in this area is the prevalence of dilettantes among the authors pretending to write the history of Ukrainian women. The urgent public demand for more women’s histories remains mostly unnoticed by academia, which, because of persistent prejudices against women’s and gender studies, has failed to answer the call with more quality research on the subject. This gap is quickly being filled with pseudo-scientific publications that imitate women’s history in form, while profaning its substance.40 This problem is aggravated by poor marketing (including publishing, distribution, and promotion) of academic publications on women’s history. Indeed, a book can become a bestseller or fall into oblivion depending on factors that have little to do with its scholarly value. Oftentimes, fundamental studies on women’s history are unavailable to readers only because of their limited circulation and poor distribution, whereas low-quality publications conceived exclusively as commercial projects flood the book market. The failure to properly present and deliver substantial research in women’s history to its potential target group is fatal for the establishment of women’s history as a solid field of research. If fundamental research is invisible to readers, it gives the impression that Ukrainian women’s history cannot be serious scholarship. There is one more blemish peculiar to many publications on Ukrainian women’s history: too often they are spoiled by poor prefaces or introductions written by some high-ranking official who is totally ignorant of women’s history.41 Such introductory texts are usually replete with

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stereotypical rhetoric based on women’s ‘special’ mission in making and maintaining the nation. An extremely essentialist notion of women is usually presented through two main points: first, the infinite variety of women’s social roles is reduced to their ‘natural’ or ‘eternal’ maternal and aesthetic functions only; second, authors steadily use the word ‘woman’ or ‘womankind’ in the singular form (zhinka, zhinotstvo) which implies that Ukrainian women are to be seen as a mass, as a solid kind of undifferentiated homogeneous category – all alike, possessing the same basic features, assigned the same mission, sharing the same destiny. Women are discursively denied any differences (social, ethnic, age, regional, etc.), and their individualities, personal interests, needs, and aspirations are neglected. The obvious discrepancy between the messages in these introductions and the content of the books themselves (which explore the variety of women’s activities and achievements beyond traditional gender roles) can confuse and disorient readers, failing to equip them with a much-needed conceptual framework. In this situation of uncertain institutional affiliations, methodological weakness, dispersed human resources, and political affections, the only way to establish Ukrainian women’s history as a solid academic field is through joint efforts by Ukrainian feminist historians. The Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History (UARWH), a non-governmental organization of professional historians (conceived in August 2010) declares institutionalization of women’s history as a relatively autonomous research field in historical scholarship in Ukraine to be its main goal. The Association’s versatile activities aim at the ‘support, promotion and coordination of research and teaching in women’s and gender history in Ukraine’ (Ukrainian Association 2010, 1). This would raise the quality of research work and help the field withstand the flow of pseudo-scientific dilettantish publications. Other goals of this association include counteracting the instrumentalization and political manipulations of women’s history, strengthening academic integrity, and consolidation of feminist historians around Ukraine. Through such a union, Ukrainian scholars could finally join the international community of feminist historians through membership in the International Federation of Research in Women’s History (established in 1987).42 In her recent book, Tatyana Zhurzhenko (2008) argues that the national discourse plays a crucial role in forming feminist scholarship in Ukraine. Zhurzhenko discusses scholars’ compliance with the national narrative and uncritical inscription of Ukrainian women’s history onto

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that framework. She concludes that contemporary women’s history is simply an additional tool to sustain and legitimize the history of the Ukrainian state (pp. 44–9, 57–63). The national paradigm is manifested even in the book’s design. Strikingly enough, even publications dedicated to women’s history in modern times often use very traditional images of women for their covers and illustrations: a peasant mother holding a baby, a peasant girl holding an archaic harvest tool, or a conventionalized Madonna – all invariably in Ukrainian national dress, all alike (see Borysenko 2004; Genyk 2008; Smolyar 1999; Zherebkina 1998). In this way, the national discourse (and to some extent, a religious one) is strengthened by imagery that frames readers’ perceptions of Ukrainian women as essentially traditional, perhaps even conservative bearers and guardians of national culture. The majority of publications in Ukrainian women’s history today ultimately strive to answer the question ‘What is so Ukrainian?’ instead of ‘What is so women’s?’ in research on literally any aspect of Ukrainian women’s past. Indeed, when shifting the focus from women’s to Ukrainian in the designation Ukrainian women’s history, authors substantially change the framework of their studies. Exploring women’s historical experience is no longer the primary goal. Instead, women appear as just another element in the history of Ukrainian nation building. Women’s interests and agencies per se are subordinated to the nation once again, as Her-story is instrumentalized for the sake of His-story.

NOTES 1 See, e.g., the works of Mykola Kostomarov, Pavlo Chubynsky, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Ivanov, Petro Yefymenko, Olexandra Yefymenko, Volodymyr Hnatyuk, Zenon Kuzelia, Volodymyr Okhrymovych, Orest Levytsky, and others. 2 Kateryna Hrushevska’s father, Mykhaylo Hrushevsky (see n27 below), was persecuted by Soviet authorities for Ukrainian nationalism. Kateryna Hrushevska was arrested by the secret police, the NKVD, in July, 1938, accused of subversive, anti-Soviet activities, and was condemned to eight years in a concentration camp plus five years of deprivation of civil rights. She died in the Gulag in March 1943. 3 The socialist project of emancipation of women from above and the manipulative motives behind it have been discussed in several publications of feminist scholars. See, e.g., Moghadam (1993), Buckley (1997), Edmondson (1992), Marsh (1996), Corrin (1992), Einhorn (1993), and Funk

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and Mueller (1993). While acknowledging some emancipatory effects of Soviet gender policies (especially free access to education and opportunities for professional self-fulfilment), scholars are unanimous in their judgment of ‘gender equality’ under socialism as hypocritical: compulsory full-time employment combined with undiminished household and maternal duties created a double burden for women; various forms of gender discrimination persisted for female employees; and women played no more than a token role in politics and governance. The only exceptions to this were historical studies of the family, in which Ukrainian peasant women’s family roles and household functions received some attention. Women’s history is absent from the Ukrainian state register of academic disciplines. Students cannot specialize in women’s history. Nor can an academic degree be awarded in this field. Naturally, such official nonrecognition has impeded studies in women’s history. Still, it has not totally blocked their progress. Volovymyr Okhrymovych, a famous Ukrainian ethnographer, persistently attempted to prove the existence of matriarchal traits in the Ukrainian culture through studying the most archaic elements of family rituals and popular customs. For more detailed discussions of the origins of the idea of Ukrainian matriarchy and the Berehynia narrative in Ukrainian academic, public, and political discourses, see Kis (2006; abridged version, 2005). For example, the authors Marko Vovchok, Olha Kobelianska, Lesia Ukrainka, Natalia Kobrynska, and others. Vasyl Ruban’s novel Berehynia (1992) reintroduced the idea of an authentic Ukrainian matriarchy to the public discourse. He worked on the historical novel Berehynia since 1968 and published its fragments in several literary journals, but the complete version was published only in 1992. Vasyl Skurativsky has also published a book with the same title about Ukrainian native traditions in 1987. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Berehynia, devoted to the study of Ukrainian traditions and folklore, he also promoted matriarchal ideas through a range of publications. Marian Rubchak (2001) has explored Berehynia as the fusion of two images – the Virgin Mary and a pagan (pseudo)goddess – that has been used to elaborate a new national model of femininity in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the feminist trend in research on women’s history, initiated by Hrushevska and others in the 1920s, remained largely unknown because of restrictions on access to their works in Soviet times.

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11 In fairness, this chapter contrasts sharply with the rest of the book, which is one of the most successful attempts to reconstruct the history of Ukrainian women in a holistic way. 12 Public perception of the meaning of International Women’s Day (8 March) in post-Soviet Ukraine is distorted. It is regarded either as a celebration of spring, women’s beauty and love (this view having been cultivated during the late Soviet period), or as a part of Soviet heritage and originating from the (foreign) socialist women’s movement (with reference to Klara Zetkin). The latter view is widely shared by nationalist women activists who deny any association with socialism. The internationally accepted meaning of this day (namely, celebration of solidarity among women struggling for their rights) has been promoted over the past few years by feminist women’s groups. 13 The snowball tree, especially if pictured as a branch with ripe red berries, is an essential Ukrainian national symbol. 14 The rhetoric of matriarchal essence lost its popularity after the Orange Revolution and has seldom been mentioned by politicians since. 15 For a detailed analysis of these representations, see Kis (2005). 16 Borysenko’s luxurious edition is not affordable for the average scholar or even for academic libraries, so in 2006 the international charitable foundation ‘Ukraine 3000’ donated 230 copies to university libraries throughout Ukraine on the occasion of Mother’s Day. 17 Grand Duchess Olha headed the first proto-Ukrainian state, Kyivian Rus in 945–57; she was known for her tough, successful style of governance, versatile diplomatic activity, and effective administrative and taxation reforms, which strengthened state authority. She was also the first Ukrainian governor to adopt Christianity and was canonized a saint by the Orthodox Church. 18 The monument to St Olha (by Ivan Kavaleridze) was erected in 1911, destroyed by the Soviets in 1919, and totally demolished in 1926. In 1996, the Kyiv city council decided to restore it. 19 Roksolana (ca. 1500–1566, likely named Nastya Lisovska) was an ordinary Ukrainian woman from the western Ukrainian town of Rohatyn who was enslaved by Tatars for a time. Owing to the outstanding qualities of her character, she became a beloved wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman II the Great in 1520. Alleviation of Ottoman aggression against East Slavic nations at that time is usually ascribed to Roksolana’s influence over her husband’s political decisions. 20 A museum devoted to Roksolana is slated to open in Rohatyn in 2010.

(Re)Constructing Ukrainian Women’s History 173 21 The series was directed by Boris Neberidze. In 2004, UT-1 produced a second series, Roksolana: Sovereign of the Empire. Olha Sumska, who played Roksolana, became a national sex symbol. 22 Lesya Ukrainka was a pen name for the writer Larysa Kosach (1871–1913), one of the key figures in Ukrainian literature. Although weak from years of suffering from tuberculosis, she maintained an active public life and worked tirelessly to promote the Ukrainian national idea. Her biography and works are studied in Ukraine and abroad, and numerous monuments as well as museums have been dedicated to Lesya Ukrainka all over the globe. 23 Of 99 commemorative coins minted by the Ukrainian national bank, Ukrainian women (including Queen Olha and Lesya Ukrainka) are portrayed on 7. 24 The 200-Hryvnya note appeared in 2001. In 2006, however, it was outvalued by a 500-Hryvnya note portraying yet another famous male Ukrainian historical figure. 25 Ukraine had no statehood of its own until the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed in the framework of the USSR (1922). Until 1939, however, a big part of the Ukrainian territories (Western Ukraine – Galicia, Bukovyna, West Volynia, Transcarpathia) were under the governance of other countries (Poland, Romania, Hungary). 26 In this work, Malanchuk-Rybak, a doctor of history and professor at the Lviv Academy of Fine Arts and expert in women’s history since the late 1980s, does provide excellent archival research to substantiate her reconstruction of the history of various women’s groups. 27 Mykhaylo Hrushevsky (1866–1934) was a prominent Ukrainian historian, author of the 10-volume History of Ukraine-Rus, and president of the Ukrainian National Republic – the short-lived independent Ukrainian national state, in 1917–18. 28 Martha Kichorowska Kebalo (2007) and Marian Rubchak (2001a, 2001b) have both shown how this willingness to subordinate women’s agenda was passed down within the movement. More recently, however, many women’s NGOs have updated their programs and adjusted their agendas in order to foreground women’s issues. 29 This book’s scarce circulation (300 copies) makes it almost unavailable to readers. 30 It is worth noting that Maria Orlyk is not a scholar. During the 12 years preceding the collapse of the USSR she was deputy prime minister of Ukraine. Later, she served as a leader of the national women’s organization

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Oksana Kis Spika zhinok Ukrainy (The Union of Women of Ukraine), which actually carried out this publishing project. Unlike many other publications on women’s history, this one has a short editorial foreword explaining the criteria and process for selecting the persons to be included, and the way their personal data were obtained. It is also remarkable that these persons are not necessarily of Ukrainian ethnic descent. In this way, the book does not cater to the Ukrainian national narrative. In general, there is little to criticize in this edition, except, perhaps, its relatively high cost. The mass national liberation movement under the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) took place in the western Ukrainian territories from the mid-1930s until 1953; after 1942, its guerilla army, known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), fought for an independent Ukrainian nation-state against the Nazis and the Soviets. In other regions, research and publications on Ukrainian women’s history are considerably less politicized and are concerned mostly with women’s professional achievements. Nadia Mudra is an activist and former member of the OUN who survived the Gulag. She managed to collect biographical materials, put them together, and ultimately publish the two-volume edition despite her advanced age and health concerns. Her work represents a unique source for further research, especially given the extreme circumstances of her information gathering on women partisans, whose activities and networking were clandestine. The state-organized artificial famine in the Eastern, Central, and Southern regions of Ukraine, which caused some 4 million deaths in 1932–33, has been recognized by the Rada to have been an act of genocide against Ukrainians. Perhaps the higher life expectancy of women (72.5 years compared with 60.5 years for men) and their relatively better health determine the predominance of female narrators in virtually all studies that uses oral historical sources. For example, the research project ‘Twentieth Century Ukraine in Women’s Memories’ was conducted between 2003 and 2007 under the leadership of Oksana Kis as a part of the international project ‘Women’s Memories: Searching for Lives and Identities of Women under Socialism.’ For more details, see www.womensmemories.net. Halyna Datsyuk is president of the Kyiv Women’s Centre ‘Spadshchyna’ (Heritage) and a journalist who teaches at Kyiv National University. The project she led was part of a joint international undertaking called

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‘Women’s Oral Histories,’ which included the majority of post-Soviet countries and was supported by the Women’s Network Program of the Open Society Institute. Andrea Peto, a professor at Central European University, served as research adviser for the international research group. Despite the obvious merits of this pioneering project, its academic value should not be overestimated. Evident flaws in the project design and documentation and its general methodological vagueness suggest that the members of the research team were novices in oral history. For instance, published memories are neither accompanied by interviewees’ personal data, nor by the date and place of the interview or the questions that were asked. It is impossible to assess the relevance of chosen theoretical principles and techniques to the project’s goals because they are not described in the preface. As well, there is no evidence that a common interviewing strategy or questionnaire was used for collecting women’s retrospections, and there is no discussion of the ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of personal life stories. Here I am not taking into account the popular publications designed for a general audience, but those which conform to the formal characteristics of a scholarly book (including pre-publishing reviews, references, bibliography, appendix, index, etc.) and therefore could be identified as a research work. For instance, Volodymyr Lytvyn, the speaker of the Rada and vicepresident of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, was the author of the ‘Foreword’ for the first volume of the Vadym Bolhov’s book Portraits of Our Women Contemporaries (2003). His reflections unequivocally testify to his total incompetence in women’s history: ‘Women have always been an embellishment of our country, the nation’s pride and treasure. Their beauty, intellect, kindness, and love inspire men to be the worthy knights and lovers. Professionalism and steadfastness, self-sacrifice for the sake of their families and children have always been the fundamental features of womanhood. Ukrainian woman is a Berehynia of the family hearth, a reliable backing and support for a man, a mother of a defender of Fatherland’ (2003, 1). Thus, Lytvyn’s political status and academic authority serve to legitimize the most stereotypical perception of women’s social roles. UARWH was accepted as a collective member to the International Federation for Research in Women’s History in August 2010. For details of the IFRWH’s history, structure, and activities, see its official website: www. ifrwh.com.

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REFERENCES Bohachevsky-Chomiak, M. 1988. Feminists despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. – 1995. Bilym po bilomu: Zhinky v hromadskomu zhytti Ukrainy, 1884–1939. Kyiv: Lybid. (This is the translated edition, printed in Ukraine, of the original English language text, cited above.) Bolhov, V. 2003. Portrety suchasnyts [Portraits of Our Women Contemporaries], vol.1. Kyiv: Ukrainska academia heraldyky. Borysenko, V., ed. 2004. Ukrainian Women in History. Kyiv: Lybid. Buckley, M., ed. 1997. Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Corrin, C., ed. 1992. Superwomen and Double Burden: Women’s Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Toronto: Sumach. Datsyuk, H., ed. 2003. Usna zhinocha istoriya: Povernennia [Women’s Oral History: The Restitution]. Kyiv: Zhinochy Tsentr ‘Spadschyna.’ – 2007. Istoriya staroi fotografii: vizualizatsiya zhinochogo dosvidu [A Story of an Old Photo: Visualization of Women’s Experiences]. Kyiv: Zhinochy Tsentr ‘Spadschyna.’ Edmondson, L., ed. 1992. Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Einhorn, B. 1993. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe. New York: Verso Franko, I. 1980. Zhinocha nevolia v ruskykh pisniakh narodnykh. (1883). In Works in 50 Volumes (works by Ivan Franko), vol. 26, 209–53. Kyiv: Naukova Dumka. Funk, N., and M. Mueller, eds. 1993. Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. New York: Routledge. Genyk, S. 2008. 150 vydatnykh ukrayinok [150 Outstanding Ukrainian Women]. Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya. Hrushevska, K. 1929. Pro doslidzhennia statevyh hromad v pervisnim suspilstvi [Towards a Study of Sex Groups in Primitive Societies]. Pervisne hromadianstvo ta yoho perezhytky v Ukraini 1: 24–33. Kichorowska Kebalo, M. 2007. Exploring Continuities and Reconciling Rupture: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Ukrainian Women’s Movement. Aspasia 1: 36–60.

(Re)Constructing Ukrainian Women’s History 177 Kis, O. 2005. Choosing without Choice: Predominant Models of Femininity in Contemporary Ukraine. In M. Hurd, H. Carlback, and S. Rastback, eds., Gender Transitions in Russia and Eastern Europe, 105–36. Stockholm: Gondolin. – 2006. Koho oberihaye Berehynia, abo Matriarkhat yak cholovichyy vynakhid [Who Is Protected by Berehynia, or Matriarchy as a Men’s Invention]. YA: The Bulletin of the Kharkiv Women’s Centre KRONA 4(16): 11–16; Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (23 April 2005). – 2007. Vidnovlyuyuchy vlasnu pamyat: proekt ‘Ukraina XX stolittya u pamyati zhinok’ [Resuming the Memory: The Research Project ‘20th-Century Ukraine in Women’s Memories’]. Ukraina Moderna 11: 266–70. – 2010. Holodomor 1932–33 rokiv kriz’ pryzmu zhinochoho dosvidu [The Great Famine 1932–33 as Seen through the Prism of Women’s Experiences]. Narodoznavchi Zoshyty nos. 5–6: 633–51. Kozulia, O. 1993. Zhinky v istorii Ukrainy [Women in the History of Ukraine]. Kyiv: Ukrainsky tsentr dukhovnoi kultury. Kuchma, L. 1997. On Establishing the Insignia of the President of Ukraine ‘The Order of the Grand Duchess Olha.’ Decree of the President of Ukraine, no. 827/97, 15 Aug. 1997. Available at the official website of the Supreme Council of Ukraine http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main. cgi?nreg=827%2F97. – 2002. Nekhay mits, bahatstvo i slava vitchyzny pryrostayut nashoyu pratseyu: Vystup Prezydenta Ukrainy na vidkrytti Monumenta Nezalezhnosti Ukrainy [May the Fatherland’s Strength, Wealth and Glory Increase Owing to Our Work: The President of Ukraine’s Speech at the Inauguration of the Monument of Independence of Ukraine]. President nos. 7–8: 6–11. Kuzych-Berezovsky, I. 1994. Zhinka i derzhava [Woman and the State]. Lviv: Svit. Lavrinenko, N. 1999. Zhenshchina: samorealizatsiya v semye I obshchestve (gendernyy aspect) [A Woman: Self-Fulfilment in the Family and Society (Gender Aspects]. Kyiv: Vipol. Luhovy, O. 1993.Vyznachne zhinotstvo Ukrainy: istorychni zhyttiepysy [Prominent Women of Ukraine: Historical Biographies]. Kyiv: Dnipro. Lutsenko, O. 1999. Matriarkhatni uyavlennia v ukrainskiy kulturi: zhinoche nachalo v ukrainskiy mentalnosti [Matriarchal Beliefs in Ukrainian Culture: Feminine Principles in Ukrainian Mentality]. In L. Smolyar, ed., Zhinochi studii v Ukraini: Zhinka v istorii i siogodni [Women’s Studies in Ukraine: A Woman in History and Today], 10–18. Odessa: Astroprynt. Lytvyn, V. 2003. Zhinkam Ukrainy [To Women of Ukraine]. Holos Ukrainy, 7 March.

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Malanchuk-Rybak, O. 2006. Ideolohiya ta suspilna praktyka zhinochoho rukhu na zakhidnoukraïnskykh zemliakh XIX – pershoï tretyny XX st.: Typolohiia ta ievropeiskyi kulturno-istorychnyi kontekst [The Ideology and Social Practice of the Women’s Movement in Western Ukraine in the 19th and First Third of the 20th Centuries: Typology and European Cultural and Historical Context]. Chernivtsi: KNYHY – XXI. Marsh, R., ed. 1996. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moghadam, V.M., ed. 1993. Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies. Oxford: Clarendon. Mudra, N. 2006 [2004]. Ukrainska zhinka u vyzvolniy borotbi, 1940–1950 roky [Ukrainian Women in the Liberation Struggle in the 1940s and 1950s], 2 vols. Lviv: Svit. Nikolayev Vecherniy. 2003. Iz dnem materi ta mizhnarodnym dnem simyi [Greetings on the Occasion of Mother’s Day and the International Day of the Family]. 13 May. Nova Doba [New Epoch, Women’s Association]. 1995. Statutes. Lviv: Nova Doba. Okhrymovych, V. 1891. Znacheniye malorusskikh svadebnykh obriadov v istorii evolutsii semyi. [Significance of the Ukrainian Wedding Rituals in the History of the Evolution of the Family]. Etnograficheskoye Obozreniye 4(11): 44–105. Olena Teliha [All-Ukrainian Women’s Association]. 1997. Statutes. Kyiv: Olena Teliha. Orlyk, M., ed. 2001. Zhinky Ukrainy: Biohrafichny entsyklopedychny slovnyk [Women of Ukraine: Biographical Encyclopedic Reference Book]. Kyiv: Fenix. Reporter. 2003. Zi sviatom vas, dorohi zhinky Zakarpattia! [Happy Holiday, Dear Women of Trans-Carpathia!] 7 March. Ruban, V. 1992. Berehynia: Istorychnyy roman [Berehynia: A Historical Novel]. Kyiv: Dnipro. Rubchak, M. 2001a. Christian Virgin or Pagan Goddess? Feminism versus the Eternally Feminine in Ukraine. In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 315–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2001b. Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness in Ukraine and Russia. European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(2): 149–60. Savchuk, B. 1998. Zhinotstvo v suspilnomu zhytti Zakhidnoyi Ukrainy (ostnnia tretyna XIX st. – 1939 [Women in Public Life in Western Ukraine (From the Last Third of the 19th Century to 1939]. Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya.

(Re)Constructing Ukrainian Women’s History 179 Savka, B. 2003. ‘A smert yikh bezsmertyam zustrila. . .’ Narysy, spohady, dokumenty pro uchast zhinotstva v natsionalno-vyzvolniy borotbi OUN-UPA 40–50 rokiv XX stolittya [‘Death Gave Them Immortality. . .’ Essays, Memories, Documents on Women’s Participation in the National Liberation Struggle of OUN-UPA in the 1940 and 1950s]. Ternopil: Dzhura. Shumrykova-Karagodina, L. 2003. Vydatni zhinky Ukrainy i yikhniy vnesok u rozvytok natsionalnoyi i svitovoyi nauky (druha polovyna XIX – seredyna XX st.) [The Outstanding Women of Ukraine and Their Contribution to the Progress of National and World Scholarship (From the Second Half of the 19th to the Mid-20th Centuries]. Dnipropetrovsk: Dnipropetrovsk University Press. Smolyar, L. 1998. Mynule zarady maybutnioho. Zhinochy rukh Naddniprianskoyi Ukrayiny druhoyi polovyny XIX – pochatku XX stolittia [Past for the Sake of Future: The Women’s Movement in the Dnipro Region of Ukraine in the Second Half of the 19th to the Early 20th Centuries]. Odessa: Astroprynt. – ed. 1999. Zhinochi studii v Ukraini: Zhinka v istorii i siogodni [Women’s Studies in Ukraine: A Woman in History and Today]. Odessa: Astroprynt. Styazhkina, O. 2002. Zhinky v istorii ukrayinskoyi kultury druhoyi polovyny XX stolittya [Women in the History of Ukrainian Culture in the Second Half of the 20th Century]. Donetsk: Skhidnyy vydavnychyy dim. Tkachenko, O. 2000. Berehyni rody nashoho bezsmertnoho [Berehynias of Our Immortal Family]. Holos Ukrainy, 8 March. Ukrainian Association for Research in Women’s History, 2010. Statutes. Lviv: UARWH. Ukrainian Christian Women’s Party. 1993. Program and Statutes. Lviv: Ukrainian Christian Women’s Party. Zherebkina, I., ed. 1998. Femina Postsovietica: Ukrainskaya zhenschina v perekhodny period: ot sotsialnykh dvizheniy k politike [Femina Postsovietica: Ukrainian Women in the Period of Transition: From Social Movements to Politics]. Kharkov: Kharkov Centre of Gender Studies. Zhinocha Hromada [Women’s Community, International Organization]. 1993. Statutes. Kyiv: Zhinocha Hromada. Zhurzhenko, T. 2008. Gendernyie rynki Ukrainy: politicheskaya ekonomiya natsionalnogo stroitelstva [Gendered Markets of Ukraine: The Political Economy of Nation Building]. Vilnius: European Humanities University.

7 Gender and Social Worth in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Civil Society sarah d. phillips

Middle-Class Fantasies 2 February 1999, Kyiv, Ukraine Vania is to pick up Svetlana, Vira, and me at the designated meeting place – the trolley-bus stop nearest to Svetlana’s apartment.1 It’s 9:30 a.m. We stomp our feet on the frozen snow to ward off numbness and tug our coat collars tighter to stave off the icy wind and blowing snow. Vania finally pulls up in his car. The burgundy Opel, a fairly new sedan, looks promising, but it soon becomes clear that this trip will be a slow one. Every few miles the car dies and Vania gets out to tinker with something under the hood, willing the engine back to life so we can travel on. Vania, the father of five children, is a member of Our House, the non-governmental organization (NGO) run by Svetlana and Vira to support ‘large families’ (bahotoditni, those with five or more children in most cases, but families with three or more children may in some instances be designated as ‘large’). Situated in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital city,2 their organization serves about seventy families and 225 children in total. Since Vania recently lost his job, Svetlana and Vira call him up whenever they need a driver for their NGO affairs, and they pay him a small sum for his trouble and for gas. I’m tagging along with the women as they scour the city for discount food items to include in food baskets which they are putting together for distribution to the members of their organization. If we find a good price, we will purchase what we can fit in the car today and then return tomorrow for the rest. As we drive around to different bazaars and warehouses searching for discounts on bulk quantities of cooking oil, sugar, and hrechka

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(buckwheat groats), with frequent stops for engine tinkering, Svetlana and Vira begin an elaborate verbal exchange about their ‘dreams and wishes.’ They seem to go to another place as they imagine themselves in different life circumstances – lives released from denial and liberated from worries about how to put the next meal on the table. These dream narratives are fascinating windows into the lives that these women live; they are testaments to their poverty, the desires it engenders, and the dreams it snuffs out. We turn the corner from Shevchenko Boulevard onto Khreshchatyk (a giant statue of Lenin to our left), and my friends conjure an image of a ‘women’s club’ they would like to start. If they had a women’s club, the moms in their organization could gather every so often to enjoy female fellowship and relax away from their home life and domestic chores. ‘Yes,’ Svetlana offers, ‘we’ll have soft and luxurious couches to rest our weary bones.’ ‘Oh sure,’ adds Vira, jokingly, ‘the women can lounge on the couches and drink tea with lemon.’ In a more serious tone, Svetlana explains that many of the women in their organization (including themselves) suffer from a lack of female companionship, since most ‘mothers of many children’ are homemakers and cannot leave the home and their children very often. She tells me: Sometimes I think I should have been a psychologist or gone into psychiatry. Because I sit there so often and listen to women – we give them a chance to get everything off their chests. They can talk to us because we are in the same situation as they.

The women’s fixation with the lemon continues throughout our quest around the city for discount foodstuffs. While we wander through a warehouse hoping to find wholesale cereals, Vira leaves the rest of us as she goes on a search for ‘one little lemon, so we can have tea with lemon later.’ She runs up to all the makeshift fruit stands around the warehouse in pursuit of the elusive lemon. She finally finds the right lemon at the right price and buys it, triumphantly carrying it to show our small collective. She cradles the lemon until we reach the car, her little symbol of the indulgences of life that she and Svetlana are so rarely able to enjoy. After our shopping trip, I invite Svetlana and Vira to my apartment to continue our chat and finally enjoy that tea with lemon. They are surprised to see the ancient Soviet refrigerator (‘Siberia’) that came with my rented apartment. ‘That thing sounds like a car motor,’ Svetlana

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observes, and adds: ‘So I’m not the only one who still has one of those energy-sucking dinosaurs.’ As I prepare a snack, I try to keep Vira from seeing that I already have four or five lemons languishing in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. Svetlana reflects on her own poverty: ‘If you ask me what my children and I live on, I can’t tell you because I don’t know myself. Our expenses greatly outweigh our income.’ Her teenage son, she explains, recently has aged out of the system of social welfare, so her family no longer qualifies as a ‘large’ one. This means that all three of her children have lost their right to collect a monthly allowance of 70 UAH (about $20 at the time).3 Svetlana’s eldest daughter gets a small sum in child support from her father each month, and Svetlana’s youngest daughter receives 6.40 UAH (about $1.85 at the time) as the child of a single mother. Svetlana sews house slippers from scrap material and sells them for 2.50 UAH (about $0.70 at the time) a pair to make extra money. This is the extent of her family budget, and Vira once told me, in secret, that ‘Svetlana’s children go around hungry.’ Svetlana again begins to articulate her middle-class fantasies: My dream is to have a big kitchen with a huge refrigerator that is never empty. And a couch right beside the refrigerator. I would be able to relax there and open the refrigerator and take out anything I want at anytime and just eat it, without having to worry about dividing it into four parts [for me and my kids]. Because there will always be more . . . And I dream about walking up and down the aisles of the Besarabs’kyi Market and being able to buy anything and everything I want.

Svetlana takes a spoon and dunks a round slice of lemon to the bottom of her teacup, squashing the lemon to release the tangy juice: ‘All I want is a normal life.’ Svetlana and Vira are just two of the thousands of women who have taken up leadership roles in various types of civic organizations in Ukraine since Gorbachev, in the mid- and late 1980s, loosened the reigns on the right of Soviet citizens to associate freely. Their experiences raise important questions about the nature of Ukraine’s post-socialist ‘third sector’ (as the NGO sphere is called in transnational ‘developmentspeak’) and about the impacts on women of the collapse of the socialist system and the introduction of a market economy. As women such as these activists have flocked to the non-profit sector, they have found themselves in the crosshairs of processes of differentiation, as the criteria

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for productive citizenship are reworked, and the rights and needs of various categories of citizens redefined. These women’s struggles for social justice and their uneven success highlights some of the social costs of economic reforms centred on marketization, privatization, and welfare reduction, policies that entail a re-evaluation of citizens’ productivity and deservedness, and a dramatic rearrangement of the state’s acknowledged responsibilities towards different groups of citizens. The claims of people such as Svetlana and Vira, who called upon the Ukrainian state to provide the same level of social protection as they had enjoyed as ‘mothers of many children’ in the Soviet Union, have become increasingly devalued as the state is pulled back and social problems become privatized. Processes of differentiation have had an especially marked impact on women, which is reflected not only in macroeconomic indicators and unemployment statistics (which generally show women to be the losers of the transition) but also in the large numbers of women who have sought refuge in NGOs as a forum to advocate for marginalized populations and eke out a meagre living. In the context of economic reform and the shrinking social safety net, it is mostly women who have been left to pick up the pieces of the dishevelled social welfare system; women have been compelled to engage in the care and defence of marginalized groups whose concerns and demands are increasingly delegitimized in the neo-liberal moment. Barbara Einhorn (2000) describes this situation as a ‘civil society trap,’ since so many women have been ushered into the low-prestige, low-paying (or no pay) ghetto of NGO grunt work (Einhorn 2000; Handrahan 2002; Liborakina 1998). Across the former Soviet Union, in general, the NGO sphere appears to be dominated by women.4 Despite popular assumptions that this is the case in Ukraine as well, in 2006, a survey of 610 civil society organizations in Ukraine showed no significant gender differences in NGO leadership (51% were directed by women, and 49% by men; Palyvoda et al. 2006). There were some regional variations, with a greater proportion of NGOs in Western and Eastern Ukraine led by women, and men dominating in Central Ukraine. However, there are significant differences in the types of NGOs commonly associated with women and those associated with men. In Ukraine, women tend to head social organizations that serve the interests of women, children, and families, and those that focus on ‘solving social issues’; women are believed to possess ‘natural’ roles as mothers, caregivers, and

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guardians of the home and nation.5 Many women-led organizations are ‘mutual aid’ associations (hrupy vzaiemodopomohy) that are simultaneously a support group and a humanitarian (charity) organization. Like Svetlana and Vira, scores of NGO directors are themselves members of a marginalized category (large families, the elderly, the disabled), and they may engage in NGO work as a form of precarious employment as they wage social justice struggles to help themselves and others. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to direct NGOs associated with human rights, civic education, politics, the state, and the economy, which represent much more prestigious and lucrative spheres than children’s issues and ‘solving social problems’ (Palyvoda et al. 2006, 92). During a long-term ethnographic study of women social activists and their NGOs from 1998 to 2005, I tracked the activities and narratives of eleven NGO activists in Kyiv to examine multiple aspects of Ukrainian civil society building after socialism, and the intersections of gender and class in particular (Phillips 2008). In this chapter, I focus on just two of these activists – Svetlana and Vira, of the organization Our House – to explore the discourses about gender and about class in this post-socialist, neo-liberalizing state that intersect to discount the ‘value narratives’ of disadvantaged women such as these, and relegate them and their concerns to a marginalized underclass (Patico 2005, 491). Their experiences reveal a little-explored side of the supposed ‘democratization’ processes of the post-socialist transition in states such as Ukraine. Calculations of Class As I spent more and more time with activists such as Svetlana and Vira, talking to them about their lives and their NGO activities, and accompanying them around the city to meetings and events and on shopping trips, I thought a lot about issues of class. Some of my acquaintances in the city would look askance at me when I told them I had been spending time with bahotoditni (large families) and pensionery (pensioners or retirees): ‘What could you possibly have in common with them?’ The lifestyles of some of the activists I knew were so different from those of my friends who were moving into the Ukrainian middle class. These were younger people: some had studied abroad; most had knowledge of foreign languages. They were either working for foreign firms or had started their own small businesses. By 2002

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and 2003, many of my friends were buying newly built or renovated apartments and modest foreign cars, and taking vacations to exotic places such as South Africa, Egypt, and the United States. They had bank accounts, credit cards, and leisure time. Meanwhile, social activists such as Svetlana, Vira, and others remained socially vulnerable, despite the long hours they devoted to raise public awareness, lobby government officials, and procure humanitarian assistance. Until rather recently (Schröder and Vonderau 2008), the literature on post-socialism has had relatively little to say about class (but see Gapova 2004, 2005, 2007; Lampland 2000). Certainly, important work has been undertaken to explore the myriad affects of marketization and privatization on different aspects of personal and communal life (Caldwell 2004; Rivkin-Fish 2005). But these processes have most often been examined through the lens of consumption or labour, without an explicit focus on the intricacies of new forms of class differentiation in the post-Soviet world (Caldwell 2002; Dunn 2004; Ghodsee 2005; Humphrey 1995; Patico 2002, 2005). This is curious given the history of the region, the importance of class to the socialist project, and its continued relevance during the transition period. As Dunn (2008, 228–9) has noted, ‘just at the moment that Eastern European societies began to experience widespread income differentiation and the dramatic cultural elaboration of new social classes, the most effective theoretical language in which to critique rising economic and political inequality was suddenly devalorised.’ I see the NGO sphere as illuminating both emerging processes of class differentiation in post-Soviet Ukraine, and the ways in which persons – and women in particular – variably resist these differentiation processes. In the face of new state policies that shifted the criteria for calculating needs, deservedness, and ultimately social and economic class, the activists in NGOs such as Our House were struggling to prevent the development of a permanent underclass. They sought to position and reposition themselves (and the categories with which they were identified; in this case large families and, for Svetlana, single mothers) for recognition and redistribution through both practical strategies (mutual aid activities, lobbying) and strategies of re-education of the public. Through all these efforts, representatives of devalued categories of citizens struggled to prove their social worth. The advocacy efforts in which women were engaged were especially likely to involve such struggles, a fact that has important implications for how both gender and class identities are being shaped in post-socialist Ukraine.

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Among the social activists I knew in Kyiv, accounting for the social worth of devalued categories of citizens (large families, pensioners, the disabled) often hinged on the assertion of claims and centred around ‘needs talk’ (Haney 2002). In Ukraine’s contemporary conditions of privatization, welfare reform, and state retreat, making claims for various forms of support (social, state, from international NGOs) is a slippery business. Neo-liberal economic reforms are accompanied by processes of privatization and individualization that privilege models of ‘active citizenship’ and ‘productive citizenship’ over socialist-era models of citizenship based more on entitlement and the state’s responsibility towards citizens. Concomitantly, citizens who received special recognition under socialism (mothers of many children, veterans, retirees) risk being moved into the category of ‘non-productive,’ and therefore potentially ‘undeserving’ of state assistance. To counter this positioning, women such as Svetlana and Vira have had to scramble to assert themselves as deserving of recognition and worthy of state support. As they felt themselves sliding into a stigmatized ‘low-class’ identity, these women sought both to procure material benefits for themselves and their consociates, and to counter the new definitions of ‘deserving’ citizenship. They mobilized accounts of their own social worth to deflect others’ negative assessments of them, such as ‘they are giving birth to the poor’ or ‘they are bread beggars’ (Rus. nakhlebniki). In their claims making, Svetlana, Vira, and other women strove to resuscitate the Soviet-era formulation of class differentiation, one that was based not so much on citizens’ productive potential or economic capital but on access to cultural and social capital, and claims to entitlement. These activists stressed the state’s obligation to care for their ‘needs,’ as they defined them. These entitlement-based claims may ultimately have little resonance in the new Ukrainian political economy. To understand the shifting politics of claims in post-Soviet Ukraine, and why the advocacy efforts of Svetlana, Vira, and many others have proved largely unsuccessful, it is necessary first to understand the shifts between Soviet and post-Soviet formulations of class difference. In the Soviet Union, real differences in income between more- and less-educated workers were small, yet a distinction between the intelligentsia and the ‘working class’ was central to perceptions of difference, often labelled as one’s ‘level of culture’ (kul’turnist’; Patico 2005, 483).6 Therefore, social differentiation was based not primarily on monetary capital but rather on cultural and social capital, which were assessed by calculating education and qualifications, manners, taste,

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‘knowledge,’ social ties, and access to information and resources (Bourdieu 1986). In today’s conditions of neo-liberal market reforms, and an increasingly stratified society in terms of socioeconomics, this system of social differentiation has changed. Income and material wealth are slowly becoming the common criteria for distinguishing between ‘classes,’ and the success of reforms in Ukraine is being gauged in part by donor governments according to the growth of the Ukrainian ‘middle class.’ However, a certain amount of cultural capital is still crucial to qualify as a member of the elite, or even as middle class. Although the situation has changed as more Ukrainians move into the market sphere and engage in business activities, during the early years of post-socialism many were highly sceptical of the new cliques of very wealthy ‘businessmen’ (biznesmeny) and the trappings of their wealth (Grant 1999; Humphrey 2002; Ries 2002). Those years saw the rise of Ukrainian nouveaux riches (‘New Ukrainians’) who had access to a range of goods and services not available to the average Ukrainian, such as lavish meals in expensive restaurants, the ubiquitous black Mercedes-Benz or SUV, protection services, and medical care in Kyiv’s numerous privatized clinics. More often than not, wealthy New Ukrainians were not afforded respect by their less privileged compatriots (except out of fear) – they were ridiculed for their poor taste and tacky lifestyles, and criticized for their conspicuous consumption. Because the New Ukrainians were perceived to be lacking ‘culture’ and education, to have poor taste, and to exhibit bad manners, they were actually perceived as ‘low class,’ despite their material wealth (Patico 2000, 77).7 By denigrating the New Ukrainians as wealthy yet ‘uncultured’ and dim-witted, people asserted their own ‘culturedness,’ intelligence, and good taste, thus indicating that cultural capital is still an essential part of calculating class in post-Soviet Ukraine, despite the growing importance of economic criteria. In their efforts to stem the tide of class differentiation, activists such as Svetlana and Vira capitalized on this fact in their descriptions of themselves as impoverished, yet cultured and intelligent women. Despite the emergence of economic capital as an increasingly important criterion for calculating one’s class, social capital also remains a key aspect of class identity. In the shortage economy of the Soviet Union, networks (called blat, meaning connections, or ‘pull’ in Russian) were important mechanisms for social stratification. One’s

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blat networks consisted of relatives, acquaintances, and friends who were placed in positions affording them access to goods and services in shortage. Those unable to cope with the new market, and those who have been most marginalized by its introduction, continue to mobilize the ideology and practice of ‘mutual help,’ in which networks and shared assistance are crucial for everyday life; this was the main idea undergirding the activities of the ‘mutual-aid associations’ in my study. A certain shift in the focus of blat networks, however, does reveal the emergence of money as a new source of power; namely, blat networks have shifted away from access to goods towards possibilities for accumulating income. In other words, blat is mobilized as a form of social capital that has the potential to produce economic capital. What I want to explore here is how the making of classes in postsocialism is both a structural and a subjective phenomenon. As Dunn (2008, 230) argues, ‘One of the central theoretical dilemmas posed by the anthropology of postsocialism . . . is how to talk about the kinds of freedom that market democracy presents for self-making and agency without neglecting a rigorous, deep investigation into the constraints posed by emerging structures of inequality and new forms of oppression.’ By examining the ‘claims talk’ and self-narratives of female social activists resisting socioeconomic and political marginalization, I hope to contribute new insights into theories of the formation and reproduction of social inequalities after socialism (see Dunn 2008, 232), particularly the intersections of class distinctions and gender inequality (Gapova 2004). (Re)producing Claims In the late 1990s, faced with the tide of post-socialist, neo-liberal social welfare reform that was slowly washing away universal benefits and leaving instead needs-based assistance, NGO activists such as Svetlana and Vira made it a priority to protect the interests of their constituents and themselves as mothers of many children (Haney 2002; Whitefield 2003). Although officially they were considered unemployed (their NGO work was not officially remunerated, and they did not hold other jobs), which seemed to indicate that they would easily qualify for assistance via new procedures of needs-based assessments, they were nevertheless in precarious positions. Svetlana’s two eldest children were aging out of the system, and soon she would receive a

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pension for only her youngest daughter (and this as a single mother, as she would no longer qualify as a ‘mother of many children’). Svetlana thought this was unfair – her son was a university student and she had borrowed large sums of money from relatives to put him through school. He did not contribute to the family budget; rather (in Svetlana’s words), he helped drain it. The same was true for the elder of his sisters, who was taking secretarial courses and was not working. Vira’s situation was slightly better: her husband was a small business owner. Still, he supported the family of five on the profits of his business, since Vira was unemployed and their daughters were still in school. Moreover, in the late 1990s, Vira’s husband was clearing only 47 UAH (about $12 at the time) per month, not enough for him to pay into the pension fund (to draw an eventual old-age pension) and not enough for the family to receive a housing subsidy. It was unclear to Vira whether her family would qualify for needs-based assistance. Neither Svetlana nor Vira was eligible for unemployment benefits, since they had turned down jobs they had been offered through the unemployment office, jobs where, in their estimation, the salary would have basically equalled their cost of transportation to and from work. Both women were extremely worried about how they would support themselves in their old age; with reforms tying old-age pensions to wage amounts and length of service, their pensions would be tiny or non-existent (V. Iatsenko 2005; N. Iatsenko 2006). So they were desperately trying to assert their claims as persons deserving of recognition and redistribution from the state and from society at large. This was essential for them personally as mothers, and also as NGO activists as they sought to garner support from the state, businesspeople, and foreign sponsors for their organization. Amid the impending implementation of income tests and needsbased social assistance, Svetlana and Vira were caught in a bind. Differentiation processes entailed in welfare reform are characterized by shifts in focus between what people (now ‘clients’) contribute to society (making them ‘deserving’) and what they lack (making them ‘needy’). In their claims making, then, the women were negotiating ‘needs talk’ from two sides. On the one hand, they sought to position themselves as needing assistance as members of a vulnerable category of citizens (mothers of many children, and, in Svetlana’s case, single mothers). To do this, they focused on their poverty and emphasized that they were ‘needy.’ However, in the context of new processes of welfare

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stigmatization, where being ‘needy’ is seen as a personal shortcoming, Svetlana and Vira also had to calculate and demonstrate their social worth (Haney 1999). Therefore, the women had to emphasize the contributions they made to society. They needed to be both deserving and needy, because it was unclear how the scales of reform would tilt. Svetlana and Vira based most of their claims on their status as mothers. These NGO activists had come to womanhood in a pro-natalist, socialist state, where their role as mother was prioritized. As mothers who were each raising three children, Svetlana and Vira felt strongly that they were owed entitlements. During our interviews, Svetlana frequently calculated the various types of government pensions she had received during her maternity leaves, the same allowances on which any mother in the Soviet Union would have depended. The sense of entitlement she felt was universal to all working Soviet women, who were promised a range of benefits to help them reconcile their roles as both workers and mothers. Haney’s description of the maternalist claims that women were accustomed to espousing in the Hungarian socialist welfare system also applies to the Soviet Union: ‘These policies trained women on how to stake a claim in the welfare apparatus and on how to emphasize their identities as mothers when couching their appeals. They taught women that as mothers and caretakers, they had “special” needs. What is more, their needs were transformed into social rights through an entitlement system that guaranteed specific resources for mothers’ (p. 154). Svetlana and Vira saw no reason why, in post-socialism, their roles as mothers should have diminished in the eyes of the state. However, in the late 1990s, their emphasis on their status as mothers had less and less resonance, and their stories often echoed those of Haney’s informants in Hungary, who desperately asserted, ‘But we are still mothers!’ (Haney 1999). It is important to note that during those years their motherhood-focused claims were devalued both by representatives of the social welfare system and by international foundations that supported women’s NGO initiatives in Ukraine. The maternalist nature of their claims and self-identity was seen as out-of-date and outof-step with the feminist mandate promoted by these organizations. Representatives of feminist-oriented international NGO development organizations operated on the assumption that a ‘rights’ platform was incompatible with maternalist organizing. This assumption overlooked the fact that women such as Svetlana and Vira were using a motherist argument to fight discrimination against certain

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categories of women (mothers of many children, single mothers), but this was not interpreted as a ‘rights’ platform by representatives of donor organizations, who dismissed their maternalist stance as backward. It seems curious that the voices of women who had several children would be dismissed by the state in the context of Ukraine’s ongoing demographic crisis. At the level of official rhetoric, pro-natalist policies have been articulated ever since the Second World War in an effort to maintain and increase population levels. However, in our interviews, Svetlana and Vira told me a different story. They recognized that ‘mothers of many children’ were privileged in Soviet discourse, and they were nostalgic for the entitlements and subsidies they had been extended, but they were also quick to point out the discrimination they had faced under the socialist regime. In spite of the Soviet state’s pro-natalist ideology, they told me, large families had always been treated ambivalently. The women attributed the contemporary poor treatment afforded them by state and business representatives to stereotypes of large families that had existed during Soviet times. Vira said: ‘When the big crisis happened a few years ago, mnogodetnye mamy [Rus., mothers of many children] were despised. We could buy four kilograms of sugar instead of only one, because we had three children. People in line said, ‘They have babies, but who will feed them?’ I tried to explain to them that I pay for what I get, so what difference does it make to them? I’m not taking food out of their children’s mouths; they get their ‘norm,’ too. But they still hated us.’

Svetlana added: Whatever government office we go into, we always hear, ‘Narozhdaiut nishchikh’ [Rus., ‘They are giving birth to the destitute’]. People can’t stand mnogodetnye. They think we are parasites, that we can’t do anything except have babies.

Given Svetlana’s and Vira’s descriptions of the stigmatization of large families, it is ironic that, among the elite classes in Ukraine, having many children has become quite fashionable. Former President Yushchenko has five children, for example, and the wealthy businessman and powerful parliamentarian Petro Poroshenko has four children.

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There is certainly a perception in Ukraine that large families are either very rich or very poor, a dichotomy that positions only certain social strata (the wealthy, self-supporting elite) as possessing a real right to have many children. Although Svetlana and Vira indicated that they had been poorly treated both during and after socialism, the root of this stigmatization had shifted. If during the Soviet period large families were shunned primarily in times of shortage, in post-socialist Ukraine poor families with many children were seen as inherently non-productive and thus, as Svetlana put it, as a ‘burden on society.’ So when their claims to special recognition as mothers were devalued, these women sought to emphasize their productive potential as well. They did so primarily by emphasizing their role as workers, both during and after the Soviet period. In our interviews, both women spoke at length about their work histories – they had received a technical education (commensurate with a two-year degree in the United States) and worked at various blue-collar and semi-skilled jobs. During the late 1990s, they were fighting hard to establish an identity as ‘employees,’ even though they were officially unemployed and did not receive a formal salary as NGO organizers. This was a pressing issue, since, as persons recognized as ‘volunteers’ by representatives of the state apparatus, no provisions were being made to ensure their retirement pensions. According to Svetlana and Vira, state bureaucrats regarded them not merely as ‘unemployed’ but rather as tuneiadki (Rus.), literally ‘female spongers’ or ‘female parasites.’8 The women thought this was ironic, since they had searched for work in earnest but had been unable to find jobs paying a living wage. According to Svetlana and Vira, when they went to the Kyiv City Administration to plead their case and convince the authorities that as ‘social workers’ working fourteen-hour days, they were, in fact, ‘employed’ and should be given certain benefits (specifically, they wanted to be allowed to pay into the pension fund), the response of the woman in charge of their case was as follows: Social [Rus. obshchestvennaia] work isn’t considered to be ‘work’; it is a hobby. We thought that you were prosperous ladies, that you didn’t have anything to do, and in order to get out of the house and away from housework, you decided to dabble in social work.

The two women, both of them nearly destitute, laughed at this (most certainly sarcastic) characterization of themselves as ‘prosperous

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ladies,’ probably a reference to the wives of factory directors and other elites during the early Soviet period (the obshchestvennitsi) who were volunteer social workers. They realized that the caseworker was making fun of them, and their appeals to receive state benefits as bona fide ‘employees’ were brushed aside. It is important to note that even when the women emphasized their productive potential as workers (rather than their reproductive potential as women), these narratives were nevertheless shot through with thoroughly gendered talk. Svetlana frequently described herself as a ‘workhorse’ and detailed her gruelling life as a blue-collar factory worker (which included lifting boxes that totalled two tons a day), but she took care to emphasize that she had undertaken this work ‘as a good mother.’ Accounting for Social Worth As they sought to secure support for themselves and other large families, women such as Svetlana and Vira were marginalized as ‘low class’ and their social worth was questioned, but not primarily because they were poor. Rather, they were stigmatized because they drew on Soviet-era discourses of state support, entitlement, and ‘needs’ that are an anathema to the perceived transition to a free market society. The neo-liberal ideology of the new free market economy labels these women (welfare mothers, retirees, and others) as nonproductive and non-deserving. They were thus excluded from elite NGO circles, whose members shared narratives of self-empowerment, entrepreneurship, productive citizenship, and self-sufficiency. Recognizing their marginal position, these women used talk to shore up their sense of self-worth and to initiate public re-education. In navigating the shifting meanings of ‘needs’ and deservedness, they focused on their intense suffering as they spun out stories of hard work, shaming, and discrimination. Therefore, they emphasized their impoverishment and neediness even as they stressed their past and potential productive contributions to state and society. While relating their experiences of sudden and extreme poverty, the women were eager to convey that the mere fact of their poverty did not make them deserving of the cruel treatment they often faced from state officials and business representatives. Many of my conversations with Svetlana revolved around her attempts both to account for her poverty and to resist the way she was

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categorized as ‘low class’ in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. Her narratives were strikingly different from those of activists in my study who had become part of Westward-looking NGO networks, like the Soros Foundation, the New Independent States – United States (NIS – U.S.) Women’s Consortium, and others, since Svetlana’s hinged not on ideas of democracy and self-empowerment but on suffering and entitlement. Svetlana continually emphasized how she had suffered through the years, sometimes slipping into the speech genre of ‘saints’ lives’ described by Ries (1997) in the Russian context. Articulating her stories of suffering, I think, was one way she sought to generate moral capital in a political economy that had left her by the wayside. Svetlana had been the victim of two broken marriages; her first husband, whom she called ‘a weak man,’ beat her and even had his friends stab her when she threatened to leave and take their two small children with her. After their divorce, he stalked her and the children, and once attempted to kidnap their son from a playground. Her second marriage was short-lived; her husband decided to remarry his former wife, leaving Svetlana, then several months’ pregnant. When her daughter (and third child) was born, she simply wrote ‘single mother’ on the birth certificate. She did not want to see the baby’s father again, so she decided not to take him to court to prove paternity. This freed the father from any child support payments or responsibility for the child, something Svetlana later regretted (she had made the decision before perestroika, when she had 3,000 rubles in savings and, in any case, received 75 rubles a month from the state for the new baby).9 Svetlana also described in detail how hard she had worked to independently support her three children, and how she had accumulated personal savings before perestroika and the economic collapse. As she listed the various blue-collar jobs she had held, Svetlana countered popular stereotypes of ‘mothers of many children’ and ‘welfare mothers’ who supposedly do not work, only have babies, do not think about the future, and only live in the moment. Svetlana emphasized, however, that the economic crash of the late 1980s meant that all her hard work and planning were for naught. Almost everyone in Ukraine experienced the same near-overnight destitution and panic. Svetlana portrayed herself as no different from others and yet stressed that, as an overstretched single mother, she had few material possessions at the time, which made her situation especially precarious. In her words:

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Within two months I became destitute. Inflation totally ate up my savings. After that my savings would have bought nothing more than a box of matches. After I had worked so hard and economized – I could have bought a box of matches or ridden on the trolleybus once. My savings turned into soap bubbles.

If, as others did, Svetlana had foreseen the economic crash and used her savings to buy durable goods (such as furniture, appliances, or building materials), her situation would have been better. But with the crash her savings quickly melted away, and Svetlana, still a single mother, remained destitute despite attempts to find work. She stayed on the rolls of the local unemployment office but gave up hope of finding a viable job. She saw no alternative but to depend on state allowances as a single mother, her first husband’s alimony payments (which he rarely paid), and her daughter’s small monthly allowance from the state as a ‘fatherless’ child. Her role as the director of Our House was also a survival strategy, since any humanitarian aid the group acquired would go to her family as well. Svetlana wanted to prevent her children from slipping into the underclass that she felt she was becoming part of, and she saw education as key. Her son, a teenager in the late 1990s, was a student at an institute in Kyiv. Svetlana had borrowed large sums of money from relatives, friends, and acquaintances to pay for his tuition, and was pinning all her hopes on his receiving a good job upon graduation. The debts she had incurred caused her great stress that often escalated into health problems. Svetlana and Vira were incensed when legislative changes threatened to bar families of three or more children that included university students from receiving state benefits as ‘large families.’ When they protested, the response of caseworkers was demeaning: svetlana: Do you know what they told us? The ‘ladies’ [Rus. damy] who take care of that? They said, ‘It is a luxury to get an education. Let them go and work.’ Where? Not having a specialty and not having an education? What will they work as? Racketeers, or at the [stock] exchange [Rus. birzha]? What can they work as? vira: So it’s like before, [people think] ‘They are creating superfluous [Rus. lishnie] people.’ Superfluous for society. That was the woman who was supposed to be defending the interests of our families. If she has such an opinion of us, what can we expect from everyone else?

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Svetlana and Vira interpreted the caseworker’s position that teenagers from poor families should ‘go and work’ instead of receiving an education as evidence of the differentiation of large families as ‘low class.’ They responded in the interviews with attempts to counter negative stereotypes about large families that were prevalent in the popular imagination. They spoke of members in their organization who were accomplished musicians, and they showed me the artistic work of children from large families who had won art competitions. They described their members as ‘cultured people’ who came from ‘old Kyivan families’ that represented the ‘impoverished intelligentsia.’ The women often noted that the privatization of education and the offering of ‘extracurricular classes’ in music, dance, and art on a fee-paying basis (subjects that were a standard part of the curriculum in Soviet times) meant that children from large families and impoverished families in general missed out on opportunities to develop their creative and performance skills and learn about high culture. Despite the women’s continued attempts to ‘shake things up,’ as they put it, and insist on the rights of large families as a deserving category of citizens, they were fighting an uphill battle. The organization Our House had been unable to pay 4,000 UAH (about $1,100 at the time) to the state in rent arrears, and the office was requisitioned in 2001. When I met them again in 2002, Svetlana and Vira assured me that their organizing activities had been interrupted only temporarily, but meanwhile they had sought official employment. Svetlana had gone to work for a crisis hotline, a job she found emotionally rewarding but physically demanding – she had to work twenty-four-hour shifts and said she was practically not allowed to lie down. Her salary was very low, just $100 a month (less than half the national average). Vira remained unemployed. With the advocacy efforts of Our House all but suspended, the seventy large families the organization represented were left to fend for themselves. Conclusions: Assessing Needs In describing how these NGO activists have articulated claims and espoused value narratives to argue for their social worth and resist being positioned in devalued class identities, I do not mean to imply that they had somehow become stuck in a Soviet past or a ‘socialist mindset,’ unaware of the transforming political economy and changing ideologies of worth swirling around them. On the contrary, these

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women were keenly cognizant of post-socialist processes of differentiation that positioned them on the losing end of the transition, and they were astute observers of others’ opinions of them as needy mothers of many children. They were not some ‘old Soviet guard’ who longed for a return to the Soviet Union or to state socialism. Perfectly aware that others might perceive them this way, activists such as Svetlana and Vira were careful to emphasize the ways in which they were precisely ‘not Soviet.’ Svetlana and Vira, ironically, actually launched a project of differentiation when they undertook a ‘needs assessment’ of their organization’s members that mirrored, eerily, case workers’ ‘reviews,’ which they themselves would likely face as mothers of many children. In a 1999 interview, Svetlana described her motivation for differentiating her needy members from the non-needy: Once I visited one of our member families (they had five children) and I was shocked to see how well they were living. They had Evroremont [European-style renovations], a computer, and beautiful furniture. When I saw this family that I was working to help, it made me ill [Rus. mne plokho stalo]. They could have helped [others] themselves, and here we were running around to find help for them . . . I went about in a trance for about a month. I thought, ‘Svetlana, why in the world do you need this? What are you doing this for?’ Here I was – and I fall into the poorest category of the families of our organization – here I was running my legs off to find help for such families, and then I find out that they are living the high life and could have helped others themselves! I took it really hard . . . [After the experience we had with that well-off family] we immediately called a meeting of the organization’s officers and decided to do an evaluation of all the families. We went around to each family and assessed their needs. About four or five of them we felt do not need help from the organization. But we didn’t take any of them off our membership roster. They are still members, and their children can participate in our holidays and trips, but we excluded [Rus. iskliuchili] them from our help.

In conducting her own needs assessment of member families, Svetlana was both a subject and an agent of state institutions mandated to undertake ‘differentiation’ of social assistance as part of social insurance reform. Her participation in this project – one that she and other ‘mothers of many children’ resisted on other levels – reveals the

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complex nature of the politics of recognition and redistribution in postsocialist Ukraine. It also shows how NGO activists have become both subjects and agents of the reform process, which has led to the formation of somewhat contradictory personal and social identities. As Svetlana and Vira worked in their office and interacted with other impoverished heads of families, there was a sense of the common struggles of the underclass of the newly poor. They delighted in each other’s stories of scraping by and making do. These sessions escalated into veritable storytelling matches: Who was the ultimate mama-heroine-trickster? Whose creative means of surviving destitution would prevail? But when Svetlana and Vira scoured the capital city for sponsors, knocking on doors asking for support, suddenly they were ‘low class,’ ‘insolent’ women ‘giving birth to the poor.’ In other contexts, they were administrators of a particular kind of social justice, bureaucrats in their own right who were empowered to assess the relative needs of their clients in Our House. To assert their claims, these NGO activists at times emphasized their needs and right to entitlements as special categories of citizens. However, they also leveraged the language of self-sufficiency, differentiation, and active citizenship that increasingly informs the social contract in conditions of market reform. Although they did tend to draw on ideas of entitlement in their value narratives, it should be noted that entitlement is not necessarily a passive stance. In asserting their own social worth and that of others like them, and in engaging in lobbying efforts and claims making, women such as Svetlana, Vira, and other activists I knew saw themselves as taking a stance of active citizenship. Ultimately, however, their efforts met with little success. The narrative accounts of these activists, understood in their ‘etymologically rich sense’ as both narration and bookkeeping, allow us to track the post-socialist creation of difference, and the material effects of exclusion, including the marginalization and disempowerment of certain categories of citizens, namely, those viewed as ‘unproductive’ (Stark 1994, 21). Although these women worked hard to carve out their own place in the new political economy, they failed in establishing a higher status for themselves in the society and securing the material benefits that go with it. One activist I knew said that ‘user’ organizations such as the mutualaid associations for large families, pensioners, and veterans would ‘fade from view’ once the economic situation in Ukraine improved and people ‘outgrew’ these NGOs. This vision of the happy post-socialist march

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to capitalism obscures the forms of differentiation that are occurring in the country at large, and in the NGO sphere as well. It is comforting to tell ourselves that privatization and democratization benefit all of society, but the stories of Svetlana and Vira tell a different tale. Their stories complicate rosy assessments of ‘reform’ and ‘civil society building’ because they present the stark reality in which entire categories of people, many of them women, seem to have fallen through the cracks.

NOTES 1 All names are pseudonyms, to protect the identity of my research informants. I use the Russian variant Svetlana (rather than the Ukrainian Svitlana) to indicate this informant’s self-identification as an ethnic Russian. Vira, in contrast, self-identified as an ethnic Ukrainian. Both women preferred to speak Russian, and accordingly, all our conversations took place in Russian. 2 When transliterating from the Russian, I use the designation ‘Rus.’ When no designation is given, the transliteration is from the Ukrainian. 3 This was the benefit for children in large families in 1999, when the exchange rate went from $1 = 3.43 UAH (the Ukrainian hryvnia, the official currency of Ukraine) in January, to $1 = 4.27 UAH in August, and $1 = 5.02 UAH in December. To give a sense of how much buying power 70 UAH carried, consider that in 1999 one kilogram of meat cost 7.06 UAH, one litre of milk cost 1.26 UAH, and a loaf of bread cost .70 UAH. 4 The ‘feminization’ of the ‘third sector’ of NGOs is common across postsocialist states. Tohidi (2004) outlines the reasons women in Azerbaijan are especially likely to undertake NGO organizing: women are excluded from opportunities to advance in politics and business, women have traditionally been responsible for mediating social problems, the civic arena is seen as less corrupt than official politics (and thus more appropriate for women), and women tend to possess vital networking and linguistic skills. These factors hold for the Ukrainian case as well. Handrahan (2002, 80) notes that 76% of the 28 NGOs she surveyed in Kyrgyzstan were led by women, and 96% of her respondents believed that women were leading NGOs nationwide. 5 In May 2000, e.g., an event called ‘Kyiv Civic Organization Day’ was held by Kyiv’s Innovation and Development Centre to showcase the work of the various social organizations in the city. Of the 150 civic and charitable organizations represented at the exhibition, 40% were formed to protect the

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interests of children, families, and women. Of the organizations with such an orientation, 68% were directed by women (Innovation and Development Centre 2000). Patico (2005, 483) further notes that ‘kul’turnost’ (culturedness) came to refer in the early twentieth century to a code of public conduct and a template for the proper relationship of individuals to material possessions, denoting a combination of polite manners, hygiene, and basic knowledge of high culture.’ Stereotypes of ‘New Ukrainians’ (as with those of New Russians) almost never refer to women. Patico has proposed that ‘this may be related to the fact that being a New Russian implies not only wealth, but also particular activities (including crime) and displays (raspberry jackets, shaved heads, heavy gold jewelry) that are associated more with men than with women and very strikingly differentiate New Russian men from other Russian men’ (2000, 77). In St Petersburg, Patico found that New Russian women were usually understood to be successful businesswomen or the wives and girlfriends of New Russian men. Tuneiadets, or ‘parasite,’ is a Soviet-era concept. In Soviet discourse, practically every citizen was required to work and thus ‘make a contribution to society.’ Those who did not were labelled ‘parasites,’ and could be arrested and jailed. The idea of the tuneiadets arose from the false assertion that unemployment as such did not exist in the Soviet Union, in contrast to the United States and other Western countries. Homelessness was also officially non-existent, although there were homeless persons in the Soviet Union. During the early 1990s, 3,000 rubles was a large nest egg in the Soviet Union, and 75 rubles a month was enough to take care of all the needs of Svetlana and her children.

REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. 1986. Forms of Capital. In J.G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–58. Westport: Greenwood. Caldwell, M. 2002. The Taste of Nationalism: Food Politics in Post-socialist Moscow. Ethnos 67(3): 295–319. – 2004. Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dunn, E. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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– 2008. Subjectivity after Socialism: An Invitation to Theory Building in Anthropology. In I. Schröder and A. Vonderau, eds., Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe, 225–33. Berlin: Lit-Verlag. Einhorn, B. 2000. Discussant’s Comments. In M. Lazreg, ed., Making the Transition Work for Women in Europe and Central Asia, 107–13. Washington, DC: World Bank. Gapova, E. 2004. O gendere, natsii i klasse v postkommunizme [On Gender, Nation, and Class in Post-communism]. Gendernye issldeovaniia [Gender Research] 13:101–18. – 2005. Conceptualizing Gender, Nation, and Class in Post-Soviet Belarus. In K. Kuehnast and C. Nechemias, eds., Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism, 85–102. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. – 2007. On the Political Significance of the Sexual Division of Labour. Aspasia: International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History 1: 231–5. Ghodsee, K. 2005. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Durham: Duke University Press. Grant, B. 1999. The Return of the Repressed: Conversations with Three Russian Entrepreneurs. In G. Marcus, ed., Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, 241–67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Handrahan, L.M. 2002. Gendering Ethnicity: Implications for Democracy Assistance. New York: Routledge. Haney, L. 1999. ‘But We Are Still Mothers’: Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Post-socialist Hungary. In M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Post-socialist World, 151–87. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. – 2002. Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Humphrey, C. 1995. Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times. In D. Miller, ed., Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, 43–68. New York: Routledge. – 2002. The Villas of the ‘New Russians’: A Sketch of Consumption and Cultural Identity in Post-Soviet Landscapes. In C. Humphrey, ed., The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism, 175–201. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Iatsenko, N. 2006. Ella Libanova: ‘U zhinky menshe trudovykh prav cherez nyz’kyi pensiinyi vik i nyzhchu, nizh u cholovikiv, zarplatu [Women Have Fewer Labour Rights because of an Earlier Retirement Age and Lower

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Salaries than Men’s]. Dzerkalo Tyzhnia [Weekly Mirror] 22(601). Available at http://www.dt.ua/2000/2650/53616/ (accessed 27 Sept. 2007). Iatsenko, V. 2005. Pensiina reforma: U poshuku zdorovoho hluzdu ta spravedlyvosti [Pension Reform: In Search of Common Sense and Fairness]. Dzerkalo Tyzhnia [Weekly Mirror] 11(539). Available at http://www. dt.ua/2000/49592/ (accessed 27 Sept. 2007). Innovation and Development Centre (IDC). 2000. Den’ Hromads’kykh Orhanizatsii Kyieva: Kataloh Uchasnykiv [Kyiv Civic Organization Day: Catalogue of Participants]. Kyiv: IDC. Lampland, M. 2000. Afterword. In D. Berdahl, M. Bunzl, and M. Lampland, eds., Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, 209–18. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Liborakina, M. 1998. The Unappreciated Mothers of Civil Society. Transitions 5(1): 52–7. Palyvoda, L., O. Kikot, and O. Vlasova. 2006. Civil Society Organizations in Ukraine: The State and Dynamics (2002–2005). Kyiv: Macros. Patico, J. 2000. ‘New Russian’ Sightings and the Question of Social Difference in St Petersburg. Anthropology of East Europe Review 18(2): 73–7. – 2002. Chocolate and Cognac: Gifts and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia. Ethnos 67(3): 345–68. – 2005. To Be Happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of Value and Ambivalent Visions of Marketization. American Ethnologist 32(3): 479–96. Phillips, S.D. 2008. Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ries, N. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. – 2002. ‘Honest Bandits’ and ‘Warped People’: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay. In C.J. Greenhouse, E. Mertz, and K.B. Warren, eds., Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, 276–315. Durham: Duke University Press. Rivkin-Fish, M. 2005. Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schröder, I., and A. Vonderau, eds. 2008. Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe. Berlin: Lit-Verlag. Stark, D.1994. Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism. Program on Central and Eastern Europe Working Paper Series no. 33. Available at http:// www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/CEE_WP33.pdf (accessed 12 May 2011). Tohidi, N. 2004. Women, Building Civil Society, and Democratization in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan. In K. Kuehnast and C. Nechemias, eds., Post-Soviet

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Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism, 149–71. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Whitefield, S. 2003. The Political Economy of Welfare Reform and Poverty Alleviation in Ukraine. In W.W. Isajiw, ed., Society in Transition: Social Change in Ukraine in Western Perspectives, 401–25. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

8 Homeless Men and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Ukraine anastasiya riabchuk

Homeless persons are among the most economically marginalized and culturally stigmatized social groups in post-Soviet societies. The Russian abbreviation, bomzh (bez opredelennogo mesta zhytelstva, literally meaning ‘without a permanent place of residence’), is a widely used label for the so-called underclass of unemployed, middle-aged or elderly single men with a lack of social ties, health problems, and alcohol or drug addictions. In post-communist societies the homeless are often portrayed as deviants who spread infectious disease, are involved in criminal or asocial behaviour (digging through garbage, sleeping in the hallways of apartment blocks), and who refuse to work or to receive treatment. In 2004 in Ukraine, more than 80 per cent of all officially registered homeless people were male, according to the research project ‘The Way Home.’1 But this gendered dimension of homelessness has not been analysed in detail. Although many problems that affect homeless people (such as bad health, vulnerability related to life on the streets, and lack of services and affordable housing) are true for nearly everyone who is homeless, other problems are gender-specific. Glaser (1994) notes that, because life on the streets is especially dangerous for homeless women, many in this group have ‘learned to stay in the shadow in order to survive [and their] plight has also tended to remain hidden from view.’ On the other hand, because it is not socially acceptable for a woman to be on the streets, there are often better and more diverse services available for homeless women than for homeless men. According to Cramer (2005), housing officers, in their informal categorization of homeless clients, tend to see homeless women as the more ‘deserving’ group and distinguish between ‘troublesome’ male offenders and

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‘troubled’ women in need. She concludes that ‘homelessness is a site where gender is both experienced and constructed’ (p. 738). Men, meanwhile, are more likely to suffer from chronic homelessness and remain on the streets for longer periods of time:2 ‘Homeless men [. . .] receive only the most meagre responses to their problems. Their independence and the public perception of them as threatening, as alcoholics, and as mentally ill put this group last on the list for help,’ notes Glaser (1994, 37). Writing about the stigmatization of homeless women in post-Soviet societies, Höjdestrand (2009) admits that ‘homelessness is not a fertile soil for cultivation of socially accepted men either.’ To her, the homeless man, stereotyped as a bomzh, is a powerless, emasculated figure analogous to the refuse spaces he inhabits, and far from what Connell (2005), in referring to ‘the pattern of practice that allows men’s dominance over women,’ would call ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (p. 832). Although this pattern is not common in the statistical sense – only a minority of men can enact it – it is considered normative as the ‘most honored way of being a man, [requiring] all other men to position themselves in relation to it’ (p. 832). The practice of hegemonic masculinity includes both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ aspects: violence and domination over women (and men with subjugated or marginalized masculinities) as well as the more revered work of ‘bringing home a wage, sustaining a sexual relationship and being a father’ (p. 840). From this perspective, homeless men can be considered to be extreme cases of ‘failed hegemonic masculinity’: lacking stable employment, suffering from poor health, and unable to provide for their families (or having cut ties with them), they fail to live up to the standard of the successful, strong, and economically stable man. Analysing the situation of homeless men in the context of recent debates about the so-called masculinity crisis in post-Soviet societies, therefore, contributes to both gender studies and homelessness research. In this chapter, I examine the situation of homeless men in the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, in the context of gender studies theories on the masculinity crisis, destructive masculinities, and failed masculinities. Drawing on qualitative data I compiled in 2003 and 2004 through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with sixty homeless people in Kyiv, I utilize the typology of men’s responses to the crisis of masculinity that was developed by Tartakovskaya (2003), who distinguishes six male self-perceptions related to how men have dealt with this crisis. In doing so, I diverge from her analysis, however, in insisting that more emphasis should be placed on the economic component of

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homeless men’s stories, as this component provides greater explanatory possibilities for capturing the context of a post-Soviet crisis of masculinity. Taking a neo-Marxist position, I conclude that post-Soviet homelessness must be understood as an extreme case of ‘failed hegemonic masculinity’ in the context of wider structural changes taking place during a transition to capitalism. From this theoretical position, de-proletarization, unemployment, and lack of social security during a transition to capitalism are the main causes of poverty, alcohol abuse, crime, and deviance. These structural factors, combined with the masculinity crisis in post-Soviet societies, contribute to disproportionately high numbers of men among homeless people. An analysis of these structural factors is essential for understanding the phenomenon of homelessness in the Ukrainian context, for challenging stereotypes, and for informing policy action. Theoretical Debates on the Crisis of Masculinity in Post-Soviet Societies For a long time, debates on gender inequality have focused on the negative effects of hegemonic masculinity for women who, as a consequence of it, find themselves subordinated. However, recent research has shown that strictly regulated norms and expectations are harmful to men, too. To name just a few of these harms, men often retire later than women, rarely get custody of their children in cases of divorce, suffer from greater stress and pressure related to the need to be economically successful, and are more frequently labelled as losers if they are unable to provide for themselves and their families. Moreover, in all industrialized societies, modernization, technological development, and the greater involvement of men compared with women in the public sphere has led to a higher death rate and lower life expectancy for men (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2002, 432–51). Many have labelled the sum of these increasingly negative consequences of hegemonic masculinity on men a ‘crisis’ (Kon 2009; Edwards 2007). In post-Soviet societies, evidence shows that men are, indeed, in an unfavourable position compared with women: they continue to have a shorter life expectancy; they take up destructive practices such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and unhealthy eating habits more often; and they are more likely to die from preventable causes (stress, accidents, or cardiovascular disease). In Ukraine, as of 2007, men’s life expectancy is about 11 years below that of women (62.3 years versus 73.6

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years), and the death rate for working-age men (20 to 45 years of age) is more than three times higher than for women in the same age group (Amdzhadin 2007). Bureychak (2008) explains these demographic data as being the result of a number of social factors, such as greater involvement of men in risky behaviour, dangerous work, and criminal activity; men are three times more likely than women to suffer from tuberculosis, five to six times more likely to have alcohol addiction, and seven times more likely to commit violent crimes. These trends in contemporary Ukrainian society are deeply rooted and can be traced back at least fifty years. Debates about the masculinity crisis in Soviet society actually began in 1968 after a demographic report by Urlanis (1970) showed higher rates of illnesses and mortality among men, compared with women. A public campaign to ‘take care of men’ was launched, highlighting the following economic and social consequences of what was deemed to be a crisis of masculinity: inefficient use of male labour power, high costs for medical treatment of preventable illnesses caused by male destructive practices, problems related to divorce and child rearing by single mothers, and the social costs of alcoholism. In late Soviet discourse, ‘crisis of masculinity’ actually became a metaphor for deeper structural ills in society: ‘The thesis about the crisis of masculinity suggests that there is a certain normative model of true manhood and a possibility to attain this model of a true man . . . The impossibility to fulfil traditional male roles, related to limitations on liberal rights (property, political freedoms, freedom of expression) were implicitly recognized to be the causes of the destruction of true masculinity, although this thesis was not openly stated until the late 1980s’ (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2002, 343–5). This reference to liberal rights suggests that a more liberal capitalist model that respected men’s rights and freedoms would at least partially resolve the masculinity crisis. However, from today’s perspective, such claims can be interpreted as wishful thinking of the perestroika years; the transition to capitalism did not resolve the problems associated with the masculinity crisis, and in fact, aggravated them. Tartakovskaya (2003) has made a comprehensive analysis of this aggravated masculinity crisis in post-Soviet societies. She conducted research on gender strategies in the labour market in Russia to show that although both men and women often find themselves in crisis situations as a consequence of the transition to capitalism, for men the crisis also implies the impossibility of living up to hegemonic

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masculinity, a failure that causes a very emotional reaction and even leads to self-doubt in men about their own gender status. Focusing on respondents’ own attitudes towards their gender roles, Tartakovskaya introduces the concept of ‘failed masculinity’ to capture this selfdoubt. As she notes, ‘Masculinity is not only a theoretical concept from the field of gender studies but has a very personal cultural meaning for each man. It is a project, the realization of which requires great efforts and often even turns out to be impossible.’ She classifies six types of self-perceptions that characterize men’s responses to situations of failed hegemonic masculinity: ‘losers who give up,’ ‘men who feel unjustly offended,’ ‘alcoholics,’ ‘escapists,’ ‘housewives,’ and ‘single fathers.’ All of these self-perceptions are shaped by difficulties encountered in the labour market except ‘single fathers’ and, to some extent, ‘housewives.’ I will therefore leave aside these last two categories for another discussion, as they exceed the scope of this chapter. For Tartakovskaya (2003), changes that have taken place in the 1990s and 2000s have worsened the crisis of masculinity that began during the Soviet era. Many traditionally male-dominated sectors of the economy, such as the military or machine building, have shrunk, and as a consequence, the professional and economic situation of previously successful men has deteriorated. Men have faced unprecedented economic, professional, and personal difficulties. As Tartakovskaya describes it, ‘An unemployed or a working, but poor man is deprived of the main characteristics of his own gender competence and becomes “de-masculinized” and faced with a problem of self-identification in his family circle (provided he has a family), among other close relatives, employees and work colleagues.’ This insight is supported by Ashwin (2001), who argues that men have had to meet certain prerequisites in both the Soviet and post-Soviet era before truly becoming ‘successful,’ namely, professionalization and attaining economic stability as a breadwinner – not only to feed his family, but as a sign of prestige and selfesteem. Therefore, post-Soviet men have a very limited set of legitimate social roles and are dependent on the overall situation in the labour market. Tartakovskaya (2003) stops short of making a thoroughgoing link between unemployment, poverty, and the masculinity crisis, however. In fact, she denies that economic restructuring during the transition could be solely responsible for failed masculinity. Instead, she lays the blame on the inevitable discrepancy between masculine ideals

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and reality: ‘Even if we look at our respondents who were somehow affected by the contemporary socioeconomic crisis in Russia, the phenomenon of “failed masculinity” is in no way its direct result. On the contrary, a possibility of “failure” is already present in the very concept of masculinity that suggests an internal hierarchy between “real,” successful men and those who could not live up to this standard.’ But, as I will argue, Tartakovskaya’s focus on the failure of masculine ideals does not sufficiently take into account the social suffering of many post-Soviet men that is the result of economic restructuring. Although I do not claim that the transition to capitalism caused the crisis of masculinity, in the tyology that follows I demonstrate that it has had negative effects on the economic and psychological well-being of many men, including on their self-perceptions, and has caused social problems such as rising rates of alcoholism and homelessness. Homelessness as an Extreme Example of ‘Failed Masculinity’ One of the signs of the masculinity crisis is the spread of destructive masculinities, as witnessed in alcoholism, aggressive behaviour towards work colleagues and family members, and criminal activities or vagrancy. In post-industrial societies, these masculinities are especially pervasive among working-class men, as traditional masculine identities related to industrial production become obsolete (Schwarz 1990). Beynon (2002) shows that work is a fundamental component of hegemonic masculinity, but given the current labour market, in which work has become less stable and more oriented towards the service sector where women are more welcome as employees, men who have lost ‘real masculine work’ in the field of industrial production are stigmatized (p. 87). If a woman, having lost her work, can find other sources of positive identification (as a good housewife, as a beauty, or as a mother), men’s identity is almost solely defined by work. Consequently, long-term unemployment is more likely to cause depression, suicide attempts, and/or criminal and destructive behaviour, such as alcoholism and drug abuse among men. In the Ukrainian context (as well as in other post-Soviet societies), the masculinity crisis and the decline of the industrial economy have occurred alongside two other trends. First, a period of transformation after the breakup of the USSR meant higher levels of stress and social suffering for the majority of the population (related to the need to

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adapt to changing social conditions). Second, the demise of the social state with guaranteed full employment was felt in an especially acute manner by middle-aged and older working-class men who lost their jobs through economic restructuring. Therefore, when speaking of the negative consequences of the transition, it is important to distinguish those that have resulted from transition itself (felt by men of various social groups), and those that are due to capitalism (felt primarily by working-class men). Homelessness emerges from a combination of these mutually reinforcing ‘crises,’ with the risk of ending up on the streets being much higher among long-term unemployed workingclass men. To capture these subtle differences, I will now employ Tartakovskaya’s typology to organize the findings from my own study. As we will see, the men in my study tend to slide across categories of selfperception rather than belonging to just one. Losers Who Give Up In Tartakovskaya’s typology of men’s self-perceptions in response to the crisis of masculinity, ‘losers who give up’ appear to be most prominent. Men in this category are mostly victims of economic restructuring – they have either lost their previous jobs or experienced a significant decline in living standards. They perceive their current or past jobs as being of little value, have accepted their low socioeconomic status, and sometimes suffer from additional marginalization because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, as Tartakovskaya notes, such personal devaluation is often preceded by a period of resistance during which a man, unhappy with his situation, tries to keep up at least temporary employment, look after himself, and take care of his family. Several respondents in my research appear to be living through this initial stage of resistance. In their self-description, they are far from ‘losers.’ Instead, they define themselves as ‘hard workers.’ Many of these men are insecurely employed in the Kyiv construction industry, making do with day labour. They cannot rely on a regular income and often have to live for several weeks without work. Forced temporary unemployment may also be caused by injuries, illness, or food poisoning (because of the low quality of food and alcohol consumed). In such periods, these men often find themselves isolated and alone in a large city, and they turn to homeless shelters and soup kitchens for

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help in survival. Although their living arrangements in Kyiv are never stable, in difficult periods the men may be literally homeless, sleeping in parks, train stations, or shelters for the homeless. Experiences of temporary homelessness in the context of overall insecurity are part of a downward spiral, with negative effects on personal appearance and well-being. For example, Daly (1996) notes, ‘There is a continual deterioration in their situation – physical and mental health, stability of friends or family, legal problems, financial and emotional independence, job prospects’ (p. 158). The majority of homeless people are chronic alcoholics and 80 per cent suffer from tuberculosis.3 ‘One can only be on the streets for seven – eight years maximum,’ says a doctor who helps street homeless in Moscow, ‘after that comes death’ (Yeroshok 2008). Despite their experiences of homelessness, insecure housing arrangements, breaks in social ties, and stress that often leads to substance abuse, day labourers in the construction industry refuse to identify themselves as bomzhi (those who ‘gave up’) and fear the prospects of such degradation of their status. One of my study participants said: Don’t think that I’m some kind of a bomzhi here! Yes, I go to these soup kitchens for bomzhi – I have to survive somehow! If they feed for free, why not come? But no, I’m not a bomzhi, I’m a hard worker! I work hard day and night, building apartments for you, Kyivites . . . Yes, building for you and not having anything myself . . . I live right there, at the construction site . . . it’s cold there, chalk and sand everywhere. But anyway, I still look after myself. I wash myself every day, and shave. Look at me – do I stink? Do I have scruffy clothes? Am I drunk? Well, I tell you – if I drank and didn’t look after myself, nobody would hire me to do the work!4

If being a bomzhi means drinking, not looking after oneself, and refusing to work – something a person can be blamed for – a ‘hard worker,’ on the contrary, is poor through no fault of his own, not because of a failure to adapt, but despite all adaptation efforts. This perception is very important among respondents when positioning their own responses to negative change. Viewed structurally, however, we can see that these casual workers in the construction industry form an ‘excess reserve army of labour’ for whom ‘economic advancement translates into a regression of material conditions and a curtailment of life

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chances,’ while ‘survival based on a mix of casual labour, welfare support and illegal activities trumps regular wage labour participation’ (Wacquant 2007). Another way in which day labourers distinguish themselves from bomzhi is by emphasizing the temporal nature of their status as opposed to those who are chronically homeless. Even when the casual male workers in this sample go through a difficult period, they still believe that things will improve shortly. As one of them said: Well, with the bomzhi it’s hopeless . . . There’s no way they will ever change their lives. As for us, hard workers, yes, there are difficult periods, when we sleep in shelters and go to these soup kitchens for bomzhi, but as the saying goes ‘after the rain comes the rainbow’ – we know that a good period will follow shortly. There will never be any good periods for the bomzhi, they can’t work, they just gave up.

However, among those who do currently identify as bomzhi, many also perceived themselves as having been ‘hard workers’ at some point in the past. Their stories show that the distinguishing line between categories of self-perception (between hard workers and bomzhi, losers who give up and those who haven’t given up yet) is unstable, and that any small injury, illness, or family conflict in a wider context of instability may lead a ‘hard worker’ to ‘give up.’ A 32-year-old homeless man from a small town in the Vinnytsia region recalls how he came to work at a construction site in Kyiv because there was no work in his hometown. In the summer he slept by the river, but in the winter he had difficulties finding a place to sleep, because apartment rent was too high even for a group of workers, and he had promised to regularly send money back home to his family. One night he slept at the train station and was robbed and beaten up by a group of street children, so he couldn’t return to work the following day and lost his job, which made him feel ‘miserable’ and contributed to his alcohol abuse. He explained: I couldn’t go back home either, you know, without the money . . . it’s not right . . . what kind of a man am I? I felt miserable . . . Well, I started drinking, and, well, here I am . . . So I guess I’m a bomzhi now.

He concludes that he is very unhappy with his situation and drinks even more ‘because it’s all so depressing.’

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Men Who Feel Offended at Being Unjustly Treated In my sample, as well as in Tartakovskaya’s study, men who did not receive positive evaluations of their work (either informally or through formal material and symbolic rewards) often came to lack self-esteem. Some left their jobs and remained unemployed for prolonged periods. Perceived betrayals by a wife represent another reason for which some of the men feel ‘unjustly offended’ (as such betrayal also challenges sexual potency). One of the men described his situation like this: Can you believe it, what a bastard! Son of a b. . . tch! He wanted to rape my wife – of course I didn’t let him! I took a hammer and hit him on his head, this jerk. Who knew that he would die? So they put me in jail. Usually you get a life sentence for murder, but with me, because it was ‘unintended murder,’ I got 12 years. And my wife? She, b. . . tch, while I was in jail, evicted me from my flat; back then it was possible. So I come back and she, b. . . tch, won’t let me in! Saying, ‘Go away, Zhenia [pseudonym], I don’t need you.’5

This case presents a violent scenario of family breakup and eventual homelessness beginning with the respondent’s taking offence at his wife’s behaviour (although the wife’s point of view is lacking here, not allowing for an idea of the whole picture). A more ‘peaceful’ resolution to a similar conflict is related by Vitaliy, who said: Am I homeless? That’s an interesting question. Actually, I am local, from Kyiv, but now I unwillingly became a vagabond. I left my home, could not live with my wife after she betrayed me . . . Of course, I could fight over my part of the flat in court, but I would have to hire a lawyer – and where would I find the money for that? And I don’t want to quarrel with my wife – let her do whatever she wants with her beloved one, I can somehow manage to survive on the streets. Actually, it’s not a matter of food or other ‘material’ things. I have no friends; I am alone. A knife in my pocket and no one will touch me. I collect bottles. No, it’s not a matter of food or money. I go to the Victory Church – they have such preaching! Yes, people help me but it’s not about help. Most of all I lack communication and rest – I have everything else.

In this passage, Vitaliy is resentful about his wife ‘betraying him’ with another man – he feels offended, but wants to preserve a sense of

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pride. He therefore presents himself as independent, not needing anyone’s assistance and lacking nothing but human relationships and an opportunity to rest. Later in the interview, Vitaliy mentions that his children sometimes come to see him and wish to help him, but he refuses or even tries to give his children some pocket money. He explained: On the contrary, I myself try to help them – my daughter is studying in a technical college, so I give her some money for her studies.

We do not know to what extent he can financially help his children, but it is important for Vitaliy to present an image of himself as a strong, proud, and independent man who is not in need of assistance. Both Zhenia and Vitaliy highlight their masculinity. At one point, Vitaliy exclaimed: Am I a man or what? What man can stand his wife in bed with another?

Such defensive postures appear to permit some homeless men to better cope with changes that have been, in reality, beyond their power, but which have threatened their sense of manhood. Alcoholics and Escapists One psychological strategy for dealing with a situation of crisis is escapism or infantilization – the failure to take responsibility for one’s actions. Among the homeless men I interviewed, there were occasions when laying blame on external circumstances out of their own control masks another side of the story that would show their own degree of responsibility for events. Thus, in describing a wife’s betrayal or decision to kick them out of their house, few men mention possible reasons for such a response by their wives, whether because of alcohol abuse or failure to contribute to the household budget. Other men described having their documents stolen or being fired from work, but did not admit to any lack of initiative in renewing documents or securing a new job. For example, one man said: I’m not a bomzh, am I? I just fell down low. I started drinking, had nothing to do . . . And now something happened to my kidneys, they hurt real bad, I can’t walk or sit – they hurt all the time. If I could lie in bed for

Homeless Men and the Crisis of Masculinity 215 a while and get some treatment, then I could work. I am only 56 years old, and I am not a bomzhi. I arrived in Kyiv only 28 days ago. Police caught me. They say: ‘Go to work or go home!’ But how can I work? I can’t – that’s what I tell them. And I can’t go home either – my wife would kill me if she saw me in such condition. So what am I to do?

Such descriptions of wives unwilling to see a drunk husband or forcing a man to leave his home are common among respondents. Meanwhile, criminal behaviour by the men sometimes leads to imprisonment, after which reintegration into society is extremely difficult. According to official statistics, about one-third of all homeless Ukrainians are ex-convicts (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine). In my own study, about a quarter of the respondents reported having served prison sentences. Redistribution versus Recognition Based on my study of homeless men in Kyiv, men’s self-perceptions – and perceptions they have of other homeless individuals – tend to blend more than one of the types of responses to ‘failed masculinity’ that Tartakovskaya (2003) identifies in her typology. Men who end up on the streets may quickly give up in practical ways, but selfdescribe as working hard for something better; they may abuse alcohol and have an escapist attitude while also harbouring resentment towards their former wives, employers, or real estate agents, whom they claim are responsible for their condition of homelessness. However, as we have seen, the men also continue to adhere to a strong sense of masculinity, and they often justify their actions with reference to preserving it. Thus, these men reflect on their experience, articulate their ‘failed masculinity’ to themselves and to others, and actively respond to the situation, although their choices can be limited. Speak (2004) notes that for many homeless individuals in developing countries, there is a degree of choice available: this is especially true among those who are homeless for short periods, who may choose homelessness ‘as a means of improving their more permanent living conditions’ and there is ‘little indication of personal inadequacy or family dysfunction’ (p. 469). The question of choice arose with the respondents in this study as well. Some chose to sleep in parks or shelters to save money. Many preferred to stay in the city instead of going back home, even in

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difficult periods when they were out of work. They kept looking for employment in order to justify the sacrifices they made by leaving home, or to avoid the embarrassment and criticism of their masculinity that might have occurred there. Some turned to panhandling or crime in order to keep the ‘promise’ they had made to their families and to send them money regularly. One man described his situation like this: Yes, there were times when I was out of work. It was wintertime, cold, and grim . . . I thought – maybe I should return home? But then I said NO, I came here, I told my family I’ll provide for them, and I have to keep the promise. So I was begging in the underground, like those bomzhi, and I . . . well, don’t tell that to anyone, but I . . . well, I got into a few shops with friends, and I was stealing wallets from foreigners. But you have to understand – I told my family, I’d be sending them money. They didn’t even know that I was out of work and I didn’t want to tell them, so they thought it was the money I made on the construction site.

This shows how important it is for marginally employed workers to be able to provide for their families – this man would rather steal or panhandle than have his family find out that he does not have work and cannot fulfil his ‘promise’ as a breadwinner. We also see from the interviews that homeless men who have at least some temporary employment and have preserved family ties resist being labelled bomzhi. This label itself can symbolize failed masculinity and personal weakness of homeless men who ‘give up.’ In post-Soviet societies there is a tendency to draw a clear dividing line between the bomzhi and normal or ordinary citizens. Homelessness is seen to be a complete absence, not only of a permanent residence, but also of social ties, of a work ethic, of respect for social norms, and of individual responsibility. Such an attitude is in line with conservative explanations of homeless people as ‘different’ from the normal majority, and parallels Bahr’s classical study on disaffiliation among men (1970; see also Bahr and Caplow 1973). Homeless men are also seen to be ‘different’ as men – as not living up to the standard of hegemonic masculinity. My research shows that homelessness does not happen ‘overnight’ but often results from a series of occurrences. The first is often unemployment, lack of opportunities in their place of residence, the need to support a family, or all three at once. Wacquant (2007) describes this trend as ‘de-proletarianization’ – denial of access to wage-earning

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activities that is an inevitable by-product of the decline of industrial production and uneven economic development. The second occurrence is immersion in an unstable environment marked by a high risk of injury, victimization, unofficial casual labour, and lack of affordable housing. Further occurrences may include the use of survival strategies such as alcohol abuse, participation in crime, saving money on housing by sleeping in public places or in crammed conditions, and frequenting homeless shelters and soup kitchens. When we retrace these steps, however, it becomes clear that the primary causes of homelessness are economic and that people who are already in marginal positions – unskilled workers and the unemployed – are at a much higher risk of becoming bomzhi. Tartakovskaya’s typology of responses to situations of ‘failed masculinity,’ her own research on men who are in marginal positions in the Russian labour market, and our research on homeless men in Ukraine together reveal a much greater link between the structural and the symbolic aspects of gender inequalities than Tartakovskaya herself is willing to admit. Economic redistribution to decrease inequalities is no less important than recognition of gender differences if we wish to at least partially neutralize the negative effects of the current masculinity crisis. As Fraser and Honneth (2003) rightly observe: The demise of communism, the surge of free-market ideology, the rise of ‘identity politics’ in both its fundamentalist and progressive forms – all these developments have conspired to decenter, if not to extinguish, claims for egalitarian redistribution. In this new constellation, these two kinds of justice claims are often dissociated from one another – both practically and intellectually. Within social movements such as feminism, for example, activist tendencies that look to redistribution as the remedy for male domination are increasingly dissociated from remedies that look instead to recognition of gender difference. And the same is largely true in the intellectual sphere . . . scholars who understand gender as a social relation maintain an uneasy arm’s-length coexistence with those who construe it as an identity or a cultural code. This situation exemplifies a broader phenomenon: the widespread decoupling of cultural politics from social politics, of the politics of difference from the politics of equality.

Fraser and Honneth conclude that this is a false decoupling, and that both redistribution and recognition are required to achieve greater social justice.

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In this chapter, I have also stressed the importance of both a cultural and structural analysis when looking at homelessness among men using the concept of failed masculinity. By neglecting the economic problems that cause men to lose employment, break family ties, and end up on the streets, we fail to notice all the men who are at risk of homelessness, many of whom will ‘give up’ and become bomzhi. We also overlook the fact that the masculinity crisis would be less acute and all would benefit from more equal development, greater job security, and affordable housing. Fewer men would have to come to Kyiv and other large cities in search of work, fewer of those who do come would have to ‘choose’ homelessness as a survival strategy, and fewer of them would end up chronically homeless. Indeed, as of this writing, taking into account economic factors of existing gender-related problems is part of the state’s Program to Implement Gender Equality until 2010 (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine 2006). Therefore, it is important to look at the masculinity crisis among post-Soviet homeless men in the context of economic restructuring. Unequal economic development among regions and along the urbanrural axis, high unemployment rates, exploitation and lack of social security in the shadow economy, and lack of affordable housing for workers are among the underlying causes of homelessness. Homeless and other marginalized men also challenge expectations of hegemonic masculinity and reveal contradictions between ideology, real life experience, and self-perceptions, pointing to structural rather than individual causes of homelessness and failed masculinities in post-Soviet Ukraine.

NOTES 1 This research is on homelessness in 20 Ukrainian cities. Information about the project is available at http://homeless.net.ua/ua/index.php. A similar proportion of homeless men and women has been found in police statistics: among the 17,221 homeless people registered by the Ukrainian police in 2005, 14,560 were men and 2,661 were women. This information was retrieved from http://www.helsinki.org.ua/index.php?id=1138900432. 2 Although men are the focus of this chapter, it is important to touch on the devastating dimensions of homelessness for women as well. Glaser (1994) notes that although women constitute a minority of the homeless, they

Homeless Men and the Crisis of Masculinity 219 suffer disproportionately from physical and psychological abuse and are less resistant to harsh living conditions [0] and to alcohol. Although women, in general, have a higher life expectancy than men, the situation is reversed for the homeless: women who do end up on the streets have a much higher death rate than men in similar conditions. In his research on homelessness, Ropers (1988) found that women, on average, were homeless for shorter periods but reported more health problems, and their health deteriorated rapidly on the streets. In her research on homelessness in Russia, Höjdestrand (2009) also found that homelessness is much more stigmatizing to women because of the taken-for-granted ‘incompatibility of homelessness and femininity’ that ‘reveals itself in the general silence in official discourse and among non-homeless Russians about the existence of homeless women. Since they can hardly be imagined, there is nothing to say about them, and those who, against all odds, are spotted are in a figurative sense considered to have forfeited their womanhood.’ 3 In 2006, the death rates of working-age men in Ukraine were three times higher than in the European Union, and half of all deaths were preventable, including those caused by suicide, poisoning by drinking low-quality alcohol, cardiovascular disease, and tuberculosis – diseases related to stress and poverty. See Smertnost’ Naseleniya Ukrainy v Trudoaktivnom Vozraste (Mortality of the Working-Age Population in Ukraine), available at http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0327/tema01.php. 4 These interviews were carried out as part of the research towards my B.A. The results are discussed in more detail in Riabchuk (2005). 5 All names have been changed to protect the participants’ privacy.

REFERENCES Amdzhadin, L. 2007. Genderni Vidminnosti Zdorovya Ukrayintsiv [Gender Differences in Ukrainians’ Health]. In M. Skoryk, ed., Genderni Peretvorennia v Ukrayini [Gender Transformations in Ukraine], 131–8. Kyiv: UNDP. Ashwin, S. 2001. Utvyer zhdyeniye muzhskoy idyentichnosti na rynkye truda sovryemyennoy Rossiyi [Affirmitation of Masculine Identity in the Labour Market of Contemporary Russia]. Rubyezh no. 16–17: 5–24. Bahr, H. 1970. Disaffiliated Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bahr, H., and T. Caplow. 1973. Old Men Drunk and Sober. New York: New York University Press. Beynon, J. 2002. Masculinities and Culture. Buckingham: Open University Press.

220 Anastasiya Riabchuk Bureychak, T. 2008. Crisis of Masculinity in Theoretical and Empiric Perspectives. In Gender Theories, Gender Practices: Building Bridges, 20–7. Kharkiv: Raider. Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. 2006. State Program to Implement Gender Equality until 2010, points 16, 17, and 18. Decree of 7 Dec. Available at http:// zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=1834–2006-%EF. Connell, R. 2005. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender and Society 19(6): 829–59. Cramer, H. 2005. Informal and Gendered Practices in a Homeless Persons Unit. Housing Studies 20(5): 737–51. Daly, G. 1996. Homeless Policies, Strategies and Lives on the Street. London: Routledge. Edwards, T. 2007. ‘Crisis, What Crisis?’ Sex Roles Revisited. In Cultures of Masculinity, 7–24. London: Routledge. Fraser, N., and A. Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? London: Verso. Glaser, I. 1994. Homelessness in a Global Perspective. New York: Hall. Höjdestrand, T. 2009. Needed by Nobody: Homelessness and Humanness in Postsocialist Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kon, M. 2009. Krizis maskulinnosti i vozniknovenije ‘muzhskogo voprossa’ [Crisis of Masculinity and the Appearance of the ‘Men’s Question’]. In Muzhchina v meniajushchemsia mirie [Man in a Changing World]. Moscow: Vremia, 13–26. Riabchuk, A. 2005. Zayvi lyudy: bezdomni na vulycyakh Kyeva [Homeless in the Streets of Kyiv]. Kyiv: Chetverta Khvylya. Ropers, R. 1998. The Invisible Homeless: A New Urban Ecology. New York: Human Sciences Press. Schwarz, O. 1990. Le monde prive d’ouvriers. Paris: PUF. Speak, S. 2004. Degrees of Destitution: A Typology of Homelessness in Developing Countries. Housing Studies 19(3): 465–82. Tartakovskaya, I. 2003. Nyesostoyavshayasya maskulinnost’ kak tip povyedyeniya na rynkye truda [Unrealized Masculinity as a Behaviour Type on the Labour Market]. In L.N. Popkova and I.N. Tartakovskaya, eds., Gendernye Otnosheniya v Sovremennoi Rossii: issledovanita 1990 godov [Gender Relations in Contemporary Russia: Studies of the 1990s]. Samara: Samara University Press. Available at http://library.gender-ehu.org/hms/attach.php/t__ articles.files/id__271/Tartakovskaya.pdf. Urlanis, B. 1970. Beregite Muzhchin! [Take Care of Men!], Literaturnaya Gazeta, 29 June. Wacquant, L. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Marginality. Cambridge: Polity.

Homeless Men and the Crisis of Masculinity 221 Yeroshok, Z. 2008. Brodyagi [Vagabonds]. Available at http://www.novayaga zeta.ru/data/2008/15/18.html. Zdravomyslova, E., and A. Temkina. 2002. Krizis maskulinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse [Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse]. In S. Oushakine, ed., O muzhe(n)stvennosti [On Masculinity], 432–51. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

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PART III Gender and Education

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9 Gender Policy and Education in Contemporary Ukraine: Discourses and Controversies olga plakhotnik

Gender studies aim to deconstruct traditional notions of the normative feminine and the normative masculine in diverse realms – in philosophy, science, art, and everyday practices. Education is an especially salient area for critique since schooling can fix sociocultural clichés in place and reproduce social inequalities. In Ukraine, the role of formal education in gender equality has not been adequately examined. Researchers in the field of post-Soviet studies have looked at the problem of gender and education from diverse methodological perspectives using, for example, essentialist, postmodernist, and broad sociological and pedagogical approaches. In contrast, this chapter is based on a socio-constructionist approach,1 and it uses two perspectives to ground its analysis of education: open (or institutional) and hidden gender discourses.2 I understand ‘gender’ within a social constructionist paradigm (Berger and Luckmann 1966) as the social organization of sex differences, or as ‘knowledge, which is used to signify body difference’ (Scott 1986). I also take as a starting point the discursive nature of education and, in particular, of curriculum, which allows the possibility to divide discourses in educational space between open and hidden. I follow the methodological insight of Foucault, who equated schools to prisons based on the level of repression seen in both (1975, 138). Finally, I employ the critique put forward by a postmodern educational project – that is, the critical pedagogy movement represented, in particular, by Illich (1971), Giroux (1981), and McLaren (1995) – that emphasizes the connection between education and policy and addresses issues of race, gender, and other social inequalities in education.

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My first analysis, of open gender discourses, shows that although Ukraine has a state gender policy in education it is very superficial and inconsistent, especially in the area of primary and secondary education. The analysis of hidden gender discourses, meanwhile, shows how important supports for gender inequality are necessarily included into educational spaces in Ukraine. They are discernible in the content of curricula and textbooks, in the features of gender stratification in the teaching profession, and in the structure of educational institutions. The chapter concludes by examining the field of ‘gender pedagogy’ in modern Ukraine, as one possible solution to current gender problems in education, and offering a critique of this approach. Open Discourses of Sex and Gender in Ukrainian Education During the years of post-communist transition, the Ukrainian educational system has been transformed significantly, and this includes changes to the gender regime of Ukrainian schools and universities (Zhurzhenko 2004; Hrycak 2005; Hrycak and Rewakowicz 2009). According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report for 2008, the sub-indices of educational attainment in Ukraine are high, and Ukraine ranks 34th among 130 countries in this area (Hausman et al. 2008). This means that women and men have mostly equal access to multiple levels of education.3 At the same time, this recognition of equal access reinforces the false public opinion that Ukrainian education is gender-equal. In reality, the situation is far more complex and problematic, beginning with the legislative framework regarding education. The main legislative act regulating gender policy in Ukraine, the Gender Equality Law of 2005,4 provides descriptions of key concepts such as equal opportunities for men and women, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and gender equality, which correspond with the tenets of equal opportunities discourse. A special chapter on education in the law (Chapter V, Art. 21) emphasized that: • The state guarantees equal conditions for women and men in entering educational institutions, evaluating knowledge acquisition, and getting grants and student loans. • It is necessary to publish textbooks and handouts that are free of gender bias.

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• It is necessary to enhance the culture of gender parity and equal distribution of professional and family duties and work. • It is necessary to conduct gender expert evaluation of existing syllabi, textbooks, and handouts. • Courses and modules devoted to gender equality issues should be included in university curricula. While these are important statements about gender parity, they remain no more than declarative, as does the law in its entirety. Arguably, additional legal documents issued by specific ministries must still follow for gender parity to take effect. In fact, as of this writing, the Ministry of Education has not issued a single document related to implementing the Gender Equality Law in the educational sector. The only exception is a set of guidelines devoted to the Annual Lesson on Gender Equality initiated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Equal Opportunities Program in cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports in 2007 to teach schoolchildren about the fundamentals of gender equality. Moreover, the Ministry of Justice, which works on gender expertise in legislation,5 has not addressed any of Ukraine’s educationrelated statutes, even though it had a gender expert evaluate fourteen documents in the 2007–08 academic year.6 The Ukrainian Law on Education (no. 1060-XII), for example, urgently needs such expertise, as it demonstrates a high degree of gender insensitivity.7 Article 3 declares equal rights for education as follows: ‘All Ukrainian citizens have a right free of charge to education in state educational institutions independently of their sex, race, nationality, social, and property state.’ This is the only place where the word ‘sex’ is used in the law. The document also lacks any notion of gender or gender equality principles and, therefore, fails to take into account new trends in understanding that distinguish between ‘sex’ and ‘gender,’ proof that the law needs to be updated according to Ukrainian state gender policy. In another example from this same outdated education law, Article 56 declares that teachers and other school staff are obliged ‘to bring up students with respect for parents, women, older people, folk traditions, the national, historical, and cultural values of Ukraine, the state and social order of Ukraine, and to inculcate careful attitudes to historical, cultural, and natural environment’ (emphasis added). This passage raises a number of questions. Why are women treated as a special group in need of obligatory respect? What folk traditions and from

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what time and place in Ukrainian history should be respected, given that some of those traditions are discriminatory? Why should students respect the social order if it is not satisfactory in many aspects, including the status of gender? Thus, the Ministry of Education’s official gender policy remains superficial. As for the implementation of gender policy in educational institutions in Ukraine, I will now analyse primary and secondary schools, followed by universities. As I will show, the ‘gender situation’ at each of these levels of education is markedly different. Open Gender Discourses in Schools As mentioned earlier, equal access to primary and secondary education in Ukraine leads to the public perception that there are no gender problems within the school system. However, on closer analysis, the issue of gender policy implementation at the level of primary and secondary schools is actually very problematic and even more so than at the university level. One reason for this is the lack of transparency surrounding Ukrainian schools in comparison with universities. Civil society has little influence on public school education because, in accordance with Article 6 of the Law on Education, political and religious organizations are not allowed much access to children in schools. In practice, however, most civil organizations are typically not welcomed into school space. Moreover, parents have little influence on the content and forms of teaching; many simply trust professionals in educational issues. As well, Ukrainian school administrations are fully dependent on the ministry’s regulations; their activities are delineated by ministerial orders or decrees. Until the ministry makes clear that it has the intention to implement gender awareness in the school curriculum, which is far from the case now, no major changes can be expected in this regard. Partly as a result of this unwillingness, gender instruction for schoolteachers is virtually non-existent. All Ukrainian teachers undergo obligatory professional development at least once every five years at what are called the Institutes for Teachers’ Professional Development. There is an opportunity in this process to increase teachers’ knowledge about gender issues and develop their professional and personal gender sensitivity by including courses on gender. Teaching gender to teachers is the most comprehensive and effective way to make schools more gender-friendly. But until now, this opportunity has been missed. For example, the curriculum of the Kharkiv Institute for Teachers’

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Professional Development includes only two hours of lectures on gender issues, and then only for history teachers. Moreover, these two hours were only included in the curriculum as the result of a private initiative by one of the institute’s instructors, who had studied gender within a non-formal gender-training program at a pro-feminist women’s non-governmental organization (NGO). Thus, gender issues are represented in the institute’s curriculum without ministry guidance and in the context of total dependence on the part of the institute’s administration on ministry orders. Even if the Ministry of Education were to agree to advance teacher training in gender issues, there remains the question of who would ‘teach the teachers,’ as there are a limited number of gender experts at that level in Ukraine. As a result of the lack of training, Ukrainian schoolteachers and staff have poor knowledge of gender equality principles, and they hardly recognize gender inequalities in educational contexts. As I have argued elsewhere (Plakhotnik 2007), there are two main tendencies in the perception of gender issues on the part of teachers: (1) to believe that there are no gender inequalities or related problems in schools, and (2) to believe that men are discriminated against in the teaching profession based on the larger number of women teachers. Ukrainian schoolteachers also lack understanding of the concept of hidden curriculum and generally see no gender issues in schools. A recent survey by Govorun and Kikinezhdi (2008) of teachers’ gender competence in Ukraine showed that 75 per cent of teachers agreed that girls must be prepared for the roles of mother and housekeeper, and boys for the role of breadwinner. Also, 63 per cent of teachers agreed that men are usually better leaders than women, while 60 per cent said that they believe that all professions should be categorized as either ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Another survey, conducted by Plakhotnik and Gubina (2009, 68), confirms these results, showing that almost 50 per cent of Ukrainian teachers in social sciences and the humanities agree that it is necessary to prepare girls for the roles of mother and housekeeper, and boys for the role of breadwinner. These researchers also found that nearly 50 per cent of respondents agreed that the sex of a child predetermines his or her gifts and the way he or she learns and should be taught. More than one-third of teachers surveyed held the opinion that a woman’s main destiny is to be a good wife and mother. Such attitudes dramatically undermine gender equality and contribute to sexist speech and practices, as further demonstrated by the following examples.

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As mentioned earlier, in September 2007 the UNDP Equal Opportunities Program, in cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports, introduced a Gender Equality Lesson into the curriculum for students at all primary and secondary schools. The stated aim of the lesson was to inform children and youth about gender issues using such key concepts as gender, gender equity, and gender equality. The UNDP proposed the idea and published a special illustrated textbook for pupils along with methodological guidelines for teachers; the Ministry of Education supported this idea and placed an e-version of the teacher guidelines on its website.8 The ministry also agreed to conduct a lesson in gender equality at the beginning of every school year. To date, the ministry reports that this has been done three times, in 2007, 2008, and 2009. However, the quality of the supplied teaching materials is questionable as evidenced by the quality of materials cited on the Ministry of Education website (Plakhotnik 2010). The teachers, who, as has been shown, understand gender issues poorly, are expected to teach gender equality to the children using these flawed materials which are written in a far too theoretical manner and are void of concrete examples. As a result, teachers often prepare their own lessons reproducing their own, often incorrect, understanding of gender, gender issues, and gender equality. As Kisselyova and Mussienko (2008) show, many teachers understand gender policy in a very limited manner to mean taking sex difference into account in the teaching process (SPD Losynska 2008, 108), and Ukrainian schools rarely have gender experts among teachers and staff. This reality is further illustrated by a survey reported by Plakhotnik and Gubina (2009, 73–4) that asked teachers to evaluate the gender equality lesson mentioned above. Thirty-six per cent of teachers said this was the first they had heard about such a lesson; 27 per cent knew about the lesson but were not sure whether it had ever been conducted in their school; and just 15 per cent had actually conducted the lesson themselves, while 17 per cent had not, but said the lesson was being taught in their school. These data demonstrate that when the gender equality lesson is conducted – as the Ministry of Education reports that it is – it is not widely discussed among teachers. A 2009 report of another survey, of first-year students of Ukrainian universities (Guslyakova et al., 2009, 47) showed that only 5 per cent of recent high school graduates had received the ministry-sponsored gender equality lesson, which raises further questions about whether the lesson was, in fact, taught after 2007, as has been

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officially reported. These data demonstrate that, in practice, the gender equality lesson has been mostly ineffective and, if badly taught, could actually confuse students’ ideas of gender equality. Unfortunately, even innovative projects aimed at reconstructing Ukrainian education also ignore gender. For example, one current large-scale project entitled Equal Access to Quality Education (started in 2006 and planned as a 10-year project) conducted by the Ministry of Education and sponsored by a loan from the World Bank focuses on the deconstruction of social inequalities (based on ethnicity, place of residence, wealth, and other differences) in secondary education – that is, every social inequality except gender inequality. This type of framework ignores the fact that people’s lives are the outcome of intersections of different social locations, power relations, and experiences in which gender figures prominently. Despite the ample evidence showing how little is being done to increase gender awareness in schools, it is important to acknowledge that some innovative and successful non-formal gender educational practices are taking place outside of public schools in Ukraine. Among them is the School of Equal Opportunities (Kovalko et al. 2002), an international NGO established by youth in 2000 that uses different forms of work, such as festivals or rallies, to communicate ideas about gender equality.9 Their Interactive Gender Theatre is a well-known program. Another interesting set of gender educational practices that work under the rubric of ‘empowering education’ have been undertaken at several schools and colleges.10 The idea here is to apply an empowering pedagogy to give girls an awareness of their potential and the possibility that they could develop their talents, and to give boys a greater awareness of their attitudes and values and encouragement towards social responsibility (Semikolenova et al. 1999, 2001). These practices, however, are concentrated in several big cities (mainly Kyiv) and have limited influences on gender relations in education in Ukraine at large. The methodology and experience of these practices have not yet been analysed or widely discussed within the Ukrainian community of gender experts. Hidden Curriculum in Education: Theoretical Background The concept of ‘hidden curriculum’ is the most significant contribution of critical pedagogy (Jackson 1968). A hidden curriculum refers to implicit (unrecognized) knowledge content, as opposed to the open,

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explicit content that is transmitted from teacher to students in an educational setting. Hidden curriculum is translated non-verbally or is concealed in the deep structures of discourse (Apple 1971; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Althusser 1998). Hidden curriculum can include messages communicated by the organization and operation of schooling, quite apart from official statements of school missions and subject area curriculum guidelines. Messages usually convey attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours. According to Illich (1971), schools actively use hidden curriculum to suggest to students an ideology of passive consumption, that is, a non-critical perception of the existing social order. Hidden curriculum thus teaches children that their role in life is ‘to know their place and to sit still in it’ (Giddens and Griffiths 2006, 704). Hidden curriculum is discursive but not necessarily communicated in language. Rather, we can think about it using the terms of Foucault (1972), who said: ‘[Discourse] is made up of a limited number of statements for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form . . . it is, from beginning to end, historical – a fragment of history . . . posing its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality’ (p. 117). This interpretation gives us grounds for considering discourse to be not only a ‘complicated unity of linguistic form, knowledge and reality’ (van Deik 1989, 121), but also a fixed ordering of reality, the kind of world view that is realized in extremely varied practices that extend beyond the verbal. As Foucault understood, discourse not only reflects or describes the world, it creates it. To fully comprehend hidden discourses, however, we still have to take account of the official ones. Karasyk (2000) distinguishes between different kinds of ‘institutional’ discourses in contemporary society, of which educational institutional discourse is one example. Such institutional discourses break down into binary oppositions of ‘central versus marginal,’ where ‘central’ denotes the legitimized content of discourse. In the case of education, ‘institutional’ means all that is connected with the goals of education and structural communication between a ‘teacher’ and a ‘student.’ Any sociocultural space contains hidden discourses in addition to the institutional ones. In education, these hidden discourses may communicate certain messages about violence, corporeality, sexuality, and others that are taboo for official pedagogical policy, like discourses of power, inequality, and discrimination, including on the basis of gender. Hidden curriculum discourse transmits social inequalities that cannot be spoken of in official institutional discourse.

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Another way to think of hidden curriculum is as a metacommunication which is a means of social control (Stubbs 1976). Hidden curriculum includes the following elements: (1) the organizational culture of an institution, (2) the content of subjects, and (3) the teaching style (Wood 1994). These three dimensions of hidden curriculum not only reflect stereotypes of gender and disability, but also reinforce social inequality by constructing identities according to symbolic classifications of feminine and masculine, disabled and able-bodied. When Hall and Sandler (1982) investigated verbal and non-verbal communicative practices in education, they found that dominant forms of teaching were based on masculine communicative patterns, which overlook women’s ways of learning and talking. The numerous examples of unequal attitudes of teachers towards students of different sexes in class were also insignificant, since they resulted, according to Hall and Sandler, in a ‘chilly climate’ for girls in the educational process. It is important to underline that gender analysis of hidden curriculum is not limited to quantitative measures like counting male versus female names in textbooks, or how long teachers will wait for an answer from a male versus from a female student. This is only a starting point. More important is the complex evaluation of the consequences of teaching and its effect on social growth among girls and boys. Teachers can undertake this evaluation of their own conduct and act accordingly. This is called ‘gender sensitivity,’ the ability to recognize and, to some extent, model the verbal, non-verbal, and objective influences of a socio-cultural environment and to reflect on the ways in which teaching forms and methods affect the formation of students and their gender identity.11 Gender sensitivity also includes the ability of a teacher to recognize and react to cases of gender discrimination. According to Reardon (2003), gender sensitivity or ‘gender justice’ contains: (1) gender competence and (2) an ability to react constructively to cases of gender discrimination. Hidden Curriculum in Schools Despite its covert nature, it is possible to investigate three aspects of hidden curriculum: (1) the organization of the educational establishment, including (gender) relations between teachers and (gender) stratification of the teaching profession; (2) the content of syllabi and textbooks; and (3) the style of communication in teaching (Wood 1994; Yarskaya-Smirnova 2000; Plakhotnik 2005).

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In terms of gender stratification of the teaching profession, I refer to the aforementioned Global Gender Gap Report for 2008, which shows that 99 per cent of primary school teachers and 79 per cent of secondary school teachers in Ukraine are female (Hausman et al. 2008). Likewise, according to the 2007 statistical report called Women and Men in Ukraine, the education sector was made up of 69 per cent women compared with just 31 per cent men (DKSU 2007, 72). Such feminization of the teaching profession is not unique to Ukraine and is common throughout the contemporary world. Unfortunately, statistics on the sex of school heads/ principals in Ukraine and data on teaching subjects are not public. My requests to the Ministry of Education and Science for this information have been unsuccessful. An informal count made on all the Kharkiv public secondary school websites, however, shows that 15 per cent of school directors in that city are men (24 of 156). Department heads in all nine districts of the city are women. These data can be interpreted as an additional illustration of the near-total feminization of secondary school teaching. Yet, given the lack of information at the moment, it is difficult to evaluate the vertical (across administrative levels) and horizontal (across subjects) gender stratification in Ukraine’s educational system. The question of which teachers teach what subjects is also an important one in terms of hidden discourses. We can say that women more frequently teach humanities, and men are mostly teachers of sciences and physical education. It is also interesting that as of 2006 the average salary of women in education is equal to just 83.8 per cent of the average salary for men in this field (KDSU 2007, 71), which means that although men are a minority, they nevertheless hold higher positions than women in education and receive higher levels of remuneration. This situation directly and indirectly reinforces to students a set of ideas about ‘normative masculinity’ as dominating and ‘normative femininity’ as subordinating. With regard to gender bias found in the content of curriculum, textbooks, and handouts for pupils and students, analysis shows disturbing trends. For example, according to state-determined standards, Ukrainian secondary schools should divide pupils by sex for delivery of different curricula about physical training and career orientation. The different syllabi for career orientation (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2) even have different, sex-differentiated titles: ‘technical work’ for boys and ‘serving work’ for girls.

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Figure 9.1. Cover image of Work Training Grade 6: Technical Kinds of Work (boys). Source: Madhizon et al. (2006).

A number of researchers have undertaken evaluations of the contents of textbooks from a gender perspective.12 The well-known gender analysis of school textbooks was ordered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and conducted in 1986 (Mishel 1991, 72). Ukraine was one of the target regions

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Figure 9.2. Cover image of Work Training Grade 6: Service Kinds of Work (girls). Source: Denysenko et al. (2006).

of the mentioned analysis, but there were no significant outcomes of this project due to significant political transformation related to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Similar work was later done in independent Ukraine (Chuhym 2001; Males 2004), Russia (Barchunova

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1995; Voronina 2005; Smirnova 2005), and other post-Soviet countries. All this research has come to similar conclusions: that school textbooks in post-Soviet educational systems are mostly non-sensitive to gender. The majority of them actually contained traditional gender stereotypes, therefore aiding in the construction of gender biases among students. Govorun and Kikinezhdi (2008), who conducted a content analysis of textbooks and handouts approved by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education for primary and secondary schools, found totally divergent representations of boys and girls and men and women in the text and images of these materials. This was apparent in traditional representations of suitable occupations. Astronauts, drivers, scientists, and engineers were represented by men, while homemakers, nurses, teachers, and doctors were represented by women. In stories and even in descriptions of math problems, women and girls were mostly passive victims of circumstances, or they assisted men in their activities. If girls were doing anything, it was usually sewing, housekeeping, or caregiving. Men and boys, meanwhile, were constructed as active, full of energy, and doing sports and outdoor activities (usually socially important ones), and they were portrayed overall as independent. As another salient example, illustrations in the Bookvar,13 a Ukrainian alphabet book in wide use in schools, are differentiated by sex 80 per cent of the time. Men appear in more illustrations in this book (65%) than women and are depicted as state leaders, politicians, scuba divers, doctors, and so on. Similar gender representations are common in popular children’s magazines in Ukraine as well as history textbooks for teenagers, which portray males in dominant positions of power and policy- and decision-making processes, while reducing the role of women in history. This tendency is changing in the newest textbooks and other publications, but the process is very slow and inconsistent. The third area where hidden curriculum can be analysed is in the style of communication in teaching. However, this is the most difficult to measure. Unlike in the West, such an analysis is only beginning in Ukraine. But I suggest that the existence of firmly entrenched gender biases in the minds of teachers, the evidence of which I outlined above, necessarily results in a significant difference in teacher attitudes towards girls and boys. The exploration of these issues is the focus of my forthcoming research project.14

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Gender in Universities: Open and Hidden Gender policy and the overall gender situation at the university level in Ukraine is markedly different from that in primary and secondary schools. At the beginning of the 1990s, gender issues were ‘discovered’ within post-Soviet academic circles, and since then, there have been big changes in the implementation and institutionalization of gender studies in Ukrainian universities. The majority of articles and books analysing the development of gender studies in Ukrainian universities draw positive conclusions, and they identify significant progress in this area during the past decade (Prykhodkina and Golubeva 2007; Sukovata 2007); at the same time, some authors, including myself, still have a rather sceptical opinion (Zherebkina 2003; Plakhotnik 2009). Since the 1990s, the number of gender studies centres at universities (mainly in large cities such as Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, and Lutsk) has grown significantly. At the same time, these centres exist as NGOs or professional associations rather than as part of the university structure. As a result, there are no gender studies (or women’s studies) university departments in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ministry of Education reports show a growing number of compulsory and elective gender courses for students at different levels and in different areas of study. The content and impact of such courses, however, have yet to be studied, and there are still no Master’s programs in gender studies in any of the Ukrainian universities. Nor is there a gender research track on the official list of specializations of the Highest Qualification Attestation Commission of Ukraine. Nonetheless, there is an increasing number of defended candidate and doctoral dissertations on gender-related topics.15 Meanwhile, implementation of gender policy at universities remains controversial. Although it is possible to observe significant progress in this area, the lack of official recognition and institutionalization of gender issues is also evident. For instance, while technically, gender issues in the area of education are the mandate of the Ministry of Education, gender polices are actually implemented by the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports. Every year, the administration of each Ukrainian university reports to the latter ministry on its progress in implementation. These reports track the number of gender courses (or modules of courses), published articles and books, and seminars and conferences. This requirement could result in a positive change in gender policy and gender consciousness if it encourages greater

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implementation. However, it can also lead to performative reporting that does not correspond to the reality of university life (Zherebkina 2003). Indeed, this is evidenced by the fact that the standard university curriculum does not contain mandatory gender courses. Implementation of such courses depends largely on the enthusiasm of particular scholars and the support of faculty administration. Teaching gender courses, however, is only a part of the problem. The other issue is the real (unconscious) influence of the university’s ‘hidden curriculum.’ As Prykhodkina and Golubeva argue, ‘The university itself is the source of gender asymmetry, patriarchal behavioural models for youth. The structure of universities and the distribution of career hierarchies there are the example of male governance and male domination . . . Ukrainian universities really are like mirrors, which reflect male domination as a basis of social gender order’ (2007, 29). In this sense, gender courses in university curricula can be seen as problematic: although students conduct critical analyses of the social (gender) order in such courses, they do so within the unchanging university (gender) structure that bespeaks the impossibility of progress in gender equality issues. Vertical gender stratification is also an important part of the ‘hidden curriculum’ in Ukrainian universities. As the data on this issue are scarce and not readily available from the Ministry of Education, it is only possible to judge its status based on data collected in 2009 by the Kharkiv Regional Gender Resource Centre.16 According to their study of Kharkiv universities (25 in total), the proportion of women among faculty deans was 23.6 per cent (46 of 195). The proportion of female department chairs was slightly higher, at 26.5 per cent (251 of 952). Thus, male domination of decision-making positions in Kharkiv universities is clear. Similar situations are probable all over Ukraine. More data on the gender distribution of university positions have emerged from Franko Lviv National University (collected by V. Sereda in 2006), as shown in Figures 9.3 and 9.4.17 In Figure 9.3, we can see that women are best represented at the lowest levels of university positions, where they actually outnumber men, but that they hold virtually none of the highest posts, as professors and chairs. In Figure 9.4, we note a similar trend: for both degrees and titles, the more prestigious the level, the fewer women there are. One hope for overcoming patriarchal attitudes in Ukrainian universities could be within the European Union – Ukraine framework. In particular, the Bologna Process for university education includes,

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50

50

%

40

36

30

female male

23 20 8

10

5 2

0

assistant

1

teacher

3

senior teacher

2 docent

professor

7 2 chair (docent)

7 1 chair (prof.)

position

Figure 9.3. Gender distribution of university positions at Franko Lviv National University 2006. Source for data: Sereda (2006).

among other things, widespread distribution of European values of human rights and liberty.18 However, despite their familiarity with European norms and standards of education, almost no Ukrainian philosophers of education, theorists, or administrators connect these with the question of gender policy in this area.19 As an example, a recent book by established Ukrainian philosopher Klepko called Philosophy of Education in the European Context provides an analysis of the development and main features of recent educational policy in Europe and the conditions and opportunities for their application in Ukraine. But despite this work’s significant impact on the development of Ukrainian education, it both ignores gender inequality and perpetuates negative gender stereotypes. This is evidenced in the following passage: ‘The situation, when some particular person is unable to use his or her university education at the labour market, can be considered to be an indicator of poor quality of the entire educational system. But sometimes it should be distinguished as a positive phenomenon, some potential of personal capital. For example, women’s university education does not have to be necessarily realized on the labour market: instead of this it can be realized in child care’ (Klepko 2006, 253–4).

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70 62 60 50

49

female male

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%

40 30 22 20

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candidate degree

doctor

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(b)

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female male

50 %

42

41

40 30

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10 3 0 no

docent title

professor

Figure 9.4. Gender distribution of degrees and titles at Franko Lviv National University 2006. Source for data: Sereda (2006).

From such a perspective, women’s education is only an enhancement to traditional roles within the private sphere and not an opportunity to realize women’s full potential as citizens who actively and meaningfully engage in public life as equals.

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An important part of the question of gender and university education is the transition made by young people from education to work. The majority of Ukrainian university graduates today are women: for every sixty-five male students there are eighty-one females (Hausman et al. 2008). Yet the statistical report Women and Men in Ukraine concludes that the average salary of women is between 59.4 per cent and 91.3 per cent of men’s in several segments of the Ukrainian labour market (KDSU 2007, 71), far less than par. These data reflect a disturbing reality: this better-educated social group of women sees few improved opportunities as a reward for their achievements, and their high potential is limited by the gender structure of the labour market and gender biases of employers.20 Taking into account that most Ukrainian higher education is state-funded, this means public moneys are being spent inefficiently. As noted by Chukhym (2003, 28), ‘to invest money in women’s education and not use their intellectual potential properly is the example of a state spendthrift.’ To review, there is an uneven landscape in Ukrainian university education. Despite the Ministry of Education being the official agency responsible for this area, the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport requires reporting on the implementation of gender policy in these settings. Meanwhile, some gender research and teaching is developing in universities. But gender issues remain marginalized in academia, usually perceived as something secondary or simply fashionable. Theoretical Reflections on Education and Gender Debates in Ukraine Discussions on Ukrainian educational policy and philosophy at education conferences reveal that the problem of gender policy has not been reflected upon enough by Ukrainian philosophers and theorists, nor by practitioners, educators, policy makers, or decision makers in the educational sphere. There is a pressing need to systematically address a number of theoretical and methodological problems in this area, as these problems are having a significant impact on the implementation of gender policy. One issue is that the majority of studies on gender and education in post-Soviet Ukraine follow the tenets of equal opportunities discourse,21 which is connected to an Anglo-American egalitarian version of feminism, as opposed to a European (mainly French) essentialist feminism represented in the works of de Beauvoir (1973), Irigaray (1985), or Cixous (1976). Yet, a number of contemporary gender

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theorists stress that, in some cultural contexts, other gender discourses besides Western ones can be more appropriate. For example, Sunderland and Kitetu (2000, 37) attest that ‘it makes sense for gender activists working in education to look for and draw on other, pro-female discourses when an equal opportunities discourse is inappropriate. Here [in Kenya], the avowedly problematic discourse of “privileged femininity” may bring with it a range of emancipatory possibilities for girls.’ Another gender theorist, Zherebkina, explains that the Ukrainian situation is somewhat opposite to the Western one: ‘In Western feminist theory the accentuation of the “primary basic” (the “woman’s essence,” for example) took place first, and then it has been deconstructed (for instance, by Butler’s theory of performativity [or] Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity . . .); [in Ukraine] we have got the opposite situation: this primary basic simply doesn’t exist here’ (2003, 251). Zherebkina concludes that clichés of Western gender discourse are problematic for Ukraine and argues that gender discourses in the West and in post-Soviet space are fundamentally different because of the different historical circumstances in which feminism and gender studies have developed and are applied, including in Ukraine (and in Russia, for that matter; pp. 249–51). In her opinion, the official Soviet ideology of equality repressed the question of sexual difference and did not address women’s individual experiences (in contrast to feminist movements in the West). After the fall of the Soviet Union, asexuality of public discourse was replaced by an overemphasis on sexual difference and what Zherebkina calls the ‘naturalization’ of sex (pp. 19–22), in the sense of treating it as essential or natural. Another issue worthy of a special attention is the understanding of gender issues among Ukrainian theorists of pedagogy. Much theoretical and applied research today is related to what is deemed ‘gender pedagogy,’ which conceptualizes what its authors consider to be key gender principles in education (Govorun and Kikinezhdi 2003; Severyna 2005). It is interesting that in this pedagogical discourse there is almost no discussion of gender theory in the educational context. Instead, a number of texts are devoted to ‘implementation of a gender approach in pedagogy’ (Kutova 2008; Cokur and Ivanova 2006; Olijnyk and Danylenko 2004; Petryshyna 2002). Such authors conclude that ‘gender studies have now become an organic part of pedagogical science, and gender issues are implemented in different branches of pedagogy,’ meaning that the researchers perceive implementation of

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gender policy in the educational sphere to be steadily progressing (Cokur and Ivanova 2006, 22). Such assumptions about implementation can be challenged, however. First, the formulation of principles of gender pedagogy on offer here is not comprehensive. The majority of such texts are based on a methodological mixture emerging from essentialism, social constructivism, humanism, and other traditions, resulting in a lack of methodological consistency (see, e.g., Krave 2003). But the most dangerous tendency is the renaming of essentialist sex-role divisions as fashionable gender ones by authors who espouse gender pedagogy (see, e.g., Nechay et al. 2004). Krave ’s well-known textbook, aptly named Gender Pedagogy, defines the tasks of gender education as ‘teaching the norms of sex-tosex communication for youth, forming of corporeal identity, and the features of male and female psychology’ (2003, 174). At the same time, Ukrainian gender pedagogy exists mostly in isolation from Ukrainian gender studies. No articles emerging from the gender pedagogy field have been published in the past ten years in Ukraine’s only post-Soviet journal in gender studies, Gendernye issledovaniya. Nor is research on ‘gender pedagogical’ issues represented in the most significant volumes in post-Soviet gender studies. The fields of ‘gender studies’ and ‘gender pedagogy’ seem not to be intersecting at all, and thus gender pedagogy does not represent any critical approach to social reality, but is rather an essentialist educational technique. Moreover, Ukrainian gender pedagogy operates from a positivist paradigm. The critical pathos of gender theory has been eliminated by its proponents and replaced with bureaucratized formulas that offer something like ‘recipes for practical use’ teaching girls ‘normative femininity’ and boys ‘normative masculinity’ (Plakhotnik 2007). There is also a tendency in gender pedagogy texts to avoid feminist rhetoric, or to distinguish feminist and gender pedagogy as something totally different from what they are doing (Prykhodkina 2008). At the same time, proponents of gender pedagogy attempt to link their ideas with Ukrainian history, as if the former flows naturally from the latter. For example, they attempt to justify parts of the Soviet pedagogical experience in terms of ‘gender approach’ principles (Petrenko 2007). Govorun and Kikinezhdi (2003) go so far as to suggest that the educational philosophy of Makarenko and Sukhomlynsky (pedagogical practitioners from the early Soviet era) demonstrated clear gendersensitive attitudes in understanding sex differences. These attempts are part of a larger nationalistic discourse in contemporary Ukraine, which can be called a ‘revival of gender equality’ (Kis 2005, 27). In contrast, the

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content analysis of five volumes of Sukhomlynsky’s main works demonstrates the opposite tendency: there is a clear sex-role approach, as opposed to a gender-sensitive approach, in conjunction with traditional Soviet rhetoric of ‘respect for women.’ As these examples demonstrate, although problems with gender equality in schools (and in education as a whole) are evidently connected with the gender competence and sensitivity of educators, the deeper causes of these problems lie with knowledge production in society, in part led by divergent intellectual movements. Drawing on ideas of social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966) and the genealogical and archaeological studies of Foucault (1972, 1975), many scholars in feminist epistemology (Fricker 1998; Harding 1986, 1991, 1998; Haraway 1988) argue that the system of knowledge production has a masculine character. The strong patriarchal tradition in education keeps ‘old’ academics and administrators in power, as in the case in Ukraine, and thus this problem cannot be solved ‘from above.’ Overall, then, my analysis of the attempts of Ukrainian proponents of gender pedagogy to consider gender in education illustrates numerous theoretical and methodological weaknesses that greatly undermine the ability of existing pedagogy to advance transformations to gender equality in education. Conclusions Ukraine has, through its own actions and by absorbing ideas from elsewhere, made steps forward in gender equality policy in education. In spite of articulated intentions and some real steps towards the implementation of gender policy in Ukraine, as this chapter has demonstrated, this movement is insufficiently strong for overcoming both open and hidden discourses of gender inequality in Ukrainian education. At the same time, however, there are also grounds to hope for future improvements in gender equality, given the country’s openness to Western influences and experiences, including those related to gender.

NOTES 1 This term entered the sociological vocabulary through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). For Berger and Luckmann, the basic features of social order are captured in the principle

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that ‘society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.’ 2 The implications of gender theory for education have been investigated in post-Soviet spaces by, e.g., Chukhym (2001), Kon (2008), Voronina (2005), Yarskaya-Smirnova (2000), and Zherebkina (2003). The problem of the theory and practice of gender policy in education has been researched by Kutova (2008), Lutsenko (2004), Males (2004), Oksamytna and Khmelko (2007), Popova (2001), Prykhodkina (2008), and Shtyleva (2008), among others. 3 For more analysis of this point, see Chapter 10, in this volume. 4 Zakon Ukrayiny, Pro zabezpechennia rivnykh prav ta mozhlyvostei zhinok i cholovikiv (Law of Ukraine on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men). Available at http://zakon.rada.gov.ua. 5 Gender expertise is, for the purposes of this chapter, understood as gender analysis. The term is widespread in Ukrainian discourse on gender legislation, and it is used in the Gender Equality Law. 6 For more details about this process, refer to the Ukrainian-language Ministry of Justice website at http://www.minjust.gov.ua/0/law_ gendpravexp. 7 Zakon Ukrayiny, Pro osvitu, Ukrainian Law on Education (no. 1060-XII), available at http://zakon.rada.gov.ua. 8 For a copy of this pamphlet, refer to the Ukrainian Ministry of Education website at http://www.mon.gov.ua/education/average/new_pr/metod_ rek_1.rtf. 9 More information is available from their website at http://www.genderua.org/index-uk.html. 10 The Empowering Education Program (led by Olena Suslova and Olena Kurganoskaya) was supported by the Open Society Institute as part of the Gender Education Project within the International Women’s Program. The project was finished in 2006, but more information is still available from its website at http://empedu.civicua.org/. 11 The terms gender sensitivity and gender-sensitive teaching are commonly used in post-Soviet and European contexts. North Americans tend to call this non-sexist teaching. 12 For a more in-depth discussion of this issue, see Chapter 10, in this volume. 13 Bookvar is usually the first textbook in primary school, which is aimed to develop children’s reading skills. See Chapter 10 in this volume for an analysis of Bookvar. 14 ‘Discourses of sex and gender in post-Soviet schools’ is supported by the Centre for Advanced Studies and Education (CASE).

Gender Policy and Education 247 15 For a recent list of these, see http://www.gender.univer.kharkov.ua/diss/. 16 I am grateful to Tetyana Isaeva, the director of the Kharkiv Regional Gender Resource Centre, for sharing this information. 17 I am grateful to Victoria Sereda from Franko Lviv National University for sharing these data, which were presented by her at the Winter School in Sociology, Kharkiv, 2006. 18 The Bologna Process is an all-European reform initiative aimed at establishing a European Higher Education Area by 2010. Forty-six countries are taking part in this process in cooperation with a number of international organizations, including the Council of Europe. More information is available at http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/highereducation/ehea 2010/bolognapedestrians_en.asp. 19 For example, during the 2008 international conference ‘Implementation of Western Educational Standards in Post-Soviet Countries’ (Kyiv, 21–2 April) my presentation on gender-sensitive teaching was the only one devoted to gender issues (and was accepted by other conference participants as a strange and exotic topic). 20 Similar conclusions are discussed in Chapter 11, in this volume. 21 For more information on equal opportunities discourse, refer to the EUROPA Glossary at http://europa.eu/scadplus/glossary/equal_treat ment_en.htm.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. 1998. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In J. Rivkin and M. Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology, 294–304. Malden: Blackwell. Apple, M. 1971. The Hidden Curriculum and the Nature of Conflict. Interchange 2(4): 27–40. Barchunova, T. 1995. Sexism v Bukvare [Sexism in School Primers]. EKO 3: 12–21. Beauvoir, S. de. 1973. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage. Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Bourdieu, P., and J.-C. Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. New York: Sage. Chukhym, N.D., ed. 2001. Genderna ekspertyza normatyvnyh kursiv i navchal’nyh program social’no-gumanitarnogo cyklu [Gender Expertise of Normative Courses and Syllabi for the Social-Humanities Cycle]. Kyiv: Vydavnychyj centr Kyi’vs’kyj universytet.

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Cixous, H. 1976. The Laugh of the Medusa. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1(4): 875–93. Cokur, O., and I. Ivanova. 2006. Genderna pedagogika – nova osvitnja tehnologija [Gender Pedagogy as a New Educational Technology]. Available at http:// osvita-ua.net/school/upbring/1657 (accessed 2 Nov. 2007). Denysenko L., O. Hnedenko, N. Kalinichenko, A. Romanchuk, M. Turov. 2006. Trudove Navchannia: Obslugovuyuchi Vvydy Pratsi. Pidruchnyk dlia 6 Klasu Zahalnoosvitnih Navchalnyh Zakladiv [Work Training: Service Kinds of Work. Textbook for Grade 6 for Public Schools]. Kyiv: Pedahohichna dumka, Cover Image. Derzhavnyj komitet statystyky Ukrainy/State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (DKSU). 2007. Zhinky i choloviky v Ukraini. Statystychnyi zbirnyk [Women and Men in Ukraine. Statistics]. Kyiv: DKSU. Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. – 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Fricker, M. 1998. Rational Authority and Social Power: Towards a Truly Social Epistemology. Aristotelian Society Proceedings 98: 159–77. Giddens, A., and S. Griffiths. 2006. Sociology. Cambridge: Polity. Giroux, H. 1981. Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Govorun, T., and O. Kikinezhdi. 2003. Genderna ideologija u navchal’novyhovnomu procesi [Gender Ideology in Educational Processes]. Osvita i upravlinnja [Education and Government] 4: 56–68. – 2008. Gender u social’no-psykhologichnomu vymiri: Chastyna 1[SocialPsychological Aspects of Gender: Part 1]. Available at http://helsinki. org.ua/index.php?id=1200305760 (accessed 4 March 2009). Guslyakova, L., I. Danylenko, O. Plakhotnik, and M. Sukhomlyn. 2009. Genderni problemy ochyma studentstva: Analytichna dopovid’ [Gender Problems in Students’ Eyes: Analytical Report]. Kharkiv: Raider. Hall, R.M., and B.R. Sandler. 1982. The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges. Haraway, D. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575–99. Harding, S. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. –1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press. – 1998. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gender Policy and Education 249 Hausman, R., L. Tyson, and S. Zahidi. 2008. The Global Gender Gap Report. World Economic Forum. Available at http://www.weforum.org/pdf/gend ergap/report2008.pdf (accessed 23 Jan. 2009). Hrycak, A. 2005. Coping with Chaos: Gender and Politics in a Fragmented State. Problems of Post-Communism 52(5): 69–81. Hrycak, A., and M. Rewakowicz. 2009. Feminism, Intellectuals and the Formation of Micro-Publics in Postcommunist Ukraine. Studies in East European Thought 61(4): 309–33. Illich, I. 1971. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. Available at www. preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html. Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jackson, P.W. 1968. Life in a Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Karasyk, V.I. 2000. O tipah diskursa [About Types of Discourse]. In Yazykovaya lichnost’: Institucional’nyi i personal’nyi diskurs [Language Person: Institutional and Personal Discourse], 5–20. Volgograd: Peremena. Kis, O. 2005. Kogo oberigaje Berehynja, abo Matriarhat jak cholovichyj vynahid [Who Is Protected by Berehynja, or Matriarchy as Male Invention]. Dzerkalo tyzhnja 23: 27. Kisselyova, O., and N. Mussienko. 2008. Genderna osvita v Ukraini: Dosyagnennya, prgalyny i vyklyly. Analitychna dopovid’ [Gender Education in Ukraine: Achievements, Deficiencies, and Challenges. Analytical Report]. Kyiv: SPD Lozynksa. Klepko, S. 2006. Filosofia osvity v evropeis’komu konteksti [Philosophy of Education in the Europen Context]. Poltava: POIPPO. Kon, I. 2008. Razdel’noe obuchenie – plyusy i minusy [Sex-single education – education – pluses and minuses]. Available at http://www.polit.ru/ lectures/2008/11/18/kon.html. Kraveć, V. 2003. Genderna pedagogika: Navchal’nyj posibnyk [Gender Pedagogy: Handout]. Ternopil’: Dzhura. Kutova, N. 2008. Rozvytok vyshhoi’ osvity zhinok u SShA v 1970-h rokah XX – na pochatku XXI st.:gendernyj pidhid [Development of Higher Education for Women in the USA from the 1970s in the Twentieth Century to the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century: A Gender Approach]. Kyiv: Universytets’ke vydavnyctvo Pul’sary. Lutsenko, O. 2004. Genderna osvita i pedagogika [Gender Education and Pedagogy]: Osnovy teorii genderu [Basics of Gender Theory], 476–503. Kyiv: KIS. Madhizon, V., H. Kondratiuk, H. Levchenko, O. Romanchuk, M. Turov, and D. Zakatnov. 2006. Trudove Navchannia: Tehnichni Vydy Pratsi. 6 Klas:

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Pidruchnyk dlia Zagalnoosvitnih Navchalnyh Zakladiv [Work Training: Technical Kinds of Work. Grade 6: Textbook for Public Schools]. Kyiv, Irpin; VTF Perun, Cover image. Males, L.V. 2004. Osnovy g’endernogo analizu v dyscyplinah sociogumanitarnogo cyklu: Metodychni rekomendacii’ [Fundamentals of Gender Analysis in the Disciplines of the Socio-humanities Cycle: Handout]. Kyiv: Zlatograf. McLaren, P. 1995. Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Mishel, A. 1991. Doloi stereotipy! Preodolet’ seksizm v shkol’nyh uchebnikah [Off with Stereotypes! To Overcome Sexism in School Textbooks]. Paris: UNESCO. Nechay, S., N. Shevtsova, and L. Trygub. 2004. Khrestomatiya navchal’nyh program z gendernogo rozvytku [Reader of Syllabi in Gender Development]. Kyiv: Foliant. Oksamytna, S., and V. Khmelko. 2007. Social’ne pohodzhennia ta osvitnia nerivist’v Ukraini [Social Origins and Educational Inequality in Ukraine]. Naukovi zapysky NAUKMA: Sociologichni nauky [Social Sciences] 70: 39–46. Olijnyk, V.V., and L.I. Danylenko, eds. 2004. Genderni pidhody do upravlinnia zakladamy serednyoi osvity: Navchal’nyi posibnyk [Gender Approach in the Management of Secondary Educational Institutions: Handout]. Kyiv: Logos. Petrenko, O.B. 2007. Klasyky ukrai’ns’koi’ pedagogiky pro gendernu osvitu j vyhovannja shkoljariv [Authorities of Ukrainian Pedagogy on Gender Education and the Upbringing of Pupils]. Visnyk 10: 211–22. Petryshyna, L.V. 2002.Gendernyj pidhid – vazhlyvyj chynnyk demokratyzacii’ osvity’ [Gender Approach as an Important Factor in Democratizing Education]. Available at http://www.edportal.org.ua/books/Conference_2002/Pet ryshyna.pdf (accessed 4 Sept. 2005). Plakhotnik, O. 2005. Gendernyj vymir suchasnoi’ osvity: Zdobutky amerykans’kyh feministychno-pedagogichnyh studij [A Gender View of Contemporary Education: The Experience of American Feministic-Ped agogical Studies]. In S. Klepko (ed.), Amerykans’ka filosofija osvity ochyma ukrai’ns’kyh doslidnykiv [American Philosophy of Education from the Ukrainian Researchers’ Point of View], 128–33. Kyiv: Poltava. – 2007. Marginal’nye diskursy v obrazovatel’nom prostranstve post-sovetkoi shkoly [Marginal Discourses in the Educational Space of a Post-Soviet School]. M.A. Thesis, European Humanities University, Vilnius. – 2009. K voprosu ob institutsializatsii gendernykh issledovaniy kak uchebnoy discipliny v sovremennoi Ukraine [About the Institutionalization of Gender Studies in University Curricula of Contemporary Ukraine]. Gendernye Issledovaniya [Gender Issues] 19: 156–65.

Gender Policy and Education 251 – 2010. Shkil’ni genderni uroky yak dzerkalo ukrains’koi gendernoi polityky [School Gender Lessons as a Mirror of Ukrainian Gender Policy]. In Genderna osvita v Ukraini: dosvid, problemy, perspectyvy [Gender Education in Ukraine: Experience, Problems, Perspectives], 167–72. Kyiv: Tsentr Ukrainoznavstva KNU imeni Tarasa Shevchenka. Plakhotnik, O., and S. Gubina. 2009. K voprosu o gendernykh ustanovkah i gendernoi kompetentnosti uchitelei [On the Question of Gender Attitudes and Gender Competence of Teachers]. In Sbornik materialov konferencii ‘Genderni peretvorennja v Ukraini: osmysljujuchy strategiju i taktyku [Gender Transformations in Ukraine: Rethinking Strategies and Practice], 66–75. Popova, L. 2001. Chto nuzhno znat’ vospitatelyam o tom, kak mal’chiki i devichki nauchayutsya byt’ muzhchinami i zhenshchinami [What It Is Necessary for Teachers to Know Regarding How Boys and Girls Are Learning to Be Men and Women]. In: Gendernyi podhod v doshkol’noi pedagogike: Teoriya i practica. Chast’ 1. [Gender Approach in Preschool Pedagogics. Part 1]. Murmansk: Obrazovatel’nyi tsentr. Prykhodkina, N.O. 2008. Pedagogichni umovy realizatsii gendernogo pidhodu u fahoviy pidgotovtsi studentiv humanitarnykh special’nostey. Avtoref.dys. na zdobuttya n.st. kand.pedagogichnyh nauk [Pedagogical Conditions for Implementing a Gender Approach in the Professional Training of Students Specializing in the Humanities. Doctoral dissertation in Pedagogy]. Kyiv: Universytet Menedgmentu Osvity. Pryhodkina, N.O., and M.O. Golubjeva. 2007. Strategii’ vprovadzhennja idej gendernogo pidhodu v osvitnju praktyku VNZ Ukrai’ny [Strategies for Implementing the Idea of a Gender Approach in Educational Practice in Ukrainian Higher Education]. Pedagogichni, psyhologichni nauky ta social’na robota [Pegagogical, Psychological Sciences, and Social Work] 71: 29–34. Reardon, B.A. 2003. Education for a Culture of Peace in a Gender Perspective. Paris: UNESCO. Scott, J. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American Historical Review 91(5): 1053–75. Semikolenova, E.I., O.I. Suslova, and G. Daugon. 1999. Upolnomochennoe obrazovanie. Posobie dlya trenerov [Empowering Education: Handout for Instructors]. Kyiv: Dovira. Semikolenova, E.I., O.I. Suslova, and G. Docjuk. 2001. Shkola rivnyh mozhlyvostej: Navchal’nyj metodychnyj posibnyk [School of Equal Opportunities: Handout]. Kyiv: Ukrai’ns’ki encyklopedichni znannja. Sereda, V. 2006. Genderno-chutlyve vykladanya: sproby, problemy, znakhidky [Gender-Sensitive Teaching: Attempts, Problems, Findings]. Presentation for

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Winter School for Junior University Teachers in Kharkiv National University, 8–9 February. Severyna, S.O. 2005. Rozvytok gendernoi osvity v shkoli [Development of Gender Education in Schools]. Teoretychni i prykladni problemy psyhologii [Theoretical and Practical Problems of Psychology] (9): 135–41. Shtyleva, L. 2008. Factor pola v obrazovanii: gendernyi podhod i analiz [in Russian]. Moscow: Per-Se. Smirnova, A. 2005. Uchimsya zhit’ v obschestve. Gendernyi analiz shkol’nyh uchebnikov [Let’s Learn How to Live in Society: Gender Analysis of School Textbooks]. Moscow: Olita. Stubbs, M. 1976. Language, Schools and Classrooms. London: Wiley. Sukovata, V. 2007. Feminists’ka metodologija jak polityka osvity: konstrujuvannja novyh gendernyh identychnostej v ukrai’ns’kij vyshchij shkoli [Feminist Methodology as Educational Policy: Constructing New Gender Identities in Ukrainian Higher Education]. Sociologija: Teorija, metody, marketyng 3: 202–22. Sunderland, J., and C. Kitetu. 2000. Gendered Discourses in the Classroom: The Importance of Cultural Diversity. In A. Yamashiro, ed., Temple University of Japan Working Papers, 26–40. Tokyo: Temple University of Japan. van Deik, T. 1989. Yazyk. Poznanie. Kommunikaciya [Language. Perception. Communication]. Moscow: Progress. Voronina, O., ed. 2005. Gendernaya ekspertiza uchebnikov dlya vysshei shkoly [Gender Expertise of Textbooks for Higher School]. Moscow: Soltex. Wood, J.T. 1994. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture. Belmont: Wadsworth. Yarskaya-Smirnova, E. 2000. Gendernoe neravenstvo v obrazovanii: ponyatie skrytogo uchebnogo plana [Gender Inequality in Education: The Notion of a Hidden Curriculum]. Gendernye issledovaniya [Gender Studies] 5: 295–301. Zherebkina, I. 2003. On the Performativity of Gender: Gender Studies in PostSoviet Higher Education. Studies in East European Thought 55(1): 63–79. Zhurzhenko T. 2004. Families in the Ukraine: Between Postponed Modernization, Neo-Familialism and Economic Survival. Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research 5: 187–209.

10 Gender Analysis of School Textbooks in Ukraine e l e na s e m i k o len ova

Formal education should provide opportunities for young people to develop abilities and skills. It should also help to level the social playing field, providing the same possibilities for advancement to children from diverse economic and ethnic backgrounds, as well as to all genders.1 However, in practice, education often emphasizes and affirms existing social inequalities by reproducing them among students (Giddens 1999, 489). This is true with regard to gender equality. Various aspects of the educational process, both explicit and subtle, from the choice of examples and illustrations in school textbooks, to the formulation of assignments and even the grammar and syntax of teachers’ speech can foster a gender-biased perspective on the world that starts in kindergarten and runs through all levels of learning. For this reason, analysing the gender balance in education is an important area of study, as it is the prerequisite for rectifying that balance. This, in turn, is a key opportunity to advance gender equality in the larger society. In this chapter, I examine the gender balance in the Ukrainian school system by analysing school textbooks. First, I provide some context for this work, looking at what is being done to address gender equality in education in today’s Ukraine. I then explain the theory and methodologies that informed my analysis. I present the results of my analysis of textbooks used in Grade 1 classrooms in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Finally, I discuss these findings and look at one possibility for remedying the gender imbalance in textbooks. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how abundant and deeply rooted gender-biased information is in the new school textbooks of independent Ukraine. As I argue, addressing this problem through gender and educational policies is of primary importance if gender

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equality is to be advanced and not hindered for the next generation of Ukrainians. Background In Ukraine, equal rights to education are protected by the 2005 Gender Equality Law.2 However, the existing educational system does not comply with the law’s provisions. Educational institutions are supposed to provide ‘inculcation of gender equality culture, and equal distribution of professional and family responsibilities’ (Gender Equality Law, Art. 21). And yet, the actual policies and practices of educational institutions do not currently contribute to these goals. In great part, this is because the majority of textbook authors, teachers, and school staff lack an understanding of gender issues.3 As a result, gender stereotypes are being transmitted and consolidated in the classroom (Semikolenova and Shilina 2006a). The Gender Equality Law states that ‘the central executive body for science and education shall organize expert analysis of curricula and textbooks for educational institutions as to their compliance with the principle of equal rights and opportunities for women and men’ (Art. 21). Such an analysis would provide an opportunity to investigate discourses of educational literature and uncover concrete examples of gender asymmetry, gender neutrality, and gender sensitivity reflected in textbooks and manuals, as well as the specific character of their translation at different stages of education and in the framework of different subjects of study. As Riabova (2005) puts it, ‘The discourse of school textbooks is one of the main resources of “creating gender,” an intellectual space where notions of male and female are formed’ (p. 123). Thus, findings from textbook analysis would reflect the expressed goals of the Ukrainian state and would reveal aspects of the society’s broader gender consciousness as well as changes in gender relations in post-Soviet Ukraine. However, up to now, very little of this ‘gender critique of education’ (Plakhotnik 2007) has been carried out. In 2004, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU), with the support of the Canada – Ukraine Gender Fund, did conduct a curriculum competition for teaching gender issues. The goal was to implement gender education in high schools and to train gender-issue specialists. The winning curricula are now published as the Anthology of Curricula on the Issues of Gender Development (MESU 2004). But, although the anthology contains

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some examples of gender-sensitivity in the social science and humanities curricula, most entries are of poor quality or adhere blatantly to anti-gender equality principles.4 Thus, in the texts of some programs such terms as gender-role education, sex education, and gender education were not differentiated and were given as synonyms. Many of the tasks proposed by the curricula for students actually reproduce patriarchal stereotypes instead of combating them. In one example, the curriculum proposes the following to teachers: ‘Select differentiated tasks in mathematics for boys and girls. For example: “Put the same number of blocks as that of dolls” (for girls), “Put the same number of blocks as that of cars” (for boys), “Are there enough vases for the flowers?” (for girls), “Are there enough wheels to make cars?” (for boys)’ (MESU 2004, 140). Other examples from the anthology include: • ‘To extend the children’s idea about norms of masculinity and femininity one can conduct the lesson on creating stories “Country of Masculinity” and “Country of Femininity.” ’ (p. 138) • ‘. . . conducting discussions separately with boys and girls “Our Women’s Secrets,” “Our Men’s Secrets,” as well as [in] solving problem situations in the form of a game teach the child to find such variants of behaviour that meet society’s requirements to be representative of a certain sex.’ (p. 138) • ‘It is useful to conduct physical education events, where boys demonstrate their strength, agility, and speed, while girls compete in flexibility, grace, and musicality.’ (p. 139) • ‘Besides joint games and toys it is necessary to think about equipment for games considering the child’s sex.’ (p. 140) Importantly, several of these study programs, including the one from which the above quotes are taken, are recommended by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for use in all schools. This will bring more harm than benefit, however, as they only reinforce gender asymmetry and hierarchy among the children (Riabova 2005, 9). This governmental initiative, therefore, cannot be considered successful in terms of advancing gender equality. Its failure points again to the fact that many educators in Ukraine, including authors, editors, and illustrators of school textbooks, are steeped in gender stereotypes, and this is reflected in the content and design of their educational materials. Meanwhile, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Ukraine are also tackling the problem. In 2009, the Program of Equal Opportunities

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and Women’s Rights in Ukraine began a wide-ranging gender analysis of school textbooks, manuals, and curricula. The project brings together advocates and professionals, such as teachers, school administrators, specialists of regional institutes of postgraduate pedagogical education, and teachers from higher educational institutions, all of whom aim to develop the principles, criteria, and standards of gender analysis of school textbooks and curricula. But more work remains to be done. Preliminary steps have been taken internationally to study gender imbalance in school materials more closely. Researchers like Kimmel (2006) have looked at gendered classrooms that produce gendered individuals in the U.S. context, while Smirnova (2005) has studied Russian textbooks to demonstrate the level of gender stereotypes use in them. For both these researchers, it is clear that school textbooks portray severe gender imbalance. The present analysis and that of Govorun and Kikinezhdi (2008) mark the beginnings of this crucial work in the Ukrainian context. Theoretical Approach and Methodology Gender expertise of school textbooks generally focuses on the following aspects: the choice of topics, content of texts, peculiarities of how the teaching materials are presented, analysis and interpretation of events, choice of subjects and how they are interpreted, how assignments and questions are formulated, illustrations, and language.5 Although each of these components is important, the order in which they are to be examined depends on the school grade that a particular textbook is designed for: elementary, secondary, or high school.6 For example, in elementary school, the content of illustrations is paramount due to the peculiarities of children’s perception. The content of texts and examples, as well as assignments and the formulation of questions are next in importance for this age group. For secondary and high school textbooks, however, the choice of topics and the presentation of materials, as well as the suggested interpretation of certain events are more significant, given the more sophisticated learning skills of students in this age group. Meanwhile, language usage, such as grammar and syntax, are equally consequential in textbooks of all levels of study because these structural elements convey a specific set of ideas about the world (Taranenko 2005). When conducting a gender analysis it is also important to consider textbooks for all study subjects, not just social sciences, which might,

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on the surface, seem most relevant for gender expertise. For example, the Ukrainian mathematics textbook for Grade 1 (Bogdanovych 2007) contains problems based on situations pertaining to mothers and grandmothers, but not a single problem where a father is the main character. The Grade 6 Ukrainian literature textbook (Bandura 1997) includes works of fifteen writers and poets, only one of whom is a female writer: Mariya Vilinska, known under the male pseudonym Marko Vovchok.7 And, when writing of human beings, a textbook called The Fundamentals of Health refers primarily to males (Voronina 2003). Thus, it is clear that the potential for transmitting either gender-balanced or genderstereotypical messages is available in any subject area. Overall, it is possible to differentiate four broad types of textbooks with regard to gender. There are ‘gender-blind’ textbooks in which gender is entirely omitted. ‘Gender-marked (stereotypical)’ textbooks address gender, but in a stereotypical manner, where men and women are not represented equally. A third type is ‘gender-marked (mixed),’ in which some gender stereotypes are represented, but which also contain some gender-balanced information. And finally, there are ‘gendersensitive’ texts, where content is based on the perspective of gender equality, the gender component is addressed consistently, and information on men and women is presented in an objective and balanced way. I used these categories to consider a subset of school textbooks for Grade 1 currently used in Grade 1 classrooms in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Almost all of these are in Russian, since the language of instruction in over 90 per cent of the schools in the Russianspeaking region of Crimea is Russian. In this sense, this subset of textbooks can be considered regional. At the same time, in terms of their content, only two of these textbooks are truly regional – meaning that their content and design differ from analogous textbooks used elsewhere in Ukraine. The first is an alphabet textbook containing Russian texts for Russian-speakers; the second is a Ukrainian language manual for Russian-speakers. The rest of the books are translations of textbooks written originally in Ukrainian and approved by the Ministry of Education for use in all Ukrainian schools, regardless of region. Thus, although the subset analysed here is regional, it is also representative of the general situation in the country. The main features of the books in the subset are summarized in the Appendix. My primary method for analysing these textbooks was content analysis. Specifically, I divided the basic units of analysis (illustrations, text, assignments, etc.) according to the spheres of social life that their

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content represented, for example, family, school, outdoors, or public transportation. Second, I grouped the units of analysis according to the gender of those they depicted, that is, girls or boys, women or men, or several of these together. Third, I cross-tabulated the collected data to demonstrate the correlation between specific spheres of social life (indoors versus outdoors) and the participants’ gender markers (female versus male). I also introduced the parameter of age to demonstrate that depiction of gender differences is similar for both children and adults. The ‘indoors’ sphere was further broken down into two sections: ‘household and family duties’ and ‘leisure activities’ (games, pastimes, hobbies, toys). Each section was looked at while taking gender and age markers into account. The ‘outdoors’ sphere was also broken down into ‘leisure activities’ and ‘work outside the home,’ which referred to adults. I also compared the content of illustrations and texts with common stereotypes divided into the following categories: • Stereotypes concerning family and professional roles, in which the family sphere is marked as female, the professional sphere as male • Stereotypes connected with differences in the content of labour, according to which women are destined to perform supporting, service/care work, while men’s activities are creative, formative, and leading • Stereotypes of masculine and feminine qualities and personal features, in which a girl’s image emphasizes emotionality, politeness, and neatness, while a boy’s image emphasizes activity, independence, and leadership skills (Smirnova 2005, 8) • Stereotypes reflecting particularities of pastimes, where girls play with dolls, knit, and embroider, while boys play with cars and planes, go fishing, and play football and hockey. Finally, I also analysed the school textbooks from the linguistic point of view to assess whether syntax and grammar used in children’s manuals is gender-marked. Results In the following sections, I describe the findings from my analysis. As will be shown, one of the most dramatic results is how frequently

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women are confined to the home space in school texts and illustrations. The cost of this confinement is seen in the depiction of professional life in the textbooks, where boys grow up to choose from a large range of careers, while girls can expect far fewer options. Representations of Home- and Family-Related Duties by Gender and Age Table 10.1 outlines the kinds of typical household activities engaged in at home by adult women and men as seen in the Grade 1 textbooks that I analysed. As the left-hand column of the table makes clear, judging from the content and illustrations in these textbooks, all housework is done by mothers and grandmothers. Most often, they cook and shop for groceries. There are a lot of pictures in the books in which family members sit at the table while mother serves food. Grandmother’s destiny, besides all the housekeeping, is to take care of small grandchildren. These duties are reflected in the following math problems: ‘Grandmother baked several layers for a cake . . .,’ ‘Grandmother and Nikita went to the store . . .,’ ‘Grandmother is buying a dozen eggs . . .,’ ‘Mother bought 2 kg of cucumbers, 3 kg of tomatoes, and 4 kg of apples. What did mother buy more of – vegetables or fruit?’ There are virtually no household duties assigned to fathers and grandfathers in the textbooks. Illustrations that depict them in a home environment are few. Their everyday responsibilities are woodworking and gardening (see Figure 10.1).8 The alphabet textbook contains the following description: ‘There is a garden near the house. There are plums, apple trees, and pears there. Father and Tolia [the boy’s name] work in the garden. Father has a saw. He cut off branches and Tolia watered the raspberry bushes.’ Only one textbook, The Fundamentals of Health, has an illustration in which the whole family, adults and children, clean the apartment. All of women’s household work is carried out inside the house, in a closed space. In contrast, men’s activities take place near the house, in an open space. If mothers and grandmothers appear outside the house, it is usually because they are required to leave for grocery shopping purposes. This rigid allocation of space reflects findings from textbook analyses conducted in other contexts. In Kimmel’s analysis, for example, men and women are shown to have their own sphere of responsibility: ‘his’ area is in open air, such as the yard or garden; ‘her’ area is always in enclosed premises such as the kitchen, laundry room, bedroom, or bathroom (2006, 208).

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Table 10.1. Household and Family Duties of Adult Family Members as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Women (Mothers and Grandmothers)

Men (Fathers and Grandfathers)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

• Woodworking (sawing and planing boards) • Working in the garden (planting trees, tying branches, etc.)

Cooking Serving food Washing dishes Buying foodstuffs Cleaning the house Taking care of plants Baking cookies and pies Beating cream Decorating cakes Laying a festive table Taking care of small children Taking care of ill children Meeting husband after work Grandmothers feed grandchildren, walk with small grandchildren, read books to grandchildren

Household duties for girls mainly repeat those of adult women (see Table 10.2). Girls either help mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen or perform these chores themselves. Girls very frequently water house flowers and take care of them. Meanwhile, like their fathers, boys’ household duties include woodworking and garden duties. The textbook Me and Ukraine presents two pictures on one page that capture these distinct roles: a girl waters flowers, a boy planes a board (see Figure 10.2). The Ukrainian language manual, however, contains two pictures in which a girl and a boy serve a table and do the dishes together (see Figure 10.3). However, these are rather exceptions from the general trend. In pictures from the alphabet textbook, only girls do housework; boys help mothers and grandmothers with grocery shopping instead. Indoor Leisure Activities by Gender and Age Mothers’ and grandmothers’ pastimes are limited to knitting socks and reading books (but not newspapers). Fathers and grandfathers sit in armchairs or on sofas reading newspapers and books, but more often newspapers (see Table 10.3). Men are thus represented as more

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Figure 10.1. An illustration from Fundamentals of Health. Source: Boichenko and Savchenko (2007, 45).

interested in world events than women. In all the textbooks, only men and boys play chess. The illustration used to depict ‘family leisure time’ in the textbook Me and Ukraine shows a father and grandfather playing chess and a son watching their game. Grandmother sits on the sofa with her small granddaughter and reads her a book (which is considered to be rest for the grandmother). In the background, a mother stands in the kitchen at the stove (see Figure 10.4). The picture is followed by a discussion question: ‘How does the family rest?’ Thus, it prompts students to invest in this gendered arrangement. More gender-balanced illustrations are presented in other textbooks. For example, in The Fundamentals of Health, the entire family is involved in a morning workout. Inside games and activities differ for girls and boys (see Table 10.4). Girls play with dolls or, like mothers and grandmothers, knit and embroider. For example, consider the following math problems: ‘The doll had 4 dresses. Marina sewed 3 more dresses. How many dresses does the doll have now?’ ‘Zoya washed 4 doll dresses and 2 more blouses. How many items did Zoya wash?’ ‘Masha had 5 toys. She was given several more toys, and now she has 11 toys. How many toys was Masha given?’ Boys’ activities are more creative. They sit at computers, work with Meccano toys (Lego-like toys), create models for cars and ships, and play chess. Math problems that use boys in their description reflect this perception of their creativity: ‘A boy had 10 stamps. He gave

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Table 10.2. Children’s Household Duties as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Girls

Boys

Girls and Boys Together

•

• Planing boards • Woodworking • Working in the garden • Helping mother or grandmother with grocery shopping • Walking the dog

• Planting trees in the garden • Planting sprouts in kitchen garden

• • • • •

Helping mother or grandmother in the kitchen Cutting vegetables Washing dishes Setting the table Watering flowers Walking the dog

7 stamps to his friend . . .’ ‘Misha has 15 stamps, and Grisha has 7 stamps less . . .’ ‘Vova cut 5 triangles and 2 squares. Misha cut 3 squares and an equal number of triangles . . .’ Children often spend free time at home together. At first glance, all their joint indoor pastimes seem gender-neutral. However, if they watch TV, the boy holds the remote control. Boys also hold books in their hands more often than girls. If they read together, more often the boy is reading and explaining, while the girl listens. In one example, we learn that ‘Oleg and Natasha are frequent visitors to the reading hall. It is quiet in the hall, there are bookshelves everywhere. Choose and read . . . What are you reading now, Oleg? sister asks. Magic Tree, the book by Kornei Chukovsky. And Natasha can’t read yet. She looks at the pictures . . .’ (emphasis added). This distinction is made even though the illustration shows children of about the same age. In such depictions, even reading ceases to be neutral and becomes gender-marked. The only gender-neutral activities that seem to exist in the world of these books are drawing and work with paper and scissors. As Kimmel puts it, daily activities are the means by which children recognize what it means ‘to be a boy’ or ‘to be a girl’ (2006, 205). Thus, depictions of children’s games and sports in textbooks ‘express and contain gender inequality expectations transmitted further in the process of gender relations in adult life’ (ibid.). Outdoor Leisure Activities by Gender and Age Family rest outside the house is more diverse than what is depicted as their indoor activities. Outdoor leisure involves attending movies and visiting the zoo, hiking in the forest, and having a picnic at the

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Figure 10.2. An illustration from Me and Ukraine. Source: Bibik and Koval (2002, 14).

riverside. During these activities, fathers and grandfathers become more visible. For example, the alphabet textbook describes the following situations: ‘Zina with her father attended the Zoo.’ ‘Vasylko with his grandfather go to the pond.’ ‘Lena and her father were walking in the forest.’ ‘Marichka is happy. Today she goes to the mountains with her father.’ Even here, women are haunted by the ghost of cooking: in illustrations under the sections ‘Your Family’ and ‘Family Pastime’ in the textbook Me and Ukraine, a family relaxes at the riverside, but the girl and the mother are positioned near a pot, while father is at an easel, and grandson and grandfather are returning from successful fishing. In all textbooks, a great number of illustrations are devoted to children’s outdoor pastimes and games (see Table 10.5), and pictures of girls are as frequent as those of boys. However, girls’ activities are monotonous. As at home, these are often games with dolls and the care of flowers. In some textbooks, like Me and Ukraine, interactions between girls and flowers are repeated on virtually every page; they plant flowers, water flowers, make bouquets and garlands, hold flowers in their hands, and smell flowers. The majority of girls’ outdoor occupations are static; they do not have an arc or developing plot. Girls’ pastimes become more dynamic if they play with boys, who are regularly engaged in outdoor team games, walks, or rides. As Table 10.5 clearly shows, boys’ pastimes are very diverse – and frequently depicted. In the ‘Family Leisure’ section of Me and Ukraine,

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Figure 10.3. An illustration from Ukrainian Language. Source: Khoroshkovska and Okhota (2002, 71).

for example, there are only illustrations of boys. They go hiking, gather mushrooms, and build a sailing ship. Fishing is one of the most preferred hobbies: boys go fishing, come from fishing, hold fishing rods, haul in fish, etc. In one example from the alphabet textbook, we hear that ‘At dawn Kostia and his grandfather Matvei go to the pond. They stop under the old willow . . . Here is the first one caught. How

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 265 Table 10.3. Adult Pastimes (Inside and Outside the Home) as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Women (Mothers and Grandmothers)

Men (Fathers and Grandfathers)

• •

•

Knitting socks Reading books

• • •

Reading newspapers or books Sitting at the dinner table Sitting in an armchair or on the sofa Playing chess

All the Family Together • Watching TV • Going to the movies • Walking in the forest • Going to a riverside or beach

big! – Kostia is happy.’ Similarly, in a math textbook young readers are presented with the following problem: ‘A boy caught 5 perches, and the girl caught 2 perches less. How many perches did the girl catch?’ This girl has other shortcomings: she also picks fewer plums: ‘Vitia gathered 11 plums and Olia – 2 plums less’ (emphasis added). Images of boats are quite frequent: boys build boats, play with boats, make paper ships, and let them sail. This theme is further elaborated in romanticized texts: ‘Morning is close. Fog. A sail boat is adrift. There are two sailors [in masculine form] in the boat. One steers, another sets sail . . .’ ‘Yakov Petrovich is the captain of Mriya, a motorized ship. He leads his ship far into the sea. Today the motorized ship Mriya arrives at Yalta. Mother, Andreika, and little Yasochka will come to meet him.’ Almost all boys’ occupations are connected to movement and riding. Boys use cars, bicycles, skates, scooters, boats, etc. They also actively engage in different types of sports. In the textbook The Fundamentals of Health, the ‘Sports’ section depicts only boys in its illustrations. Boys play football, hockey, and water polo. In the alphabet textbook, we get another example of boys’ active play: ‘Iliusha and Andriusha [2 boys] like to play hockey very much. They are captains of their yard teams . . . And now is the game. Players quickly run across the field . . . – Goal! – their friends Niura and Liuba [2 girls] are happy.’ The textbook also provides commentary to this text: ‘Chess develops the brain and wit and hockey – strength, courage, and endurance. The song justly says: “Real men play hockey, cowards don’t play hockey.” ’ All boys’ games and pastimes are dynamic. They are also directed; many of these activities assist in the choice of future professions. Thus, prompting questions accompanying illustrations of young people’s activities include: ‘Which of these boys dreams to serve in the navy?’ ‘Who

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Figure 10.4. An illustration from Me and Ukraine. Source: Bibik and Koval (2002, 29).

is driving fruit to the shop?’ ‘Who learns to take photos?’ and ‘Who wants to become a pilot?’ The general answer is mostly ‘Boys.’ Kimmel observes, in the depiction of children’s games, that boys play to get power, while girls play to make sure everyone is having a good time (2006, 203). This is also evident in the pictures in the textbooks that I analysed, where roles in games are divided in a way so that a boy would be a leader (a war general or a bus driver), with a girl playing a supportive role (a field nurse, or a ticket seller). As researchers have pointed out, in their games and play, boys and girls study and emulate the models of behaviour that they are expected to follow as future men and women (ibid.). Work Outside the Home by Gender and Age The most stark examples of discriminatory gender depictions in the textbooks relate to professions and types of jobs (see Table 10.6).

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 267 Table 10.4. Children’s Pastimes (Games and Activities) as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Girls

Boys

Girls and Boys Together

•

•

• Reading • Watching TV • Drawing • Working with scissors and paper

•

• • •

Playing with blocks Playing with dolls (dressing, feeding, nursing, putting to bed, walking, etc.) Embroidering Knitting Drawing

•

• • •

Sitting at the computer Constructing models of cars, ships, rockets, etc. Playing with Meccano toys Reading Drawing

Judging from illustrations alone, the most popular female profession is that of schoolteacher, depicted dozens of times in all textbooks. A total of three illustrations depict males in this profession, and these were teachers of mathematics and computer science. This dramatically skewed view reproduces the more general social perception that the ‘hierarchy of sciences’ has a masculine character: the ‘hard’ sciences, like mathematics or physics, are respected and prestigious, while ‘feminine’ areas, like literary studies, are much less so (Voronina 2003, 73). Among the other most frequent ‘female’ professions are baker and doctor, as well as jobs in the service sector. In contrast, as can be seen in the right-hand column of the Table 10.6, the range of ‘male’ professions is much greater, from tractor operator to agronomist, and firefighter to astronaut. Male professions are depicted as more prestigious, romantic, heroic, and creative. Acquiring them presupposes a high level of qualification and professionalism, as well as the ability to work with advanced equipment. Interestingly, although cooking and sewing in the home are considered to be women’s duties, the public-sphere professions of cook and tailor are represented by men, thereby further reinforcing the value of men’s activities outside the home and diminishing women’s work within the family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, given these depictions, the textbook that deals explicitly with work futures, called Career Education, presents the most rigid gender stereotypes (Yarskaya-Smirnova 2000). The book consists of five sections, each of which is devoted to a particular professional sphere. Table 10.7 lists the kinds of work described in these spheres and whether they are represented by illustrations of men or women.

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Table 10.5. Children’s Leisure Activities Outside the Home as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Girls

Boys

Girls and Boys Together

• Playing with dolls • Skipping rope • Caring for flowers • Watering flowers • Gathering flowers into bouquets • Twining garlands • Looking after trees • Embroidering

• Fishing • Hiking • Gathering mushrooms • Playing with a ball • Riding bicycles • Riding scooters • Skating • Diving • Flying kites • Playing with paper toy ships • Breeding pigeons • Conducting chemical experiments • Taking photos • Joining sports • Playing football • Playing water polo • Play hockey

• Reading • Walking in the park or forest • Gathering mushrooms • Taking part in team games • Playing with a ball • Bathing in a river • Skating • Sledding • Throwing snowballs • Making snowmen • Feeding birds in winter • Take part in concerts: singing and dancing

This breakdown reflects the traditional attribution of action, strength, intellect, rationality, and organizational skills to men. In another example, the book describes three broad categories of work, each of which is also accompanied by an illustration: to show intellectual labour, we see a boy reading a book; for physical labour, a boy holds a spade and a girl holds a rake in a kitchen garden; for artistic labour, a girl is shown drawing. Meanwhile, near the section of text that describes the value of labour, only male professionals are depicted: a blacksmith, carpenter, miller, potter, and tailor. The text speaks to these in the following way: ‘Their work is valuable for a city and a village, valuable for the whole country.’ This is in accordance with the widely held opinion in society that ‘boys should grow independent and self-sufficient to explore the environment and cope with it’ (Kimmel 2006, 200). Female images, meanwhile, are characterized by shows of care for others, support, sympathy, and diligence. In the world of these textbooks, professional life is far from paramount for women; the most important thing for them is family.

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 269 Table 10.6. Professions and Types of Labour as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Women

Men

• Teacher • Doctor Agriculture-Related • Farm worker • Calf-tender • Milkmaid • Poultry maid Other (Mainly Service Sector) • Sales assistant • Hairdresser • Seamstress • Baker • Painter • Assistant stationmaster • Craftsperson

Agriculture-Related • Agronomist • Forester • Harvest collector • Beekeeper • Tractor operator • Combine operator • Shepherd • Miller Other • Builder • Carpenter • Locksmith • Turner • Steeplejack • Blacksmith • Potter • Driver • Gardener Service Sector • Cook • Tailor • Postman Creative • Artist • Designer Romantic and Heroic • Sailor • Skipper • Cosmonaut • Policeman • Firefighter Computer-Related • Computer operator • Programmer • Accountant

Gendered Representations of Toys Almost all toys represented in the textbooks that I analysed are clearly gender-marked (see Table 10.8). As Kimmel points out, many toys ‘are

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Table 10.7. Professions by Gender in Illustrations in the Textbook Career Education (Yarskaya-Smirnova 2000) Sphere

Professions

Represented by

Human – nature

• Gardener • Agronomist • Forester

Only men

Human – human

• Doctor • Hairdresser • Teacher

Only women

Human – sign systems

• Operator • Accountant

Only men

Human – technology

• Tractor operator • Astronaut • Driver

Only men

Human – art/creativity

• Artist • Gardener • Craftsperson

Two men, one woman (craftsperson)

designed to be sold as girls’ toys or boys’ toys. Girls are given dolls and dollhouses; boys get trucks and building blocks, and are told that they are “sissies” if they want to play with girls’ toys’ (2006, 202). Illustrations showing girls with dolls are repeated dozens of times. All games with dolls are static and limited to caring for them. In such games girls reproduce all types of household work performed by their mothers and grandmothers in the home: dolls are bathed, dressed, fed, nursed, taken for walks, put to bed, etc. Examples from the alphabet textbook demonstrate similar biases: ‘Polia has a doll Lida. Polia picked up the doll to wash it. She sat the doll at the table and set the table . . .“Sit here, Lida” . . .’ ‘Ivan has new flippers. Inna has a new doll.’ Boys’ toys are different in content, purpose, and quantity. Among them are a lot of different Meccano toys, and means of transportation, such as cars, planes, and ships. Games with these toys presuppose movement. Boys’ toys also include ‘bad toys’ such as slingshots, thus communicating to the children that violence is more acceptable for boys than it is for girls. Even if children are shown playing together, the rigid

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 271 Table 10.8. Toys Held and Played with Inside and Outside by Boys and Girls as Seen in Grade 1 Textbooks Girls

Boys

Girls and Boys Together

• Dolls • Dishes • Furniture • Teddy bears • Stuffed rabbit • Ball • Toy blocks

• Ball • Blocks • Cars • Rackets • Planes • Ships • Wooden horse • Kite • Paper ships • Slingshot

• •

Ball Blocks

division of their toys remains intact. This is true for textual references as well. The alphabet book contains the following scenario: ‘Denis made a house. Sasha built a rocket, and Timur made a sailing boat.’ It would make sense that any toy could be available for play by any child, but in reality toys are divided by invisible borders of sexual difference between children (Kimmel 2006, 246). Textbook authors themselves ‘push’ children to the stereotypical choice of toys. Thus, pictures in the textbook The Fundamentals of Health show a doll, a teddy bear, a mirror, a comb, a handbag, a toy bed, toy dishes, a plane, a train, a robot, a truck, a ball, and a skipping rope (see Figure 10.5). Children are asked which of these a girl would choose, and which a boy would choose. As children seek approval from teachers, they will obviously try to choose ‘correctly.’ Meanwhile, of all the toys represented on the pages of the textbooks under analysis, only two were gender-neutral: balls and blocks. Gendered Language The final content analysis conducted for this study was to look at linguistic structures used in the textbooks. The major finding here is that in all the books there is a high frequency of words used in the masculine gender. In the Ukrainian language, as in others, many words

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Figure 10.5. ‘Look at the picture, which toys do you think a girl will choose? What about a boy?’ An illustration from Fundamentals of Health. Source: Boichenko and Savchenko (2007, 39).

can be used both in feminine or masculine form. The textbook authors do not choose the feminine forms as often. Thus, for example, the books address student readers using only the masculine gender form, despite the fact that half of these readers are girls. The very opening of the majority of the textbooks reads: ‘Dear friend!’ ‘Young friend!’ or ‘Dear first-grader!’ – all in the masculine form in Ukrainian or Russian. But examples aren’t limited to these initial addresses. There are many others: ‘As a young engineer [masculine] think what construction a racing car can have’; ‘Compete with your classmates [masculine] in speed and length of movement of a toy car’; and ‘Student’s [masculine] work place should be convenient.’ Thus, gender imbalance is built into the very structure of the language of these books.

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Discussion The results described above are alarming. They show that an abundance of gender-stereotypical content is being presented to children. Among the materials analysed here, there are no gender-sensitive textbooks, and none are even gender-blind. All of the textbooks are gender-marked and nearly all are stereotypical. Importantly, this stands in contrast with the Soviet period in Ukraine, during which time school literature was more gender-blind because of the predominance of communist ideas, which overrode other ideological discourses, including traditional gender ones. The findings presented here thus demonstrate the need for deep reform in the area of education in Ukraine. At the outset, I discussed steps being taken in this regard in Ukraine to date, particularly with regard to analysing textbooks. I showed that more work needs to be done in this area, noting that this study is but one contribution. Here, I want to briefly review efforts being made to go the next step: that is, to replace textbooks found to be gender-stereotypical. I will then discuss one possible direction for policy reform in relation to the problem of gendered language in school textbooks. Certain successful attempts do exist in the non-governmental sector with regard to the production of new, gender-balanced textbooks. For example, in 1996, the Women’s Information Consultative Centre started the Empowering Education Program for secondary schools. This program was based on the idea of gender justice and non-violence and was directed at creating the conditions for students to acquire group selforganization skills by education through immediate experience (Suslova 2002). The program’s authors, without rejecting the existing forms and methods of transmitting knowledge, suggested expanding the possibilities of modern pedagogy by taking into consideration the principle of gender justice. The textbook does not teach any absolute truths, but rather teaches children to find out those truths for themselves. It also teaches how to build relations and cooperate with other people following the principles of trust, partnership, equality, and nonviolence. In 2003, the study program Fundamentals of Dialogue built on this work. Designed for secondary schools, the program was approved by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The related textbook (Semikolenova et al. 2008) was published with the support of the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Gender Policy of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and educators started

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to implement the ideas of empowerment, equality, and non-violence in Crimean schools. A third program, called Equal Opportunities and Women’s Rights in Ukraine,9 has the promotion of gender standards in education as one of its most important objectives. The project coordinator, Larysa Kobelyanska, initiated the publication of the educational manual We Are Different – We Are Equal: Basics of Gender Equality Culture for students in Grades 9 to 12 (Semikolenova 2007). The manual is intended ‘to overcome stereotypical views on the roles of women and men in family and society, and form students’ outlooks free from gender bias and prejudice’ (ibid., 2). The textbook has since received official approval by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science. All of these efforts are important steps forward in creating gendersensitive programs and textbooks available for use in schools. Although they represent only the tip of the iceberg, and much more work is needed to balance Ukraine’s educational sector in terms of gender, these initiatives represent an important example that can be emulated. Textbook Language: Future Directions While the work of analysing textbooks for gender balance and then replacing them is ongoing, one important consideration is language. As mentioned in the results section, currently, children are nearly always addressed by their textbooks in the masculine form. This hints at the potential in the Ukrainian language itself for inclusion or exclusion. According to Ukrainian grammatical rules, masculine gender forms of words are preferred when persons of both sexes or a group of people are being described or addressed. Like many modern languages that differentiate genders, Ukrainian uses nouns of masculine gender to denote men and women both in the plural and the singular. Thus, speakers usually say: ‘Teachers of our school . . .’ using the masculine gender, even though there may only be female teachers in that particular school. Similarly, city, regional, and national contests for excellence in teaching annually award the prize for Teacher of the Year using the masculine gender, even if a woman wins. And TV contests for children that are broadcast every Saturday by the ‘Inter’ Ukrainian channel deem one viewer ‘The Smartest,’ also using the masculine gender, even though both girls and boys take part in these competitions.

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Until recently, this situation was justified in several ways. First, it was argued that gendered language reflected existing social divisions of labour between men and women, with a prevalence of men’s labour in certain positions and professions, like lecturer, engineer, general, or priest (Vinogradov 1972, 65). Second, it was argued that the Ukrainian language lacks the resources to invent words to name professions in either the feminine gender form or neutrally (Schmelev 1997, 367). But some sociologists, psychologists, and linguists now argue that such a ‘mechanism of exclusion’ is not innocently grammatical. Usage of masculine forms of nouns when women are also being designated contributes to ignoring women not only in the language but in the ‘picture of the world’ as well (Desinova 2002, 232–3). When women inhabit professions or positions with only masculine titles, this results in instilling into native speakers, children among them, the idea that these women are taking someone else’s job. Some researchers argue that this has a greater influence than even crude forms of discrimination, as language penetrates deeper layers of consciousness (Gabrielian 1993). In a similar vein, Edward Taylor argued that attention to grammatical gender is crucial because words hold great power over the human mind and might be the greatest drivers of mythological development (1989, 141). On this basis, certain linguists insist that existing language norms must be rethought and changed, arguing that consciously shaping language to take gender into account should be basic to contemporary language policy (Pomonariv 2001a, 2001b; Semikolenova and Shilina 2006b). To some extent, this is happening in the Ukrainian language. For example, such words as khudozhnytsia, likarka, vchytelka, dyrektorka, redaktorka, aktorka, agronomka, vyhovatelka, budivelnytsia (the feminine gender forms for artist, doctor, teacher, director, editor, actress, agronomist, educator, and construction worker) and the like are now used in common speech and mass media. The list of such words is constantly lengthening by ‘forming new units or borrowing them from the language of Western Ukrainian diaspora: for example, liderka, rezhyserka, spikerka, premyerka, derzhsekretarka, . . . chlenkynia, mystkynia [feminine gender of leader, producer, speaker, prime minister, state secretary, member, artist]’ (Taranenko 2005, 23). In fact, the Ukrainian language is rather flexible and resourceful in producing feminine gender forms (Vykhovanets and Gorodenska 2004, 91). These new feminine gender words eventually take on normative status

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and are recommended for use by many Ukrainian linguists.10 Thus, linguistically it is possible to reduce the level of gender bias in the language of textbooks. Work now needs to be done to communicate this idea to the authors of school textbooks. To conclude this discussion, it is worth mentioning that Ukraine’s educational policy is still under development. Even among the textbooks analysed for this study, the number of copies published in 2007 varied greatly across subjects, from 25,000 to 75,900 copies. This is illustrative of the fact that, until now, the area of textbook production and dissemination has lacked planning and control, even at the local level. Standardization only began very recently. It was only in 2004 that the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted the State Standard of Elementary and Complete Secondary Education.11 Yet, there are still no state standards regarding school textbooks or their content. In this context, the findings of this and similar studies of the gender balance of existing textbooks, as well as the recommendations discussed in this section with regard to increasing gender-neutral language and developing new textbooks, together have the potential to contribute to the development of state educational standards based on the principles of gender equality. Conclusions The material analysed in this chapter demonstrates how abundant and deeply rooted is gender-biased information in the new school textbooks of independent Ukraine. Addressing this aspect through both gender and educational policies is of primary importance if gender equality is to be advanced and not hindered among the growing generation of Ukrainians. Some attempts at advancing gender equality through school textbooks have already been made. However, the governmental project in this area has reinforced gender biases rather than combated them. In contrast, non-governmental initiatives in textbook expertise and gender-sensitive programs and manuals have been more successful, yet of limited scope so far. The chapter argues that future reform in this area has to follow a dual-track approach: textbook expertise and the creation of new texts and study programs. In doing so, both content and form have to be taken into consideration. Thus, both texts and illustrations need to be gender-balanced, together with the language in terms of grammar and syntax.

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Appendix Table 10A.  Analysed Grade 1 Textbooks Used in Ukrainian Russian-Language Public Schools City and Publisher

Year

No. Printed

Russian; original text for Russian schools

Kyiv: Osvita

2004

57,200

Ukrainian; original text for Russian schools

Kyiv: Osvita

2007

75,900

Bibik and Koval, Ya i Ukrayina. Russian;    Vikonechko (Me and Ukraine: translation    A Little Window), 2nd ed. from Ukrainian

Kyiv: Geneza

2007

60,350

Bogdanovych, Matematyka    (Mathematics)

Russian; translation from Ukrainian

Kyiv: Osvita

2007

65,880

Boichenko and Savchenko,    Osnovy Zdorovya    (Fundamentals of Health),    2nd ed.

Russian; translation from Ukrainian

Kyiv: Geneza

2007

75,050

Veremiychuk, Trudove    Navchannia (Career    Education)

Russian; translation from Ukrainian

Kyiv: Pedahohichna Dumka

2007

25,000

Authors and Titles

Language

Vakulenko and Gudzhyk, Bookvar    (Alphabet) Khoroshkovska and Okhota,    Ukrayinska Mova    (Ukrainian Language),    2nd ed.

Notes 1 Article 26 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights cites the provision of education as a priority of the international community in the twenty-first century, while Article 29 of the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child emphasizes that ‘education of a child should be directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential; . . . as well as to the preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups’ (emphasis added).

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2 Zakon Ukrayiny, Pro zabezpechennia rivnykh prav ta mozhlyvostei zhinok i cholovikiv (Law of Ukraine on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men), available at http://zakon.rada.gov.ua. 3 See Chapter 9 in this volume for further discussion of teachers’ understandings of gender. 4 E.g., O. Kis’s ‘Gender Studies,’ and T. Doronina’s ‘Gender Trends in Literary Studies: Theoretical and Methodological Basics and Interpretation Practices.’ 5 Outside of the Ukrainian context this is known as gender analysis. 6 In Ukraine, school education is comprised of three stages: elementary school (grades 1 through 4), secondary school (grades 5 through 9), and high school (grades 10 and 11). 7 This is despite the fact that Ukrainian culture is unimaginable without its remarkable women writers, yet they are not included in the school program. 8 Woodwork is a stereotypically masculine activity, and no matter how outdated it is at the moment in both urban and rural settings, with very few men actually owning woodworking instruments or ever engaging in this activity, in the textbooks it still remains among the jobs most associated with men’s roles. 9 The project was co-funded by the European Union, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the United Nations Development Program. The project’s national implementing partner is the Ministry of Ukraine for Family, Youth, and Sports. For more information, visit http://gender.undp.org.ua. 10 For example, by linguists such as Kateryna Gorodenska, Nina Ozerova, Yury Pradid, Elena Selivanova, Aleksandr Taranenko, Ivan Vykhovanets, Svetlana Yermolenko, and Anatoly Zagnytko. 11 ‘Derzhavnyi standart bazovoyi i povnoyi zagalnoyi serednioyi osvity’ (State Standard of Elementary and Complete Secondary Education), available at http://www.mon.gov.ua/education/average/drzh_ stand.doc.

REFERENCES Bandura, O., and Y. Kucherenko. 1997. Ukrayinska Literatura: Pidruchnyk dlia Shostogo Klasu [Ukrainian Literature: Textbook for Grade 6]. Kyiv: Osvita. Bogdanovych, M. 2007. Matematyka: Pidruchnyk dlia Pershogo Klasu [Mathematics: Textbook for the Grade 1]. Kyiv: Osvita.

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 279 Boichenko, T., and O. Savchenko. 2007. Osnovy Zdorovya: Pidruchnyk dlia 1 Klasu Zagalnoosvitnih Navchalnyh Zakladiv [Fundamentals of Health: Textbook for Grade 1 of Public Schools]. Kyiv: Heneza. Bibik N., and N. Koval. 2002. Ya I Ukrayina: Vikonechko. Pidruchnyk dlia 1 Klasu [Me and Ukraine: the Window. Textbook for Grade 1]. Kyiv: ACK. Denisova, A., ed. 2002. Slovar Gendernyh Terminov [Gender Terms Dictionary]. Moscow: Informatsiya – XXI Vek. Doronina, T. 2004. Gender Trends in Literary Studies: Theoretical and Methodological Basics and Interpretation Practices, in Khrestomatiya Navchalnyh Program z Problem Hendernoho Rozvytku [Anthology of Curricula on the Issues of Gender Development] by Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. Kyiv: Foliant. Gabrielian, N. 1993. Meditatsii Na Temu Feminizma: Vsplyvayuschaya Atlantida [Meditations on Feminism: Emerging Atlantis]. Obschestvennye Nauki I Sovremennost’ [Social Sciences and Modernity] 6: 171–8. Giddens, A. 1999. Sotsiolohiya [Sociology]. Translation from English by V. Shovkun and A. Oliinyk. Kyiv: Osnovy. Govorun, T., and O. Kikinezhdi. 2008. Gender u social’no-psykhologichnomu vymiri: Chastyna 1[Social-Psychological Aspects of Gender: Part 1]. Available at http://helsinki.org.ua/index.php?id=1200305760 (accessed 4 March 2009). Khoroshkovska, O., and H. Okhota. 2002. Ukrayinska Mova: Pidruchnyk, 1 Klas [Ukrainian Language: Textbook, Grade 1]. Kyiv: Heneza. Kimmel, M. 2006. Gendernoye Obschestvo [The Gendered Society]. Moscow: ROSSPEN. Kis, O. 2004. Gender Studies, in Khrestomatiya Navchalnyh Program z Problem Hendernoho Rozvytku [Anthology of Curricula on the Issues of Gender Development] by Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. Kyiv: Foliant. Lebedinskaya, I., ed. 2003. Problema Hendernoyi Rivnosti v Pedahohichnii Osviti [The Problem of Gender Inequality in Pedagogical Education]. Kyiv: Foliant. Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU). 2004. Khrestomatiya Navchalnyh Program z Problem Hendernoho Rozvytku [Anthology of Curricula on the Issues of Gender Development]. Kyiv: Foliant. Niemanis, A. 2003. Vprovadzhennia Hendernyh Pidhodiv [Implementation of Gender Approaches]. Kyiv: KIC. Available at http.//www.undp.sk/ genderlibrary. Plakhotnik, O. 2007. Gender and Education: Survey of Literature. Gendernye Issledovaniya [Gender Studies] 15: 331–5.

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Ponomariv, O. 2001a. Imennyky Zhinochogo Rodu u Nazvah za Profesiyamy [Feminine Nouns in Job Titles]. Filosofsko-Antologichni Stufiyi: Spetsvypusk [Philosophical Anthropological Studies: Special Edition], 183–6. Kyiv: Stylos. – 2001b. Kultura Movlennia [Speech Culture]. Kyiv: Lybid. Riabova, T. 2005. Gendernaya Ekspertiza Uchebnikov s Uchebnyh Posobii po Istorii i Literature [Gender Expertise of Textbooks and Manuals on History and Literature]. In O. Voronina, ed., Gendernaya Ekspertiza Uchebnikov dlia Vysshei Shkoly [Gender Expertise of University Textbooks], 123–40. Moscow: Solteks. Semikolenov, V., E. Semikolenova, and O. Suslova. 2008. Osnovy Dialoga [Fundamentals of Dialogue]. Simferopol: DiAiPetri. Semikolenova, O., ed. 2007. My Rizni – My Rivni: Osnovy Kultury Hendernoyi Revnosti [We Are Equal – We Are Different: Fundamentals of Gender Equality]. Kyiv: KIC. Semikolenova, O., and A. Shilina. 2006a. Henderna Osvita v Serednii Shkoli: Deklaruvannia chy Vprovadzhennia? [Gender Education in Secondary School: Declaration or Implementation?] In O. Suslova and E. Rakhimkulov, eds., Zakonotvorchist’: Zabezpechennia Rivnyh Prav ta Mozhlyvostei Zhinok I Cholovikiv [Lawmaking: Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men], 145–55. Kyiv: Zapovit. – 2006b. Hendernyi Aspekt Suchasnoyi Movnoyi Polityky: Mizhnarodnyi Dosvid ta Ukrayinski Perspektyvy [Gender Aspect of Contemporary Language Policy: International Experience and Ukrainian Prospects]. Movoznavstvo [Linguistics] 4: 32–40. Shmelev, A. 1997. Dve Strategii pri Vybore Roda Anaforicheskogo Referenta [Two Strategies in Choosing Anaphoric Reference]. In T. Bulygina and A. Shmelev, eds., Yazykovaya Kontseptualizatsiya Mira: Na Materiale Russkoi Grammatiki [Language Conceptualization of the World: On Material of Russian Grammar], 363–8. Moscow: Shkola ‘Yazyki Russkoi Kultury.’ Smirnova, A. 2005. Uchimsia Zhyt’ v Obschestve: Hendernyi Analiz Shkolnyh Uchebnikov [Learning to Live in Society: Gender Analysis of School Textbooks]. Moscow: Olita. Suslova, O., ed. 2002. Upovnovazhuvalna osvita: Posibnyk dlia treneriv [Empowering Education: Trainers Manual]. Kyiv: Dovira. Available at http:// empedu.org.ua. Taranenko, O. 2005. Pryntsyp Androtsentryzmu v Systemi Movnyh Koordynat I Suchasnyi Hendernyi Rukh [Androcentrism Principle in the System of Language Coordinates and Contemporary Gender Movement]. Movoznavstvo [Linguistics] 1: 3–25.

Gender Analysis of School Textbooks 281 Taylor, E. 1989. Pervobytnaya Kultura [Primitive Culture]. Moscow: Politizdat. United Nations (UN). 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml – 1989. Convention of the Rights of the Child. Available at http://www2.ohchr. org/english/law/crc.htm Vinogradov, V. 1972. Russkii Yazyk: Grammaticheskoye Ucheniye o Slove [Russian Language: Grammar Study of Word]. Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola. Voronina, O. 2003. Osnovy Gendernoi Teorii i Metodologii [Fundamentals of Gender Theory and Methodology]. In E. Faizulaeva and N. Kurganovskaya, eds., Gendernoye Obrazovaniye [Gender Education]. Post-conference publication, 4–5 Nov., Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Vykhovanets, I., and K. Gorodenska. 2004. Teoretychna Morfologiya Ukrayinskoyi Movy [Theoretical Morphology of the Ukrainian Language]. Kyiv: ‘Pulsary’ University Press. Yarskaya-Smirnova, E. 2000. Gendernoye Neravenstvo v Obrazovanii: Poniatiye Skrytogo Uchebnogo Plana [Gender Inequality in Education: The Notion of a Hidden Curriculum]. Gendernyye Issledovaniya [Gender Studies] 5: 295–301.

11 Educational Achievement, Social Background, and Occupational Allocations of Young Men and Women in Ukraine svitlana oksamytna

The relationship between gender and inequality in educational and occupational attainment was the focus of much research interest in both Western European and some post-socialist countries throughout the second half of the twentieth century and has remained an important area of study since (see, e.g., Breen and Jonsson 2005; Erikson and Jonsson 1996; Domanski 2006; Ishida et al. 1995; Shavit and Blossfeld 1993; Shavit and Muller 2003). Yet, these issues have not been adequately addressed in Ukraine, where gender-based educational inequalities were not typically the focus of academic investigations during Soviet rule and where, today, significant gaps exist in the research with regard to how educational qualifications differently affect occupational and socioeconomic class status among men and women, and the influence of social background on educational opportunities. This chapter begins to address these knowledge gaps by presenting findings from the Youth in Transition Survey (YIT) in Ukraine, carried out in 2007 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).1 The survey sampled four thousand Ukrainians between the ages of 15 and 34 who had left school within the previous six years (2001 to 2006). The results highlight a number of important phenomena that can be summarized, in brief, as follows: (1) men and women in Ukraine have equal access to higher education; (2) Ukrainian women tend to achieve higher levels of education; (3) equal access to higher education has, nonetheless, failed to disrupt traditional segregation of young people by gender into particular areas of education; and (4) posteducation, regardless of their chosen fields, men achieve more advanced positions and receive greater remuneration. Also, as will be shown, the YIT results strongly correlate social background with

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 283

educational achievement in Ukraine – where social background is defined by the educational level of one’s parents, one’s place of residence, and one’s social class. The latter finding holds for both men and women. Thus, based on this survey, we can conclude that social origin (and not gender) is the determining factor in access to education in Ukraine. But as the YIT data also show, gender does influence what people study and how well they do in the labour market once formal education is complete. To fully explore these findings first requires a brief overview of the rapidly changing context in which Ukrainians undertake higher education, followed by a description of the design of the Youth in Transition Survey. Ukrainian Education: Recent Trends Recent decades have been characterized by intense educational expansion in many developed countries, creating greater educational opportunities for both women and men. In some European countries, female educational attainment has caught up with and even surpassed that of men. In Ukraine, female students became more numerous than male students well before independence, during the final decades of Soviet rule. However, educational expansion, in terms of an increase in the quantity of educational institutions, occurred mostly in the post-Soviet period in Ukraine. According to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (DKSU), since 1991, the number of higher educational institutions has been continuously increasing, as has the number of students. Colleges and universities – which in Ukraine are referred to as the ‘third and fourth levels of accreditation’ – increased in number from 149 in the 1990–91 academic year to 351 by the beginning of 2007–08, with an accompanying growth in the number of students, a number that increased by 2.7 times in the same period, from 881,300 to 2,372,500 (DKSU 2009). In fact, over the past two decades, the number of students at the college and university levels has tripled per 10,000 inhabitants in Ukraine: from 170 in 1990–91 to 178 in 1995–96; up again to 284 in 2000–01, then 466 in 2005–06, and finally to 512 in 2007–08 (Council for Cooperation in Education 2005). According to this measure, with regard to increasing access to higher education, Ukraine has exceeded the progress made in the majority of states formerly under Soviet rule (and now members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS), as

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well as that of several countries that are far more economically and politically developed.2 Given such massive educational expansion, it is important to evaluate to what extent this process has been characterized by gender equality or gender discrimination at different stages by examining the following factors: access to education, the structures and processes involved in the educational system, and the level of labour market outcomes of education. Measuring Educational Attainment and Social Background The Youth in Transition Survey measured educational attainment using an abridged version of the CASMIN educational schema (Shavit and Muller 2003) to assist with comparative mobility analysis.3 Respondents could identify their highest level of educational attainment, as well as that of their parents, using the following four categories: 1bc Incomplete secondary or lower – completed elementary education; completed elementary education plus basic vocational qualification; completed secondary plus intermediate general qualification; completed secondary plus intermediate vocational qualification 2b Full secondary – compulsory in Ukraine; completed full general secondary education or general secondary education plus vocational qualification4 3a Lower-level higher education – e.g., technical college diplomas, nonuniversity teaching certificates 3b Full higher education Areas of study were divided into the following nine categories from which respondents could choose: general programs; education; humanities and arts; social sciences, business, and law; sciences; engineering, manufacturing, and construction; agriculture; health and welfare; and services. With regard to work, the YIT survey determined occupations by presenting respondents with nine options based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88), a well-known tool for organizing jobs into clearly defined fields according to tasks and duties. These nine fields were: legislators, senior officials, and managers; professionals; technicians and associate professionals; clerks;

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 285

service workers and shop and market salespeople; skilled agricultural and fisheries workers; craftspeople and related workers; plant and machine operators and assemblers; and non-skilled workers. Meanwhile, respondents could self-identify as being part of one of six social classes, a list that parallels the occupations listed above and which is based on the Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocarero (EGP) approach to class analysis (Shavit and Muller 2003, 17). These six classes are: I Upper service – higher-grade professionals, administrators, and officials in the public sector II Lower service – lower-grade professionals, higher-grade technicians, lower-grade administrators and officials, managers in small firms and services, and supervisors of white-collar workers IIIab Routine non-manual employees in administration and commerce, and routine non-manual workers in services IVabc Small proprietors and artisans with or without employees, and self-employed farmers V + VI Skilled workers, lower-grade technicians, and supervisors of manual workers VIIab Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, including agricultural labourers. Results As mentioned at the outset, the survey targeted young people aged 15 to 34 who had left school and entered the labour market within the previous six years, meaning that at the time they were surveyed their job status was ‘employed.’ Results for the youngest respondents (under age 20) must be considered in light of the higher likelihood that these respondents might return to their studies in the future, thereby possibly altering their level of educational attainment and social position. However, this possibility aside, the survey still shows distinct differences in levels of educational attainment between young women and young men, as seen in Table 11.1. In particular, among the women surveyed, a larger proportion (28.0%) had obtained at least a lower-level higher education compared with men (21.7%). This was also true of the highest category of educational attainment, full higher education (29.7% of women vs. 23.8% of men). More men

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Table 11.1. Educational Attainment of Men and Women Aged 15–34 and Their Parents

Educational Attainment Incomplete secondary or less

Women and Men Aged 15–34

Their Parents

Women (%)

Men (%)

Mother (%)

Father (%)

10.8*

11.8

12.5

8.1*

Full secondary

34.2**

43.8**

34.0**

41.5**

Lower-level higher education

28.0**

21.7**

34.2**

27.5**

Full higher education

29.7**

23.8**

19.9

18.5

N

2,091

1,734

3,935

3,478

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007). *P = .01. **P = .001.

(43.8%) than women (34.2%) gave full secondary as their highest level of education attained. At the other end of the spectrum, we can note that quite a large number of the young people surveyed (8.1% of women and 10.8% of men) had entered the labour force without completing their secondary school education, even though completion is mandatory in Ukraine.5 However, as mentioned earlier, we can also assume that some of these individuals will return to finish their secondary education in evening or vocational schools at a later date. YIT participants were asked about their parents’ level of educational attainment. Results, shown in the right-most columns of Table 11.1, demonstrate a relatively higher level of attainment among mothers compared with fathers. The largest proportion of respondents’ mothers (34.2%) had incomplete or basic (lower-level) higher education, and almost exactly the same proportion (34.0%) had a full secondary education. Nearly 20 per cent of mothers had achieved full higher education (completed college or university), while the lowest proportion of the mothers, just 11.8 per cent, had an incomplete secondary education. With regard to the young adults’ fathers, results from respondents who answered the survey questions about their parents’ education showed that a similarly small proportion of fathers

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 287 Table 11.2. Mothers’ and Fathers’ Educational Attainment: Same or Different (Cell Values as % of the Total Sample) Father’s Educational Attainment Lowerlevel higher education

Mother’s Educational Attainment

Incomplete secondary or less

Incomplete secondary or less

8.1

1.8

1.0

0.5

Full secondary

1.6

26.1

4.0

2.1

Lower-level higher education

1.8

10.4

17.5

4.3

Full higher education

0.6

3.3

Full secondary

4.99

Full higher education

12.0

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey (2007).

(just 12.5%) as sons (10.8%) had failed to complete their secondary education. And, like mothers, about 20 per cent of fathers (though slightly less, at 18.5% vs. 19.9%) had gone on to complete their college or university education. But the educational attainment of the fathers contrasted distinctly from that of mothers in two ways. First, most respondents’ fathers by far (41.5% vs. 34.0% of mothers) were found to have completed just their secondary education. And second, a lower number of respondents said their fathers had incomplete (lower-level) higher education (27.5% vs. 34.2% of mothers). Thus, among the parents of the young adults surveyed, mothers are more educated than fathers. As mentioned earlier, greater inclusion of women in education occurred in Ukraine during the final decades of Soviet rule. These results demonstrate the breadth and lasting impact of that change. The majority of young respondents came from a homogeneous family educational background: 63.7 per cent (a sum of diagonal cell values) of parents had attained the same level of education (see Table 11.2). However, nearly a quarter of these young people (22.6%, the sum of cell values below the diagonal) had mothers who had attained a higher educational level than the father. It was only in the minority of cases (13.7%, a sum of cell values above the diagonal) that

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the father’s level of education was higher than the mother’s. This finding contrasts starkly with research results emerging from other settings. For example, according to Pfeffer’s (2008) data from twenty developed countries, for families in which one parent has a higher level of education than the other parent, the situation is generally reversed: in 26 per cent of cases, the father’s education level surpasses that of the mother, while the mother’s exceeded the fathers’ in just 15 per cent of cases. Ukraine thus presents a peculiar case where the mother’s educational level is the same or higher than that of the father’s in the majority of cases (86.3%). This is especially significant given that in many sociological studies the influence of parents’ educational qualifications on children’s education has only been measured based on the fathers’ education, and not on that of mothers. The presented data, however, show that many mothers exceed fathers in their level of education attained and thus the impact of mothers’ education on their children’s educations should necessarily be considered. Gender Differences in Areas of Study and Occupations Findings from the Youth in Transition Survey show significant gender differences in the subject areas that young men and women choose to focus on in their studies. The survey approached this question using an index of dissimilarity, that is, an index showing what proportion of men or women would need to change their area of study in order to achieve equal gender distribution in the range of study areas.6 As noted earlier, for the purposes of the survey, this range was divided into nine generalized categories (listed in the left-most column of Table 11.3). According to the YIT data, the index of dissimilarity for the nine categories equals 32 per cent: this means that one-third of young men or women aged 15 to 34 would have to change their area of education in order to achieve gender parity in those areas. We can also note that gender segregation would be even higher if the fields and branches of education were classified in more detail, with each of the sub-branches having a different gender profile. This has been shown to be the case in Smyth’s (2002) study of a number of European countries. Based on these results, we can divide the areas of education in Table 11.3 by the intensity of their gendering as being areas of ‘female intensity’ (more than 60% female), ‘mixed intensity’ (40% to 60% female), or ‘male intensity’ (below 40% female). Thus, health and welfare is far and away the most female-intensive area of study in Ukraine

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 289 Table 11.3. Distribution of Young Men and Women across Areas of Education Area of Education

Men (%)

Women (%)

N

General programs

49

51

498

Education

28

72

306

Humanities and arts

21

79

121

Social sciences, business, and law

24

76

834

Sciences

40

60

94

Engineering, manufacturing, and construction

73

27

1,009

Agriculture

60

40

153

Health and welfare

11

89

186

Services

41

59

353

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007).

(89% female), followed by three areas where women dominate in the classroom with more than 70% representation: humanities and arts (79%); social sciences, business, and law (76%); and education (72). According to these results, the most male-intensive area of study in Ukraine is engineering, manufacturing, and construction, with just 27 per cent female participation, followed by agriculture, which is at the threshold between male-intensive and mixed, at 40 per cent female participation. The same breakdown (60%–40%), though reversed, can be seen in the sciences, where the survey found that 60% of those choosing science were women. Thus, the YIT findings support other evidence that institutions of higher education remain internally gender-segregated in Ukraine. For example, according to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (DKSU 2009), among young Ukrainian men it is typical to choose military sciences (99% of all university students acquiring this profession are male), transportation (80% men), national security (80%), computer sciences (74%), and engineering (74%). Young women, meanwhile, show a preference for professions in the social sciences (79% of all university students choosing this major are women), humanities (78% women), arts (77%), medicine (73%), and pedagogy (72%). Also in parallel with the Youth in Transition Survey results, according to the same Statistics Committee study, specialties such as natural sciences

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Table 11.4. Distribution of Young Men and Women by Occupation

Occupational Fields

Men (%)

Women (%)

N

Legislators, senior officials, and managers

52

48

146

Professionals

29

71

667

Technicians and associate professionals

43

57

312

Clerks

18

82

188

Service workers and shop and market salespeople

29

71

687

Skilled agricultural and fisheries workers

76

24

50

Craftspeople and related workers

79

21

536

Plant and machine operators and assemblers

84

16

251

Non-skilled workers

67

33

335

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007).

and agriculture are the most gender-neutral. One difference between the YIT results and those found by the Statistics Committee is that the latter study found legal studies to also be relatively gender-neutral, while Table 11.3 shows that the present survey found law to be among the more female-intensive areas of study. However, this is likely explicable by the fact that the YIT analysed only a sample of the population, not the whole population, as the Statistics Committee did. Table 11.3 reveals a gender typology by area of education, which is similar to that of other European nations, especially in Eastern Europe (Smyth 2002). More similarities with Europe emerge with regard to occupation by gender. Categorized according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations, or ISCO-88 scale (listed in the left-most column in Table 11.4), the YIT survey found that, as in other European settings, agricultural, handicraft, machine operating, and non-skilled (manual) jobs tend to be dominated by men in Ukraine, while women tend to predominate in professional, clerical, and service jobs. Two occupational fields, senior officials and managers, and technicians and associate professionals, are gender-mixed, which reflects patterns of gender distribution in other European countries. Ukraine diverges from other settings, however, with regard to senior officials and managers, a category of occupations that is mixed in Ukraine, while more male-intensive in other European countries (Smyth 2002, 15).

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 291

Despite these numbers, we know that men’s average income in Ukraine, as measured by the industry average for the country, dramatically exceeded the corresponding level for women (by 21.7%) as of 2007. Although some variation exists across sectors, men receive higher remuneration than their female counterparts, even in so-called female-intensive sectors. For instance, in the educational sphere (where 77% of those employed are women) and health care and social welfare (83% women) average earnings by men are nonetheless 15 per cent higher than women’s earnings (DKSU 2008). Thus, there is a disconnect between the YIT survey findings, which show women working across occupational fields in high numbers – sometimes higher than the European average – and the financial gains they receive based on this integration. Social Background and Class Status of Higher Education Graduates: Gender Aspects Higher-level education is normally attained by persons between 24 and 34 years of age. By this age, the majority of young people who wish to (and can) achieve higher education will have done so. Table 11.5 narrows the survey results to this demographic of respondents in order to assess these Ukrainians’ levels of educational attainment and that of their parents. What emerges most strongly here is the very large proportion of women (51.9%) and men (52.9%) in this age group who have completed the highest levels of education. If we compare this to what the respondents said about their parents’ level of education, we can see that only about half as many mothers (25.2%) and fathers (23.9%) had attained such a high level. Table 11.5 also shows that respondents found themselves in the lower categories of educational attainment two to three times less often than their parents; this points to a significant increase in opportunities for higher education in Ukraine. If we look at the values for the two highest levels of education, almost 80 per cent of young people in this age range thus have either lower-level or full higher education. To break this intergenerational change down in terms of gender, we need to assess what educational opportunities, or what level of educational mobility, is flowing down to young women versus young men from fathers and mothers depending on the parents’ social status (as measured by mothers’ and fathers’ own educational attainment). Tables 11.6 and 11.7 present the proportions of intergenerational relationships between each of the parents and their children’s educational

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Table 11.5. Educational Attainment of Men and Women Aged 24–34 and Their Parents

Educational Attainment Incomplete secondary or less

Women and Men Aged 24–34

Their Parents

Women (%)

Mother (%)

1.7*

Men (%) 3.3*

Father (%)

7.8

8.7

Full secondary

17.5

19.1

28.5**

35.5**

Lower-level higher education

28.9*

24.8*

38.5**

31.8**

Full higher education

51.9

52.9

25.2

23.9

N

989

645

1,776

1,616

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007). *P = .05. **P = .001.

status. In other words, they show the level of educational mobility (or immobility) of the sons and daughters relative to their fathers and mothers. Table 11.6 shows that the majority of children whose father had at most either an incomplete or complete secondary education display upward educational mobility (cells above the diagonal). These respondents were more or less evenly distributed among the three higher levels of educational attainment. Sons, however, ended their education at the full secondary level more often than daughters, who more often continued on to obtain a higher education. Nearly one-third of respondents whose fathers had a lower-level higher education maintained their father’s achievement by completing this same level of education themselves, while many more, 52 per cent of men and 58 per cent of women, were upwardly mobile in this regard, rising to the level of full higher education. A smaller number expressed downward mobility, entering the labour market with less education than their father (cells below the diagonal). This was true twice as often for sons as it was for daughters. Finally, among the children of the top educated fathers, 70 per cent managed to reproduce this same full higher educational level. A minority finished at the level of an incomplete or lower-level higher education (more often daughters) or full secondary.

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 293 Table 11.6. Educational Mobility of Men (Upper Part of Table) and Women (Lower Part of Table) Compared with Their Fathers (% by Row) Men and Women Aged 24–34 Father’s Educational Attainment

Incomplete secondary or less

Full secondary

Lower-level higher education

Full higher education

Incomplete secondary or less

13.5 11.6

37.8 29.8

21.6 27.3

27.0 32.2

42 85

Full secondary

4.3 2.7

34.8 30.4

29.7 31.2

31.2 35.6

202 310

Lower-level higher education

2.4 0.6

18.2 10.7

27.3 30.5

52.2 58.2

169 281

Full higher education

2.6 1.0

10.5 8.3

15.7 20.6

71.2 70.1

160 187

N

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007).

Table 11.7 shows a parallel comparison between survey respondents’ educational achievements and that of their mothers. Immediately, we can see similar results emerge, indicating that a mother’s education is as important as a father’s for her children’s educational mobility. From these two tables it is evident that educational mobility processes are rather gender-blind for young people in Ukrainian society. What is more, mobility rates for women and men are approximately the same as in other developed countries (Pfeffer 2007). Overall, social background and parental education are much more influential for children’s educational opportunities than is their gender. In order to determine the probability that children will obtain higher education depending on the educational levels of their mothers and fathers, I have applied an ordinal regression. What I found was that young men’s and women’s social background essentially determines their chances to obtain a full higher education. So, for example, the probability of children whose father and/or mother have a higher education obtaining the same educational level is approximately 80 per cent (see Table 11.8). At the same time, only about one-third of children who have a loweducated father have similar educational prospects.

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Table 11.7. Educational Mobility of Men (Upper Part of Table) and Women (Lower Part of Table) Compared with Their Mothers (% by Row) Men and Women Aged 24–34 Mother’s Educational Attainment

Incomplete secondary or less

Full secondary

Lower-level higher education

Full higher education

Incomplete secondary or less

15.4 11.2

37.2 39.7

17.9 21.6

29.5 27.6

42 89

Full secondary

3.9 2.7

41.8 34.9

24.6 31.9

29.7 30.5

171 281

Lower-level higher education

3.7 0.9

23.1 12.9

29.9 34.9

43.2 51.2

225 371

Full higher education

2.3 1.2

10.8 5.9

16.7 16.5

70.3 76.5

181 214

N

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007)

If we factor in place of residence, we see that geographical origins moderate the influence of social background as measured by parental educational levels, but not crucially. Thus, children from rural areas (31% of respondents in the YIT survey) have much better chances of obtaining a higher education, as long as their parents have already reached that level, compared with children from bigger towns and cities (69% of YIT survey respondents) whose parents have only a secondary education. Apparently, living in a big town or city, with their almost unlimited opportunities to access information sources, libraries, and additional education, does not on its own equalize educational opportunities. Social background remains the determining factor. Along with education, social background can be measured by an individual’s class status. The YIT survey results show that although men and women have similar distributions of educational qualifications, there are some gender differences with respect to social class. These are outlined in Table 11.9, which uses the Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocarero (EGP) approach to measure class using six categories of occupational fields (outlined at the beginning of this chapter). As we can see, even at the same level of education, men and women survey respondents identified themselves as belonging to different classes. Young female respondents with a full secondary education

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 295 Table 11.8. Probability of Completing a Full Higher Education Depending on a Parent’s Level of Education Women and Men Aged 24–34 Men

Educational Attainment Incomplete secondary or less

Full secondary

Lower-level higher education

Full higher education

Women

Mother

.31

.33

Father

.38

.40

Mother

.35

.36

Father

.39

.43

Mother

.58

.57

Father

.64

.62

Mother

.80

.80

Father

.77

.75

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007).

said they belonged to class III (routine non-manual labour) five times more often than men with the same educational level. At the same time, men more often appear to belong to classes V + VI and VIIab (qualified and non-qualified manual labour). The main trend with regard to the class of women with lower-level higher education is their concentration within class III, routine non-manual labour (at 43%) and class II, lower service, including lower-grade professionals (at 28%). Over half of men with an incomplete secondary education said they belong to classes V + VI and VIIab (manual labour). Evidently, a considerable number of young males are overeducated for the manual occupations they perform, especially semi- and non-skilled labour. Similarly, many young women are overeducated for the routine non-manual jobs they perform. Regretfully, until now there has been no rigorous investigation at the national level into this issue of correspondence between education and type of employment in Ukraine. The conclusions that I suggest here are indirect, since they are based not on the type of employment data per se, but rather on data about class belonging, which in turn, are based on the type of employment attained. Full higher education, meanwhile, opens doors to occupations and employment statuses that belong to the highest classes in the EGP scheme, I and II, or upper and lower service classes. In general,

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Table 11.9. Social Class Status by Educational Attainment and Gender (% by row) Social Class Status of Women and Men Aged 24–34 Educational Attainment

I

II

III

IVabc

V + VI

VIIab

n

Men (N = 585) Full secondary

0.0

0.9

7.9

10.5

36.8

43.9

114

Lower-level higher education

9.3

15.9

11.9

5.3

29.8

27.8

151

37.2

32.2

7.8

5.9

11.6

5.3

320

Full higher education Women (N = 881) Full secondary

1.3

5.5

41.7

2.0

29.1

20.5

151

Lower-level higher education

11.5

28.0

42.9

0.4

9.6

7.7

261

Full higher education

28.4

48.2

17.5

1.9

2.8

1.3

469

Source: KIIS, Youth in Transition Survey in Ukraine (2007).

occupations of almost 77 per cent of young women and 70 per cent of men who had attained a full higher education were within these service classes. However, there exists a noticeable gender disparity. Young men said they belong to the upper service class (I) more often relative to young women with the same level of education, who tended to say they occupy positions belonging to the lower service class (II). These positions have lower pay and worse career prospects. Women are thus receiving less remuneration and face weaker prospects in the labour market based on the same level of education. It also means that equally educated woman reach ‘the glass ceiling’ more quickly and more often than men. We can therefore conclude that despite gender equality in access to education, in modern Ukraine, marked gender differences can be observed between women and men who have received the same level of education. One of the possible explanations of such an outcome may be that men and women tend to choose different areas of study, which predetermines their participation in particular occupations and labour market segments to a larger extent than does their level of education. Thus, the more conventional a woman’s educational specialty is, the lower her income will be, and the poorer her career opportunities and social status. Yet this explanation, although valid, does not account for

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 297

all the evidence, since men who hold accreditation in the same educational field as women tend to achieve greater career advancement as well. Therefore, the stable differences in socioeconomic achievement between men and women in Ukraine cannot be fully explained either by their levels of education or their educational field of choice. Culturally embedded gender stereotypes associated with different positions within the labour market also play a role. Reproduction of occupational gender segregation is also determined by the lack of efficient state gender policies, including educational policies, equal opportunities policies, anti-discrimination policies, and policy to enable a balance between family and work life, including provisions for part-time work and publicly funded child care. Conclusions Equal educational opportunities, regardless of an individual’s social background or gender, are tightly connected with the ideas of social justice and social equality in developed democratic countries. They are generally regarded to be an inherent part of social integration, stability, and ongoing societal development. This chapter utilized recent data from a large survey, Youth in Transition, to assess gender equality at multiple levels of the Ukrainian educational system, with particular attention paid to access to higher education, structural characteristics of the educational process itself, and the relationship between educational attainment, class, and occupational advancement. As we have seen, the data highlight significant gender differences in these areas, as well as a number of negative tendencies in educational opportunities and accessibility in contemporary Ukrainian society. As noted in brief at the outset, four trends were clear. First, gender is not a significant determinant of access to educational opportunities for Ukrainians. All levels of education are equally accessible for both men and women. What is more, in the cohort under investigation, women actually surpassed men in terms of attaining higher education. Second, social origin, as defined by one’s parents’ education and place of residence, does directly impact educational opportunities. This inequality holds across genders. With regard to the impact of parents’ education, in particular, a mother’s educational qualifications influence her child’s opportunities for educational advancement as much as a father’s do. Third, despite equal access to education by gender, the educational system remains unequal. Gender differences are easily

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observable in the choice of area of study, a reality reflected in other European countries, and especially Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, engineering, manufacturing, and construction courses are male-dominated, while education, humanities and the arts, social sciences, business, and law, and health and welfare courses are female-dominated. Finally, compared with women, men in this cohort held higher professional and managerial positions across all sectors and areas of employment regardless of their chosen field of education or their level of education. Thus, gender inequalities in socioeconomic class remain and will continue unless the state intervenes to redress them. Returning to the observation made at the beginning of this chapter that higher education in Ukraine has expanded at a rapid rate, we can conclude that this expansion has not been accompanied by equalization of opportunities, including the chance to obtain higher education regardless of social background, or the possibility of enjoying the results of such education regardless of gender. One’s chances of attaining higher education are much better for young women and men whose fathers and mothers have already reached those levels. The data show this to be true even for secondary education, which has been compulsory for the late Soviet and post-Soviet cohorts. Gender, meanwhile, remains an important factor in what young Ukrainians choose to study, what kinds of jobs they get afterwards, what they can expect to earn from those jobs, and how far up the ladder they can expect to climb before hitting a glass ceiling.

NOTES 1 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology is a private, for-profit research institution. Further information is available at http://www.kiis.com.ua/. 2 According to the CIS data, between 2000 and 2002, the corresponding number for Germany was 262; Japan, 313; Italy, 314; Austria, 327; Canada, 394; Sweden, 404; Norway, 423; Poland, 466; United States, 494; and Finland, 540 (Council for Cooperation in Education 2005). 3 To keep the results statistically significant I have combined the original 1a, 1b, and 1c categories of the schema into a single 1abc category. Similarly, I have united the 2a and 2b categories into a single 2ab. 4 Unlike in many other countries, both developed and developing, where only nine years of education are compulsory.

Education, Social Background, and Occupation 299 5 This can be explained by the fact that not all village schools provide full secondary education, and those students who do not want to or have no possibility to go to school in a different location often quit their education altogether. This situation is also perpetuated by the fact that there is no monitoring of this issue by the state, and there are no official sanctions for persons who decide not to get full secondary education. 6 The index of dissimilarity is calculated by summing up the absolute differences in the proportion of females and males in each educational area and dividing the total by two.

REFERENCES Breen, R., and J. Jonsson. 2005. Inequality of Opportunity in Comparative Perspective: Recent Research on Educational Attainment and Social Mobility. Annual Review of Sociology 31: 233–43. Council for Cooperation in Education. 2005. Vysshieie proffesionalnoie obrazovanije (2004/2005 uchebnyi god) [Higher Professional Education (2004/2005 School Year)]. Soviet po sotrudnichestvu v oblasti obrazovanija gosudarstvuchastnikov SNG [Council on Educational Cooperation of CIS Countries]. Available at http://www.cis.unibel.by/index.php?module=subjectsandfun c=viewpageandpageid=157 (accessed 1 March 2009). Derzhavnyj komitet statystyky Ukrainy/State Statistics Committee of Ukraine (DKSU). 2008. Dity, Zhinky ta Simya v Ukraini [Children, Women and Family in Ukraine]. Statystychnyj zbirnyk [Statistical Bulletin]. Kyiv: DKSU. – 2009. Osnovni pokaznyky dijalnosti vyshchykh navchalnykh zakladiv Ukrainy na pochatok 2008/09 navchalnogo rokuy: Statystychnyj biuleten [Basic Indicators of Institutions of Higher Education in Ukraine by the Beginning of the 2008/09 School Year: Statistical Bulletin]. Kyiv: DKSU. Domanski, H. 2006. Barriers of the Selection to Secondary and UniversityLevel Education. Polish Sociological Review 4: 471–87. Erikson, R, and J. Jonsson, eds. 1996. Can Education Be Equalized? The Swedish Case in Comparative Perspective. Boulder: Westview. Ishida, H., W. Muller, and J. Rider. 1995. Class Origin, Class Destination, and Education: A Cross-National Study of Ten Industrial Nations. American Journal of Sociology 101(1): 145–93. Konstantinivskij, D., V. Vakhshtain, D. Kurakin, and J. Roshchnina. 2006. Dostupnost kachestvennogo obshchego obrazovanija v Rossij:

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Vozmozhnosti i ogranichenija [Availability of Qualitative General Education in Russia: Opportunities and Restrictions]. Voprosy obrazovanija [Educational Issues] 2: 186–201. Pfeffer, F. 2007. Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Comparative Perspective. CDE Working Paper No. 2007–09. Madison: Center for Demography and Ecology. – 2008. Persistent Inequality in Educational Attainment and Its Institutional Context. European Sociological Review 24(5): 543–65. Shavit, Y., and H.P. Blossfeld, eds. 1993. Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries. Boulder: Westview. Shavit, Y., and W. Muller, eds. 2003. From School to Work: A Comparative Study of Educational Qualifications and Occupational Destinations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smyth, E. 2002. Gender Differentiation and Early Labour Market Integration across Europe. Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) Working Paper no. 46. Available at http://www.mzes.uni.mannheim.de/publications/wp/wp-46.pdf (accessed 10 March 2009).

PART IV Emerging Issues

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12 Gender and Health in Ukraine o l e na ha nk ivsky

The collapse of the Soviet Union has had enormous implications for health in Ukraine (Cockerham et al. 2006; Gilmore et al. 2002; McKee 2005). As with all former Soviet states, slow socioeconomic progress coupled with deteriorating social security and health care systems have contributed to high morbidity, lower life expectancy, and growing health inequities within the population. According to the World Bank (2009a), ‘Ukrainians are not only dying younger but also have fewer years lived in full health relative to their European counterparts’ (p. 11), resulting in what has been referred to as a national health crisis. All citizens, but especially those who are most vulnerable (e.g., people with disabilities, rural residents, refugees, and ethnic minorities), who had grown to depend on the state for their health care, now often lack the knowledge, experience, and capacity to promote their own good health (Gander and Magdyuk 2006). Moreover, the current state of the health care system and ineffective policies and programs have contributed to specific gendered health implications, especially among Ukrainian men, whose life expectancy is among the worst in the world. As has been highlighted elsewhere, ‘There is a need for raising public awareness of important health issues, one of the most serious being the health situation for men’ (SIDA 2003, 71). In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the current situation in Ukraine, outline selected leading health issues and challenges, and critically examine the responses of the Ukrainian government, international organizations, and health researchers to understand how to best address the health crisis. I will argue that proposed reforms to date are inadequate as they focus primarily on the health care system and modification of high-risk and health-compromising behaviours,

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without linking these to the social context of people’s lives, and in particular, the social determinants of health (SDH) – an internationally recognized framework for working towards better health and health equity. I argue that for transformative change to occur in Ukraine, policy solutions need to be framed within a comprehensive SDH framework that allows for a better understanding of how gender and other important factors affect the way people live, their consequent chance of illness, and their risk of premature death (WHO 2008). At the same time, the presentation of such an overview is also intended to point to specific areas, which are pressing population health issues that require not only changes at the level of policy but also the development of strategic programs of research to produce the necessary knowledge base and evidence to fully inform policy reform in the Ukrainian health sector. Background Ukraine is considered to be in a demographic crisis because of its high death rate relative to its low birth rate. In 2007, the country’s population was declining at the fourth fastest rate in the world (CIA 2008), a rate that is currently the highest in Europe (World Bank 2009a; emphasis added). While the overall health status of the general population was fairly good before the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukrainians now spend almost 13 per cent of their lives in poor health, compared with Poles (8%) or Slovenians and Czechs (9%) (pp. 7–8). The average life expectancy is now 62.3 years for men and 73.6 years for women, a decline in life expectancy of approximately 4.5 years for men and 2.2 years for women (Skoryk 2007). The statistics show that the burden of transformation has been gendered, with men being disproportionately affected (Skoryk 2007; World Bank 2009a; SIDA 2003). The life expectancy gap of almost 12 years is a significant gender issue and, when compared with males and females in the European Union (EU), the life expectancy in Ukraine is 14 and 8.2 years lower respectively (World Bank 2009a). Within the territory of the former Soviet Union, the situation is worse only in Russia and Kazakhstan. The highest at-risk cohort is workers who are between 40 and 60 years of age. To illustrate: Ukrainian men age 40 years and older have a 31 per cent risk of dying before their 60th birthday (Word Press 2008). Men’s mortality in Ukraine is comparable to countries with a five times lower gross domestic product

Gender and Health 305

(GDP) per capita than in Ukraine (World Bank 2009a). In turn, this results in significant human and economic costs for individuals, their families, and the nation as a whole. The outlook for Eastern Europe including Ukraine remains bleak, especially for men. For example, data from the Global Burden of Disease Report indicate that either no change or indeed a further decrease in life expectancy at birth among men of the ‘former socialistic economies’ of Europe is expected for 2020 (cited in Weidner and Cain 2003, 768). At the same time, according to the 2009 World Bank report An Avoidable Tragedy: Combating Ukraine’s Health Crisis (2009a), if diseases were cured in their early stages, then 80 per cent of deaths could have been prevented among working-age men and 30 per cent among working-age women. In fact, the World Bank estimates that about 50 per cent of deaths under the age of 75 in Ukraine could be prevented with adequate prevention and treatment (p. 9). Major Health Issues: Selected Examples Health challenges in Ukraine include a number of health-compromising behaviours, as well as a number of non-communicable and chronic diseases. It has been determined that 94 per cent of deaths are caused by three risk factors: (1) smoking, (2) alcohol, and (3) violation of safety requirements (World Bank 2009a). The prevalence of smoking is very high among the Ukrainian population; more than 62 per cent of the population above the age of 15 are regular smokers (p. 9), and smoking is a growing problem among disadvantaged socioeconomic groups, among youth and younger women, and among those who live in Eastern Ukraine (World Bank 2009a; Ukrainian Ministry of Health [MoH] 2009). In terms of smoking, Ukraine, and in particular its Southeastern region, has the highest rates of tobacco use in all the former Soviet republics (Poznyak et al. 2002). Interestingly, medical workers smoke only slightly less than the general public does (MoH 2009). Government interventions have included a state program (2008–12) on decreasing tobacco use, educational courses in Grades 1 to 9, and awareness campaigns, all of which have had little impact on the overall rates of smoking (MoH 2009). Moreover, the Ukraine – World Mental Health Survey found that one out of every three men and one out of every twelve women consume alcohol heavily (Webb et al. 2005). Similarly, Bromet et al. (2005) noted that 26.5 per cent of the male population of Ukraine reported an

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alcohol disorder in their lifetime. Alcohol has been found to cause 12.3 per cent of all disability adjusted life years (DALYs), which represent the sum of years of potential life lost due to premature mortality and the years of productive life lost due to disability, in Ukraine (World Bank 2009a, 9) and 13.6 per cent of deaths (p. 30). Even though national action plans for tobacco control and reduction of alcohol consumption exist, there has been little in the way of effective implementation (p. 30). Furthermore, as the World Bank (2009a) has reported, noncommunicable diseases and chronic conditions, often linked to highrisk behaviours, including excessive drinking and tobacco use, are responsible for the bulk of mortality in Ukraine. For example, it has also been reported that the majority of poisoning and trauma cases, including workplace and car accidents, result from alcohol abuse (SIDA 2003). Additionally, there has been a sharp rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other diseases directly related to alcohol and tobacco consumption (Gander and Magdyuk 2006). At present, the primary cause of health decline in Eastern Europe appears to be a dramatic increase in heart disease (primarily coronary heart disease), which has assumed epidemic proportions (Weidner and Cain 2003, 768). In Ukraine, ischemic heart disease was responsible for nearly 40 per cent of all deaths in 2005 (World Bank 2009a, 21). It should also be noted, however, that communicable diseases, most notably HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) have reached epidemic proportions and are a growing threat to the health of the Ukrainian nation. Ukraine is presently at the epicentre of HIV infection in Europe, with an estimated prevalence of nearly 500,000, or 1.5 per cent, of the adult population (MoH et al. 2006). Although the government has implemented national program on the prevention and cure of HIV infection (for 2009–13), the virus continues to spread within the general population, and this has resulted in a substantial increase in HIV infection among women and children born to infected women. More than one-third (36%) of people who live with HIV infection are women of reproductive age (Skoryk 2007). In response, the government of Ukraine has developed what can be considered as generally sound legislation and policies; however, these are not always effectively implemented or adequately resourced. Moreover, the lack of awareness and correct information about the disease, as well as continuing stigma and discrimination against those who are diagnosed

Gender and Health 307

with HIV/AIDS, have impeded prevention and intervention efforts (Hankivsky 2009). The scale of epidemics continued to grow between 2004 and 2007, increasing by 10 per cent to 15 per cent annually (Skoryk 2007). In terms of tuberculosis, despite the fact that this problem is a state priority under the control of the president of Ukraine, the spread of tuberculosis and mortality caused by it are at the epidemic level. The levels of the spread of TB and mortality due to it are eight to ten times higher than in most EU countries.1 Several factors influence the difficulty in containing tuberculosis. According to Vassall et al. (2009), reduction in service funding, reduced economic status of the population, and the concurrent spread of HIV/AIDS have all led to increases in cases of TB (see also Drobniewski et al. 2005). Tuberculosis epidemics are much influenced by the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. More than 30 per cent of those with HIV/AIDS have tuberculosis, and about 50 per cent of them die from it. Reported prevalence rates have more than doubled since the collapse of the Soviet Union, from 32 per 100,000 in 1990 to 80.9 per 100,000 in 2004 (Vassall et al. 2009). Similar to the situation with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis has not been curtailed, largely because of the lack of effective and preventive health care measures (Betliy et al. 2007). Responses and Current Challenges Much of the demographic decline in Ukraine is fuelled by an ineffective health care system and the rise of unhealthy lifestyles (World Bank 2009a). In evaluating the current situation in Ukraine, Rekha Menon, senior economist at the World Bank, has recently concluded that ‘compared with cities in other European countries, Ukrainians lead less healthy lives and receive poorer support from health services’ and that ‘premature mortality among adult Ukrainian males could be avoided through behaviour changes but public awareness of health risks is low. The solution to this challenge is complex, and involves a combination of focus on primary health care and prevention and broader system wide changes in how health services are delivered and financed’ (p. 1). To date, there have been numerous initiatives aimed at improving the health of the Ukrainian population, including reform of the health care system. In the past twenty years, the health care system has shifted from a reasonably effective curative system aimed at serving the entire

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population to a system that is broken, where little investment is made into primary health care services, and where even less investment in terms of health policies and promotion prevents the system from responding to contemporary health demands. In essence, it has changed very little in recent years (Betliy et al. 2007; Semigina and Kishkina 2006; De Bell and Carter 2005; Lekhan et al. 2004), and it is unable to respond to the current and changing health needs of the population. In 2006, government spending on health care as a proportion of GDP was 7 per cent (WHO 2009). However, most spending (86%) is allocated to hospitals and specialized facilities. Nevertheless, those who work in the system complain of inadequate funding, especially in terms of buying new equipment and medical supplies, poor sanitary conditions, difficulties in recruiting and retaining health professions, and the low salaries offered to health care workers (Gatehouse 2009; Abbott and Wallace 2007; Betliy et al. 2007). A major obstacle to health care reform in Ukraine is the lack of a skilled workforce in health care management and public health. This is not surprising given that there is currently only one school of public health in the National University of KyivMohyla Academy and twenty-two medical schools in the country. For citizens, the health care system – intended to be state funded under the Constitution of Ukraine – now imposes private payment for all treatment and services. The cost of services is prohibitive for most Ukrainian citizens, especially those in lower income groups (Gatehouse 2009; World Bank 2009a; Abbott and Wallace 2007; Betliy et al. 2007). In 2005, around 13 per cent of households reported that they were unable to access necessary health care services; 77 per cent claimed this was due to the costs of consulting a doctor, and 95 percent reported being unable to purchase the necessary medical devices (Betliy et al. 2007). According to the World Bank, ‘Ukraine’s health system is complex, inefficient, highly inequitable and of low quality’ (2009a, 9). The situation is only worsening in the current global financial crisis and political turmoil because of the drop in value of the Ukrainian currency and significantly reduced budgets for health care spending, especially in terms of buying power for medicines by the state. Beyond the formal system itself, and in addition to the plans and programs targeting tobacco and alcohol use, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis mentioned above, Ukraine has attempted a number of other initiatives at the national level. As early as 1992, Ukraine established Principles of Legislation on Health Care, which were aimed at regulating all aspects of the development and implementation of health

Gender and Health 309

policy in Ukraine, as a way of meeting international standards and human rights obligations. According to this legislation, the Ministry of Health is responsible for the following: (1) setting standards for health care provisions; (2) defining rules for accreditation of public and private health care establishments; (3) licensing health care professionals and pharmaceutical producers and distributors; and (4) determining the list of pharmaceuticals that can be purchased by public health care establishments. Commenting on the implementation of the Principles of Legislation on Health Care, Betliy et al. (2007) have observed that ‘not all its provisions are fulfilled in real life’ (p. 10). In 2000, the president of Ukraine approved the Concept of Health Care Development in Ukraine, which recognizes the need to take into account population health care needs and setting standards in the health care sector. In 2002, the first national health strategy, ‘Health of the Nation 2002–2011,’ was adopted, in accordance with European World Health Organization (WHO) standards and policy; however, no financial resources were allocated for this program, leaving its implementation to local governments (SIDA 2003). In December 2005, a Presidential Decree on Urgent Measures Regarding Health Care System Reform was introduced. As part of the current President’s Economic Reform Plan (2010) Ukraine has embarked on the most ambitions health reform plan since independence (Tarantino el al. 2011). Its goals are to optimize the network of health care institutions, reform health financing, and strengthen the system of standards and quality control at the central level. Significantly in its current conception – Health of the Nation: Ukraninian Dimension Program 2012–2020 – the government is beginning to acknowledge the significance of social determinants of health. While this recent initiative is promising, its development will have to be carefully monitored and evaluated. As the World Bank director for Ukraine has recently cautioned, ‘Ukraine has made repeated attempts to launch health sector reforms, but their implementation has been slow and fragmented’ (World Bank 2009b, 1). Importance of a Wider Perspective: The Social Determinants of Health Although having an effective health care system is important, the health outcomes of a population are not completely dependent on the

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state of such a system alone. As in all other jurisdictions, they are influenced by the ‘circumstances in which people grow, live, work, and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness,’ and ‘the conditions in which people live and die are, in turn, shaped by political, social, and economic forces’ (WHO 2008, iii). Thus, a population health approach takes into account the complex interactions among factors that contribute to health. While lists of social determinants of health vary by jurisdiction, they typically include factors such as income and social status, social supports, education, economic and social environments, personal health practices and coping skills, early life experiences, genetics, health services, gender, and culture. And in post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine, the social determinants of health are of particular importance given the rapid and fundamental changes to the fabric of Ukrainian society and of its economy. The changes brought about as a result of the collapse of communism are evidenced in growing poverty, social and economic inequities, and rising unemployment, crime, and violence. In their study on health and well-being in post-Soviet Ukraine, Abbott and Wallace (2007) identified cultural trauma to be a consequence of transition, leading to a breakdown of social trust and agency and contributing to insecurity and uncertainty in daily life. To illustrate, they report: They [Ukrainians] talk repeatedly about the daily struggle for survival – poverty; poor health; unemployment; a decline in trust; a decline in close relationships with neighbours; an increase in selfishness; politicians who do not care about them; not being able to afford a good diet, clothes, or education for their children or to pay the charges for medical treatment; an increase in consumption of alcohol and in cigarette smoking, including drinking and smoking by women and young people; and an increase in the use of hard drugs by the young. The present is compared unfavourably with the past. Young people are especially concerned about the lack of employment opportunities and often report poor health. They also complain about the environment, the poor water supply, the lack of street cleaning in the towns, pollution from cars and the impact of nuclear accidents. (p. 186)

A major outcome of such changes, especially in terms of the new political order, is that citizens feel unable to improve their lives and, in turn, their health (p. 183). As one male respondent explained: ‘The transition to democracy brings about the problem of the loss of paternalism.

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That is, we used to know that the state would provide a flat, work and so on and now the state’s guardianship has vanished. Now we are on our own. We must rely on ourselves – but we can’t and we become depressed’ (p. 188). Abbott and Wallace conclude that residents of Ukraine perceive their living conditions and health as very poor and that ‘there is a strong interaction between the poor quality of life after the economic and political collapse and the views of individual citizens about their ability to take responsibility for their health’ (p. 181). These findings are supported by an earlier study, which noted that 43 per cent of women and 25 per cent of men reported their health as poor or very poor (Gilmore et al. 2002). The low material situation and control over life as a result of the changing political and economic circumstances were found to be key contributing factors (ibid.). Although these developments signal the need for a broader conceptualization of health in the Ukrainian context, one that is consistent with a population health perspective that prioritizes the social determinants of health, Semigina and Kishkina (2006) have observed that ‘this is a challenging matter for Ukrainian health policy since it was and still is predominantly medically (treatment) oriented and devoted to the advancement of medical care services’ (p. 28). Moreover, these tendencies are replicated in a number of evaluations of the health care crisis, which focus on how to correct deficiencies and improve the efficacy of the health care sector (Betliy et al. 2007; Semigina and Kishkina 2006; Haidayev 2007). As argued in a recent study by the World Health Organization (2008), ‘Traditionally, society has looked to the health care sector to deal with its concerns about health and disease. Certainly, maldistribution of health care – not delivering care to those who most need it – is one of the social determinants of health. But the high burden of illness responsible for appalling premature loss of life arises in large part because of the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. In their turn, poor and unequal living conditions are the consequence of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics’ (p. 1). A number of scholars have called for more attention to ‘healthy lifestyles’ among the population (Kryszyna et al. 2009; Haidayev 2007), as well as for more research on preventive care (Semigina and Kishkina 2006). The World Bank (2009a) has similarly asserted that ‘many of the causes of premature-death and disease in Ukraine are linked to riskfactors which are largely modifiable and preventable’ (p. 9). In turn, it has recommended the implementation of ‘a comprehensive disease

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management model’ (p. 10), although acknowledging that transformative changes cannot be achieved through the health care system alone but require intersectoral initiatives to modify the environment, behaviour, and health services (p. 38). This acknowledgment does point to the fact that, while many Ukrainians want to accept personal responsibility for their health, including leading healthier lives, ‘they do not see how to exercise this responsibility in their present economic circumstances’ (Abbott and Wallace 2007, 201). A medical expert interviewed in Abbott and Wallace’s 2007 study observed that ‘the main thing [to improve health] must be to improve the standard of living – it must be sufficient to satisfy the main needs of people. Then we could start talking about improving the state of health’ (p. 201). And in 2003, in the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) report on gender issues in Ukraine, the authors observed the interconnected nature of health and the economy by arguing that ‘if health does not improve, the risk is that the economy will continue to be an obstacle. If the economy does not recover, neither will the health of the population’ (SIDA 2003, 76). Not surprisingly, then, economic reform is often prioritized as a precursor for improving the health of Ukrainians (Haidayev 2007). Although a strong relationship exists between the state of the economy and health, it is not the only factor that influences and shapes population health outcomes. Arguably, ‘economic growth is without question important, particularly for poor countries, as it gives the opportunity to provide resources to invest in the improvement of the lives of their population. But growth itself, without appropriate social policies . . . brings little benefit to health equity’ (WHO 2008, 1). In addition, health strategies, which prioritize health care system reforms, lifestyle risk factors, and disease management, are important, especially given the state of the health care system in Ukraine and the epidemic in communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS. However, they may tend to marginalize the processes by which structural factors at both micro and macro levels shape health outcomes. Any prescriptive change is, however, inextricably part of complex social relations of gender, socioeconomic status, ability, ethnicity, and sexuality. Thus, a myriad of factors outside the health care system, and in addition to the state of the economy must be recognized as impacting on health, including morbidity and mortality. Not surprisingly, Weidner and Cain (2003) have argued that ‘the experience of Eastern Europe should serve as an important example

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of how societal-level change can influence the health of a population’ (p. 770). And of particular importance are the differential impacts that these changes have had. Weidner and Cain further elaborate by pointing out that ‘the speed with which mortality rates changed, especially for middle-aged men, clearly point away from a biological or genetic explanation for the changes that occurred. Rather an explanation may be found by looking at the social context of people’s lives during a period of great social unrest and examining their responses to it’ (p. 770). As such, there is a pressing need for Ukraine to approach its health crisis using a comprehensive social determinants of health framework. Others have made similar observations. According to McKee (2005), ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union was a massive natural experiment that has provided many insights that help our understanding of the determinants of population health’ (p. 374). Moreover, Gilmore et al. (2002) have argued that ‘knowledge of the determinants of health is needed to underpin our understanding of the potential causes of the decline of life expectancy and to develop appropriate health and social policy responses within Ukraine’ (p. 2179). And Betliy et al. (2007) have asserted that ‘policies should also aim at promoting the health of the population’ (p. 42). In these calls, less attention, however, is paid to gender as a key explanatory determinant or to how the order and power relations it creates in conjunction with other factors such as those associated with socioeconomic status, geography, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation, translate into damaging health consequences. Gender, Men’s Health, and Women’s Health In other jurisdictions, such as Canada, which is internationally recognized for its pioneering work in the area of social determinants of health, the inclusion of gender as a key health determinant was considered a crucial development in questioning previously unquestioned norms and structures that influence gendered experiences of health and which affect vulnerabilities to illness, health status, access to preventive and curative measures, burdens of ill health, and quality of care (Hankivsky and Christofferson 2008). Gender can be understood to be ‘the array of socially constructed roles and relationships, personality traits, attitudes, behaviours, values, relative power, and influence that society ascribes to two sexes based on a differential basis. Gender is relational, that is, gender roles and characteristics do not exist in isolation, but are defined in relation to one another’

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(Health Canada 2000, 14). Moreover, gender is also understood to be a primary signifier of power (Scott 1986). Accordingly, then, in the realm of health, gender should not be equated with women’s health as is often the case in health research and policy literatures (Bates et al. 2009; Hankivsky 2007). In the context of men’s lives, for example, gender, and the resultant social norms and cultural expectations of masculinity, affect men’s emotional and psychological health, and often cause risky and unhealthy behaviours that, in turn, lead to reduced longevity (Sen and Östlin 2007, 1). Societal ideals of masculinity, specifically, ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ have detrimental health effects. As Courtenay (2000) states, ‘In exhibiting or enacting hegemonic ideals with health behaviours, men reinforce strongly held cultural beliefs that men are more powerful and less vulnerable than women; that men’s bodies are structurally more efficient than and superior to women’s bodies; that asking for help and caring for one’s health are those for whom health and safety are irrelevant’ (p. 1398). In most countries, men have a lower life expectancy and higher morbidity in relation to some diseases (Lohan 2007; Tsuchiya and Williams 2005). However, the situation is more pronounced in Ukraine, with the gap between female and male life expectancies growing (World Bank 2009a), and yet the ways in which gender affects men’s health are still in nascent stages of investigation, recognition, and systematic policy response. In terms of the Ukrainian context, evidence on gender differences in health is still emerging. What is now widely acknowledged is the significant gap in life expectancy. However, there are varied other effects in relation to health, including the experiences of illnesses and diseases. For example, there are a number of diseases that prevail among the male population. These include myocardial (cardiac) infarction and strokes, blood circulation system illnesses, and infectious diseases (Skoryk 2007, 135). The risk of getting AIDS correlates with gender and age: youth, especially young men, are the primary risk group (p. 135). Gender extends to also influence the way in which the population responds to its environment. Perhaps the most significant impact of the transition period in Ukraine has been the changing labour participation among males. Rising unemployment rates have undermined men’s traditional role as breadwinner (Gander and Magdyuk 2006), resulting in a loss of identity, and leading to stress and other high-risk and health-compromising behaviours consistent with the stereotypical conceptions of masculinity (Weidner and Cain 2004), including

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tobacco use and increased alcohol consumption. For example, Ukraine belongs to the countries with the highest level of smokers among men (Skoryk 2007), and alcohol use has also been shown to contribute to higher rates of mental and behavioural disorders, among others, in men (SIDA 2003). A number of studies include qualitative data. Abbott and Wallace (2007) cite the following from a male respondent who links the use of alcohol and tobacco to the management of stress: ‘You have a drink and the headache is gone. So it is a kind of medicine and not harmful for a middle aged person. I can drink alcohol – if something is wrong I go drinking’ (p. 197) and, ‘Of course everyone is going to say that people smoke, drink and take drugs, but again you have to mention the problem of stress. It is tough for us. People get very depressed’ (p. 198). Significantly, more socially disadvantaged males are at particular risk for smoking, especially those with lower education, poorer economic situations, and less social support (Pomerleau et al. 2004, 1583). According to Abbott and Wallace (2007), ‘Men’s actions – their heavy and binge drinking and excessive smoking – can be seen as a way of reasserting some measure of control and choice over their lives and lifestyles: a way of coping with stress, and one that is culturally available and “scripted” for men but not for women’ (p. 184). Cockerham et al. (2006) have similarly noted that ‘in post Soviet societies it is appropriate masculine – but not feminine – behaviour to drink alcohol’ (p. 2392). Not surprisingly, heavy drinking as a response to stress is also linked to cultural male norms and male socializing (p. 2392). Moreover, in Ukraine, as in other jurisdictions, strong stereotypes among the population prevent men from disclosing or seeking help for their physical and mental health issues (Springer and Mouzon 2011; O’Brien et al. 2005; Weidner and Cain 2003). Consequently, when faced with the onset of disease, such as cardiovascular disease, this has dire consequences by delaying diagnosis and treatment. It also means that, as Weidner and Cain (2003) explain, ‘interventions solely aimed at reducing traditional coronary risk factors are unlikely to have a dramatic impact on the cardiovascular disease epidemic in Eastern Europe. Rather, behavioral interventions designed to increase social support, decrease depression, and improve lifestyle behaviors and coping skills appear to be more promising venues for prevention. Considering that these psychosocial factors are differentially linked to notions of masculinity and femininity, the design of gender-specific interventions may be required to yield effective outcomes’ (p. 770).

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Finally, it is also worth noting the gendered nature of suicidality in Ukraine; for example, the rate of increase in the number of suicides is greater in the male population than in the female. Geography also seems to play a role. At a 2006 parliamentary hearing, it was reported that in Crimea more men died from suicide than from heart attacks (Skoryk 2007, 132). While there is a need to pay special attention to men’s health in the context of Ukraine, women’s health also needs to be addressed. This is because women’s higher average length of life compared with men’s is not necessarily an indicator of their better health. According to data in annual reports about the Ukrainian population’s health and activities of medical and preventive institutions of the national health care system, women’s morbidity in a large number of disease classes is significantly higher than men’s (UNFPA 2009). Abbott and Wallace (2007) note that women report higher levels of psycho-social stress, poorer physical health, and higher incidence of long-term illness, and they submit that ‘while men die, women survive, to struggle on with a poor quality of life and poor health’ (p. 184). Women who do survive to old age typically experience poverty and other hardships because the support systems that existed during the Soviet era simply do not exist now (SIDA 2003). Many elderly women in Ukraine have little food or economic and health security. One of the female respondents in the study by Cockerham et al. (2006) explain, ‘If you experience economic hardship, no matter how hard you try to be healthy, there is nothing you can do about your diet’ (p. 2392). In terms of women’s health more generally, there are a number of key issues. Rates of maternal and infant mortality are among the highest in Eastern Europe (Betliy et al. 2007; Gander and Magdyuk 2006). According to the Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and Gynecology, 40 per cent of Ukrainian women cannot carry through a normal pregnancy, and every sixth woman is infertile.2 In recent years, women also have been suffering from a greater variety of illnesses than men and experiencing certain illnesses at different rates than men; for example, women suffer from urogenital system illnesses at a rate that is 4.2 times higher than for men. Women get tumours 1.7 times more often, and they have endocrine pathology 1.8 times more often than men. The female population seeks medical attention for blood diseases and hemogenic organ diseases 32 per cent more often; among working-aged women, the incidence of anemia is noticeably greater compared with men. Twenty per cent more women than men come

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for medical help with blood circulation problems. And, women are also very vulnerable to varicosity disease, migraine headaches, vegetovascular dystonia (autonomic neuropathy), pneumonia, bronchial asthma, and diabetes (Skoryk 2007). In recent years, the incidence of breast cancer has doubled in the population (Maistruk and Bannikov 2009). This is coupled with the fact that many women, especially those living in rural areas, do not receive early diagnosis which is key to effective treatment and survival. The prevalence of smoking among women is continuing to increase, especially among women living in urbanized areas who are exposed to tobacco advertising campaigns (Pomerleau et al. 2004, 1583). HIV/ AIDS is rapidly spreading to the female population (Hankivsky 2009; SIDA 2003). And, of particular importance in the Ukrainian context, is violence against women in its many forms. According to SIDA (2003), ‘how bad the real picture of gender violence is in Ukraine is still unknown’ (p. 7). However, the increase in poverty and unemployment since independence and the breakdown of family structures and relationships has increased women’s vulnerability to violence and trafficking (Hankivsky 2008; Gander and Magdyuk 2006). In sum, however, the main gender health differences in Ukraine which are reported are higher mortality among working-aged men, and as a result there is a disproportionate number of surviving elderly women than men in the country; men tend to suffer from fewer illnesses, but they are vulnerable to diseases leading to more deaths. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and government responses to date demonstrate the limited extent to which issues of gender in relation to other social factors and processes are recognized and addressed. In 2003, in its publication Gender Issues in Ukraine, SIDA reported that, in terms of government actions: ‘Attention is dedicated to the health problems of women and children, such as implementation of screening programmes for early detection of various gynaecological conditions, pregnancy complications and an upgrading of obstetrical services. Men’s health problems are addressed indirectly in the elements dealing with improving mental health, preventing suicides, organizing anti-alcohol campaigns and introducing healthy lifestyle (spiritual, physical and mental) education in schools’ (p. 76). In terms of the first government foci on reproductive health issues – reproductive health is an important health issue in Ukraine and, in particular, starting in the 1990s, a key aspect of the nation-building process (Kuenhast and Nechemias 2004, 5). The issue has taken on

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specific significance, as Zhurzenko describes in detail in Chapter 5 of this volume, because Ukraine is now among the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world (Maksymenko 2009). Additionally, Ukrainian women use abortion as a form of fertility regulation at higher rates than women in the rest of Europe (Criswell 2009). In 2010, the CEDAW Committee in its review of Ukraine identified the large number of unwanted pregnancies and the high rate of abortions as areas of concern requiring sustained policy intervention (CEDAW 2010). Reproductive health has also become a specific issue of concern for Ukrainian men as well. According to the U.N. Population Fund (2009), Ukrainian men avoid dealing with issues of sexual and reproductive health which places them and their partners at risk for unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Although important, women’s health and men’s health needs, however, extend beyond their reproductive functions. Moreover, reproductive health – for both women and men cannot be reduced to analyses of biological or health care systems. For example, in Ukraine, reduced reproduction is largely influenced by the lack of social and economic resources and other financial supports required to cover the costs of bearing and rearing children. And yet, in general, there is little attention paid to population health needs, including social determinants of health. In particular, there is no structure or related policies within the health care system that systematically responds to or monitors the gender aspects of population health (Skoryk 2007). Significantly, despite the mortality statistics and concomitant health issues, ‘the crisis in men’s health in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries has not been adequately addressed by government or NGOs’ (Gander and Magdyuk 2006). A comprehensive social determinants of health approach, which takes into account the importance of gender and its interactions with other social factors and processes, needs to be implemented in health research, policy, and system-wide reforms. Specifically, in terms of men’s health, ‘there is a need to train doctors about men’s health issues, provide more preventive care through specialized services, and lobby government to allocate resources to the problem. Special strategies and tools are also needed to educate the public about men’s health needs and issues’ (Gander and Magdyuk 2006, 30). There is also a need to ‘work with boys and men through innovative programmes for the transformation of harmful masculinist norms, high risk behaviours, and violent practices’ (Sen and Östlin 2007, ix). In all

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such undertakings, it is essential that researchers and policy makers recognize that men are ‘not a monolithic category and the ways in which gender shapes men’s health depend as well on its intersections with other social and structural locations’ (Bates et al. 2009, 2). Arguably, issues related to either men’s health or women’s health must be addressed through ‘actions both outside and within the health sector, because gender power relations operate across such a wide spectrum of human life and in such inter-related ways’ (Sen and Östlin 2007, xii). And while gender should be taken into account, the diversity in and among females and males needs to be taken into account when developing policies, prevention, and intervention measures and conducting health research. Importantly, analyses that cre-ate evidence to inform policy directions ought to address the associations between gender and other factors, namely, age, employment status, region, ethnicity, and sexuality. At the same time, successful interventions will require policies that are feasible within the Ukrainian context, taking into account the history, culture, and contemporary understandings and responses to issues of gender (World Bank 2009a).3 Conclusions Given the current health crisis in Ukraine, the onus is on the government to rethink its approaches to the specific health challenges of this region. And time is of the essence. As the World Bank (2009a) has aptly put it, ‘To safeguard the health of the population and prepare itself for the health challenges of the next half century, the Ukrainian government needs to undertake drastic measures’ (p. 57). In its report, Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health, the World Health Organization (2008) has suggested that in order to address health inequities, responsibility for action on health and health equity must be placed at the highest level of government to ensure its coherent consideration across all ministerial and departmental policy making. This ought to result not only in efforts to reform a health care system, services, and healthrelated behaviours. Such efforts should be framed within a comprehensive social determinants of health perspective, one that identifies interactions of gender with other characteristics of vulnerable populations, not only at the individual level but also at structural levels, thereby capturing fully the multiple contexts that shape lives and health

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outcomes. To ensure that such efforts are effective, Ukraine also requires sustained research to provide the necessary evidence base to inform the development of policies and effective strategic plans that will improve the health and well-being of Ukrainian women and men.

NOTES 1 For more detailed information and comparative statistics, visit the website of the Committee on Combating HIV/AIDS and other socially dangerous diseases at http://stop-aids.org.ua (accessed 18 Aug. 2009). 2 See also the short video Movchannia Nemovliat [Silence of Babies]. Available at http://noabort.org.ua/2006/11/28/mov4a/ (accessed 29 Aug. 2009). 3 For a further analysis of this point, see Hankivsky and Salnykova’s analysis of gender mainstreaming in Ukraine (Chapter 16 in this volume).

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– 2008. Globalization, Trafficking and Health: A Case Study of Ukraine. In C. Patton and H. Loshny, eds., Global Science/Women’s Health, 175–99. Amherst: Cambria. – 2009. The Challenge of HIV/AIDS in Ukraine. In C. Pope, R. White, and R. Malow, eds., HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention – An Interdisciplinary Reader, 96–112. New York: Routledge. Hankivsky, O., and A. Christoffersen. 2008. Intersectionality and the Determinants of Health: A Canadian Perspective. Critical Public Health 18(3): 271–83. Health Canada. 2000. Gender-Based Analysis Policy. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Iyer, A., G. Sen, and P. Östlin. 2008. The Intersections of Gender and Class in Health Status and Health Care. Global Public Health 3(S1): 13–24. Kryszyna, N.P., V.L. Veselskiy, N.Y. Kondratyuk, and O.V. Kryzyna. 2009. Family Medicine of Ukraine at the Present Stage of Reforming Health Care. Health of the Nation [Ukraine] no. 1–2. Kuehnast, K., and C. Nechemias, eds. 2004. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in conjunction with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Lekhan V., V. Rudiy, and E. Nolte. 2004. Health Care Systems in Transition: Ukraine. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe on behalf of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. Lohan, M. 2007. How Might We Understand Men’s Health Better? Integrating Explanations from Critical Studies on Men and Inequalities in Health. Social Science and Medicine 65: 493–504. Maistruk, G., and V. Bannikov. 2009. Breast Cancer Problem in Ukraine. Available at http://www.whfp.kiev.ua/prbl_eng.shtml (accessed 3 Aug. 2009). Maksymenko, S. 2009. Fertility, Money Holdings, and Economic Growth: Evidence from Ukraine. Comparative Economic Studies 51: 75–99. McKee, M. 2005. Understanding Population Health: Lessons from the Former Soviet Union. Clinical Medicine 5(4): 375–8. Medical News Today. 2009. Condom Price Increases in Ukraine Cause Concern about Spread of HIV, Other STIs. (10 Feb. 2009). Available at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/138455.php (accessed 1 Aug. 2009). Ministry of Health (MoH) Ukraine (with Ukrainian AIDS Centre, WHO, International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine, U.N. Program for HIV/AIDS, Geneva, Switzerland). 2006. Report on the National Consensus Estimates on HIV and AIDS in Ukraine as of End of 2005. Kyiv: MoH. Ministry of Health (MoH) Ukraine. 2009. Kontrol nad Tutunom v Ukrayini [Tobacco Control in Ukraine]. National report. Kyiv: MoH.

Gender and Health 323 O’Brien, R., K. Hunt, and G. Hart. 2005. Men’s Accounts of Masculinity and Help-Seeking: ‘It’s Caveman Stuff.’ Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59: 873–6. Pomerleau, J., A. Gilmore, M. McKee, R. Rose, and C.W. Haerpfer. 2004. Determinants of Smoking in Eight Countries of the Former Soviet Union: Results from the Living Conditions, Lifestyles and Health Study. Addiction 99: 1577–85. Poznyak, V.B., V.E. Pelipas, A.N. Vievski, and L. Miroshnichenko. 2002. Illicit Drug Use and Its Health Consequences in Belarus, Russian Federation and Ukraine: Impact of Transition. European Addiction Research 8:184–9. Scott, J. 1986. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. American Historical Review 91 (Dec.): 1053–75. Semigina, T., and O. Kishkina. 2006. Public Health Policy and Public Health Research in Ukraine: Linked, Interlinked or Unlinked. UDK 614(477): 28–33. Sen, G., and P. Östlin. 2007. Unequal, Unfair, Ineffective and Inefficient Gender Inequity in Health: Why It Exists and How We Can Change It. Final Report to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. (Sept.). Available at http://www.who.int/social_determinants/resources/csdh_media/ wgekn_final_report_07.pdf (accessed 4 Aug. 2009). Skoryk, M., ed. 2007. Genderni Peretvorennia v Ukrayini [Gender Transformations in Ukraine]. Kyiv: UNDP. Springer, K.W., and D. Mouzon. 2011. ‘Macho Men’ and Preventive Health Care: Implications for Older Men in Different Social Classes. Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Published online 13 April, 1–16. Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (SIDA). 2003. Gender Issues in Ukraine: Challenges and Opportunities. Kyiv: SIDA. Tarantino, L., S. Chankova, J. Rosenfeld, S. Routh, and E. Preble. 2011. Ukraine Health Assessment. Available at: http://www.healthsystems2020org/ content/resource/detail/82461/(accessed 15 Dec. 2001). Tsuchiya, A., and A. Williams. 2005. A ‘Fair Innings’ between the Sexes: Are Men Being Treated Inequitably? Social Science and Medicine 60(2): 277–86. UNFPA. 2009. Ukraine’s Report. United Nations Population Fund. Available at http://www.unfpa.org.ua/en/icpd10/ (accessed 4 Aug. 2009). Vassall, A., Y. Chechulin, I. Raykhert, N. Osalenko, S. Svetlichnaya, A. Kovalyova, M.J. van der Werf, L.V. Turchenko, E. Hasker, K. Miskinis, J. Veen, and R. Zaleskis. 2009. Reforming Tuberculosis Control in Ukraine: Results of Pilot Projects and Implications for the National Scale-Up of DOTS. Health Policy and Planning 24: 55–62. Webb, P.M., E.J. Bromet, S. Gluzman, N.L. Tintle, J.E. Schwartz, S. Kostyuchenko, and J.M. Havenaar. 2005. Epidemiology of Heavy Alcohol Use in Ukraine. Alcohol and Alcoholism 40(4): 327–35.

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Weidner, G., and V.S. Cain. 2003. The Gender Gap in Heart Disease: Lessons from Eastern Europe. Men’s Health Forum 93(5): 768–9. Word Press. 2008. Russian Women Speaking English. Available at http://russianwomenspeak.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/ukrainian-demographic-statisticscomparable-to-russian (accessed 1 Aug. 2009). World Bank. 2009a. An Avoidable Tragedy: Combating Ukraine’s Health Crisis – Lessons from Europe. Kyiv: World Bank. – 2009b. Ukraine Is in the Midst of an Unprecedented Demographic Decline Compounded by a Health Crisis, Says a New World Bank Study. World Bank Press Release, Kyiv, 25 June. Available at http://web.worldbank.org/ WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/ECAEXT/0,,contentMDK:2222583 7˜menuPK:2246556˜pagePK:2865106˜piPK:2865128˜theSitePK:258599,00. html?cid=ISG_E_WBWeeklyUpdate_NL (accessed 4 June 2010). World Health Organization (WHO). 2008. Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity through Action on the Social Determinants of Health. Commission on Social Determinants of Health Final Report – Executive Summary. Available at http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2008/WHO_IER_CSDH_08.1_eng. pdf (accessed 12 Nov. 2009). – 2009. Ukraine – World Health Statistics. Available at http://www.who.int/ countries/ukr/en/ (accessed 4 Aug. 2009).

13 Masculinity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine: Models and Their Implications t e t ya na b u r eyc h a k

Over the past two decades, gender relations have become an issue of growing public and academic interest in many post-Soviet states, including Ukraine. This can be clearly traced in the simultaneous increase in gender studies publications and research and dissertations on gender issues, as well as in the introduction of gender studies courses into university curricula and the establishment of academic and research gender studies centres. At the same time, most of these projects have focused on women and femininities, primarily discussed in relation to patriarchy and gender inequalities. Masculinity, meanwhile, remains on the fringe of academic discussion in Ukraine to date. Yet the social, cultural, economic, and political changes experienced by Ukrainian society during its Soviet and post-Soviet history have had a powerful influence on the experiences of both women and men. Gender analysis focused primarily on female experiences does not capture the complexity of gender relations. This chapter contributes to the study of masculinities by looking at Soviet and post-Soviet gender regimes through their framing, normalizing, and prioritizing of particular notions and models of masculinities. Models of masculinities are understood here as exemplars or ideals of masculinity that contribute to the construction of the normative and discursively central notion of masculinity – what is called ‘hegemonic masculinity.’ The chapter offers an overview of gender politics in the Soviet Union; a discussion of dominant models of masculinity popularized in that period follows, as well as a look at their influence on men’s experiences; finally, the chapter analyses masculine ideals in Ukraine in the post-Soviet period and considers to what extent they exist in reaction to the past or open up possibilities for men in the future.

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Soviet Gender Policy and Ideals of Masculinity With regard to gender politics, most scholars divide the long, seventyyear era of Soviet rule into three distinct periods: 1918–30, which was a time of Bolshevik experimentation in the sphere of sexuality, marriage, and political involvement by women; 1930–50, characterized by intensive economic involvement of women and, at the same time, a rollback towards traditional family relations and pro-natalist (i.e., targeted at the increase of birth rates) state policy; and 1950–80, which saw the liberalization of gender politics and the emergence of criticism of gender relations, much of which, however, was censored (Lapidus 1977; Rotkirch 2000; Kon 2005; Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2007a). Despite the stark differences between these periods, scholars have also defined some of the overall features of the Soviet gender regime. Probably the most important of these was the dominant role of the state in defining and controlling gender relations. For this reason, Zdravomyslova and Temkina (2007a, 96) define the USSR’s gender regime as ‘etacratic,’ that is, fundamentally shaped by state power. This shaping occurred via two major mechanisms: defining gender norms in legislation and enabling guarantees of state control over gender relations. One means by which the Soviet state guaranteed the latter control was to make private matters public. This, in turn, required the destruction of the patriarchal family and traditional gender relations within it. As a consequence of this policy, the traditionally dominant position of men in the private sphere was undermined. According to Zdravomyslova and Temkina (pp. 104–5), alienated fatherhood was especially promoted by the Soviet policy of ‘defamilialization’ in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. The policy reimagined the Soviet family as a union of two comrades–members of the big Soviet family and labour collective. Liberation of sexual relations during this period was aimed at ruining the family as the basis of bourgeois society and at rejecting individualism in the name of communist society. Although Stalin’s regime reversed the policy and proclaimed the family as a basic unit of socialist society, the position of men in the family remained marginal.1 According to Tartakovskaya (2005, 128–9), this was aided by a range of stateled shifts, among which were the following: (1) Mass involvement of women in the labour force. This allowed women to be more socially and economically independent from

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men, which led to the lowering of men’s authority in the family, since a man could no longer be the sole breadwinner and unconditional head of the household. (2) Politicization of motherhood. This placed most responsibility for raising children with mothers, and neglected the father’s role, which resulted in the legitimization of women’s control over children. It also contributed to the weakening of fathers’ authority by reducing their role to an economic function: providing financial resources to the family (alongside universally employed mothers), or paying alimony in cases of divorce. (3) Various approaches to control men’s behaviour. Women and even children were occasionally recruited to assist in the state’s attempts to eradicate socially inadequate types of men’s behaviour (alcoholism, marital infidelity, violence, and so on). In the Soviet period, gender equality policies thus adhered more closely to communist ideology than to principles of justice and gender egalitarianism. The Soviets focused a lot of their effort on dealing with the socalled women’s issue (zhenskiy vopros), promoting women’s education and protecting their right to paid labour, as well as creating a network of social services (public catering networks, kindergartens, and daycares, etc.). But little was done to overcome the vertical and horizontal gender segregation of labour, women’s limited access to power, their insignificant participation in politics, or to relieve them of the burden of most of the domestic work (Tartakovskaya 2005). While the policy of the ‘new household’ was initiated with the aim of liberating women from ‘kitchen slavery’ and mobilizing them into the workforce (Zhurzhenko 2008, 85)–men’s participation in the household was never a part of this policy–state support proved to be extremely inefficient (Gerasimova and Chuikina 2004), and household duties continued to be distributed in a traditional way, with most tasks carried out by women. Men’s participation in the household was occasional and related to traditional men’s duties, such as changing electric bulbs, taking out the rubbish bin, mending household equipment, and doing renovations. According to Slesarv and Yankova, gender inequality in the Soviet household was therefore preserved because of an inefficient state service sector and adherence to old patriarchal norms that saw girls raised to serve the family (cited in Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2007a, 134). Men’s passivity contrasted with women’s activity in the household, and this

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imbalance caused a diminishment of men’s investment in, and their alienation from the family (Chernova 2007, 166). The high level of divorces and alcohol addiction among men were some of the negative phenomena in the private sphere. Spreading the Word about the New Soviet Man Propaganda in the form of official rhetoric as well as printed, visual, and music media that suggested specific frames for Soviet masculinity and femininity played a crucial role in promoting the state’s gender ideology (Haynes 2003). The visual mode of propaganda was especially powerful in the first decades of the USSR because of the necessity of establishing new ideological narratives for a broad and largely illiterate audience. This was equally true with regard to messages aimed at men (Bonnell 1999). The Soviet Union promoted specific idealized modes of masculinity deemed most appropriate to its aim of building a society of social equality and prosperity. This ideal was based on strength of mind and body and unconditional devotion and heroism in the name of state principles. The ideal, via various personifications, was widely conveyed, and every single Soviet man was socialized into one or more idealized masculine roles, including Defender of the Motherland, selfless worker, athletic man, and builder of communism, each of which merits further description. Another ideal, leader of the country, although masculine, was promoted rather as an abstract object of worship that represented the highest virtues of communist society and ideology.2 Defender of the Motherland Soviet men received a steady stream of messages from their militaristic state, which insisted that men’s self-fulfilment was possible only through service to the motherland (Tartakovskaya 2005, 128, 130). The first appeals to this defender ideal occurred during the creation of the Red Army in 1918, which was to become a stronghold of the new Soviet state and its ideals. According to Lenin, this was an army of liberation for a proletariat that would adhere to principles of internationalism. To be a defender of the motherland required the highest level of devotion to state ideals and readiness for self-sacrifice, including willingness to die for the motherland (Yuval-Davis 1997).

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The idea of ‘real’ men as defenders intensified considerably in the post – Second World War period, when this image became particularly appealing because of the halo of victory and pride surrounding it. A strong and unconquerable Soviet state contributed to a symbolic increase in the status of masculinity among individual Soviet men. In times of peace, service to the motherland was extended beyond its original military function. A ‘real’ Soviet man thus had to be ready for unconditional and selfless participation in any state project (Tartakovskaya 2005, 128). Military discourse was altered to promote struggles for bountiful harvests, record-breaking industrial production, and labour heroism. At the same time, cowardice, weakness, and laziness were deemed the most negative characteristics that a man could possess. Soviet posters played a significant role in the visualization and promotion of the defender of the motherland ideal; Figures 13.1 to 13.3 illustrate examples. Selfless Worker Discouraged to play a significant role in the family under Soviet rule, men were banished to the public sphere. To a large extent, this was the area where they could find fulfilment. Although men’s success in the professional sphere is traditionally measured by the achievement of high social and financial status, in the USSR, men’s professional selffulfilment was not necessarily associated with these indicators. Soviet ideology prioritized social needs over personal ones, as well as spiritual over material motivations (Magun 1998). As a result, the outcomes of personal efforts and achievements of men were measured by their input into the abstract of ‘building a better future.’ Ideas of selflessness and heroism were therefore intricately woven in with labour for Soviet men (see Figures 13.4 to 13.6). The selfless worker ideal was supported by numerous stories about Stakhanovite miners, daredevil aviators, and record-breaking collective farm workers. These were widely circulated through Soviet media and art. Based on events in the lives of real people, the success stories were nonetheless distorted and embellished to fit the socialist discourse (Haynes 2003, 3). Selfless labour required men to be flexible and mobile. A man was considered a ‘military unit’ in Soviet ideology; he was expected to be ready to leave his home at a moment’s notice and set up elsewhere to carry out the work of the Communist Party (Chernova 2007, 142–4). This emphasis on a man’s mobility secured the possibility of his

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participation in socialist construction projects, the conquering of virgin lands, and the patrolling of state borders. As well, while their labour was mandatory, men were expected to go beyond just fulfilling this requirement to achieve extraordinary results and beat existing records in their fields of endeavour.3 Record-breaking productivity was encouraged by the state in every possible way, including awards for labour achievements – comparable to military awards for achievements in battle. Athletic Man The cult of the healthy, strong, trained male body was a feature of Soviet education. Images of athletic men were also part of heroic and patriotic Soviet propaganda (Kon 2001). A strong body was the condition for dedicated work and effective labour. A strong male body also symbolized physical and moral advantage. In contrast, enemies of the USSR (capitalists and bourgeois) were always depicted as physically unattractive, with badly proportioned bodies – too short and fat, or too long and thin. Physical strength was supposed to be reached through strict discipline, regular sports activities, and hardening of the body (Gilmour and Clements 2002; see Figures 13.7 to 13.9). Builder of Communism This model for masculinity informs all of those discussed so far, since it provides the impetus for labour and service to the motherland. The moral code of the builder of communism was officially introduced as a part of the Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961.4 This code stressed devotion to communism, love towards the socialist motherland, conscientious labour, respect for public duty, humane relationships, collectivism, and brotherhood, as well as intolerance of injustice, dishonesty, and careerism (see Figures 13.10 to 13.12). Leader of the Country The ideal of leader of the country, incarnated in the figures of Lenin and Stalin, had different functions from the other Soviet masculine ideals. It was not intended as attainable by ordinary men, but rather as an object of worship. Leaders of the country were not ordinary men. They

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were symbolic figures who played the role of wise leader, teacher of communism, strategy genius of the socialist revolution, and inspiration for the fight of Soviet people for socialist society and the building of communism (see Figures 13.13 and 13.14). According to Kon (2006), this mythological image of a great leader, father, and teacher symbolically compensated for the model of traditional fatherhood, which was difficult to achieve during times of totalitarianism (pp. 506–7). Soviet ideology sought to redefine traditional masculine ideals, preserving and emphasizing some of the elements and abolishing others in ways that would best serve the regime. This picking and choosing led to an odd configuration: the Soviet man should be strong, brave, and devoted to his principles when it came to loyalty to the state, patriotism, and devotion to communist values, but he should refrain from applying traditional masculine qualities like energy, initiative, and independence with regard to critical assessments of these communist principles. Thus, the Soviet regime promoted a composite of traditional masculinity and communist ideology, while requiring that men remain under the total control of the state. The most conspicuous results of this were a decrease of men’s traditional authority within the family (which had both positive and negative effects in terms of gender equality) and their alienation from the private sphere. It also led to men’s mobilization for full-value participation in labour and and in the building of communism. This participation was encouraged through a range of symbolic rewards and promotions within power hierarchies. Models for Ukrainian Men in the Soviet Era Since one of the aims of Soviet ideology was the creation of a new community called the ‘Soviet people,’ ethnic and cultural differences were in most cases omitted from Soviet propaganda. However, aspects of the Soviet vision of Ukrainian masculinity can be discerned through analysis of Soviet cinema. Based on her review of images of Ukrainian men in Soviet films between 1940 and 1980, Semikhat (2009) assembled a list of traits that were typically inherent in these characters. A Ukrainian man is often depicted as a solidly built, middle-aged man of rural origin who did not complete school. He holds an ordinary, often marginal position within the professional hierarchy. His origin and education do not provide him with enough cultural capital to be an independent and self-sufficient character. In terms of personal qualities, the Ukrainian

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Figure 13.1. Glory to the Warrior-Victor! (1945). Artist: V. Klimahin; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.2. The Love of the Whole Nation to the Warrior-Victor (1944). Artist: A. Kokorekin; source: the Soviet Posters Archive of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

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Figure 13.3. This Is a Profession – Protect the Motherland (1984). Artist: D. Denisov; source: the Soviet Posters Archive of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

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Figure 13.4. With Intensified Speed Let’s Do Our Five-Year Plan in Four Years (1930s). Artist: unknown; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.5. There Are No Fortresses that Cannot Be Conquered by the Bolsheviks and Stalin. Building of the Dneprostroy Dam Is Finished (1932). Artist: A. Strakhov-Braslavsky; source: Bonnell (1999, 69).

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Figure 13.6. We Will Mechanize Donbass (1930). Artist: A. Deineka; source: Bonnell (1999, 53).

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Figure 13.7. Train Yourself If You Want to Be Like This! (1951). Artist: V. Koretsky; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.8. Fight for New Achievements in Sport! (1955). Artist: L. Golovanov; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.9. To the New Victories in Labour and Sport (1955). Artist: A. Kokorekin; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.10. Pioneer’s Tie (1961). Artist: A. Dobrov; source: Lafont (2007, 27).

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Figure 13.11. Ahead – To the Great Goal! (1959). Artist: M. Soloviev; source: Lafont (2007, 184).

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Figure 13.12. Personal Plan for the 110th Anniversary of Lenin’s Birth (1979). Artist: A. Dobrov; source: Lafont (2007).

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Figure 13.13. Lenin Lived, Lives, and Will Live! (1967). Artist: V. Ivanov; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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Figure 13.14. Stalin. ‘Dear Stalin – Happiness of People!’ (1949). Artist: V. Koretsky; source: a reproduction from the author’s personal collection.

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man is a positive character – kind and friendly, but sometimes an infantile simpleton. These traits are usually supplemented by others stereotypically ascribed to Ukrainians, such as wearing an embroidered shirt, eating salo (lard), and speaking Russian with a bad Ukrainian accent. This often makes him an object of jokes by his colleagues. He tries to be like a Russian, but he is not Russian yet (pp. 249–50). Thus, in Soviet films Ukrainian masculinity is presented as less prestigious compared with a successful Soviet model of a man. Applying the terminology of Connell (1995), Ukrainian masculinity was subordinated to hegemonic Soviet/Russian masculinity. Soviet Man over Time Although the dominant models of masculinity did not change considerably in the Soviet era, their reception and the levels of critical interpretation towards them did. Zdravomyslova and Temkina (2002) argue that the evolution of the gender order in the late Soviet period (1970s and 1980s) led to a discursive crisis of masculinity, that is, a discrepancy between the ideals of Soviet masculinity and the ability to fulfil them. As Soviet ideology weakened, models for men such as Defender of the Motherland or builder of communism were seen as irrelevant and were thus devalued. At the same time, other traditional masculine ideals from the pre-Soviet moment and modern Western masculinity were equally unachievable because of the lack of appropriate ideological and economic conditions. Social anxiety about inappropriate roles of men and women became particularly pronounced in discussions in the press, films, and academic publications in this late period. Particular criticism was directed towards the so-called masculinization of women and the feminization of men (Kon 2006, 507). Men’s low life expectancy, high death rates, poor health, alcoholism, and increased display of harmful habits were used as examples of a deteriorating masculinity. There were proposals to enforce strict state control and compulsory medical check-ups to combat men’s poor health (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2002, 436–9). However, these were never enacted. Discourse surrounding the ‘weaker’ man was also based on the inability of Soviet men to fulfil their traditional family roles – to serve as sole breadwinner, head of household, and good father. Thus, the Soviet redefinition of traditional masculinity according to the socialist agenda, while having some positive effects on gender equality, also created gender identity problems among Soviet men. Moreover, women, tired from

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carrying a double or triple burden of work and home life, began to reconsider the traditional ideal of the strong man as possibly desirable. Their longing for a return to traditional ideals was arguably primarily driven by the hope of lightening their duties, since with a traditional man they would no longer be entirely responsible for household and family as well as labour. This reasoning has the potential to shed additional light on the causes of gender neo-traditionalism in post-Soviet Ukrainian society and on women’s acceptance of the return to patriarchal values. Ideas about the need for change in the Soviet gender regime became especially popular during the wave of political liberalization in the 1980s to early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the loss of the dominant role of the state in regulating social relations (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2007b, 176) and opened up the possibility – and expectation – of change. Soviet gender norms were criticized as having been coercive and inadequate, and the attempts to create a ‘new man’ and a ‘new woman’ were seen as brutal experiments that had set out to ruin natural relations between genders. As a result, the search for new models of gender relations and ideals in the post-Soviet moment in many cases totally negated the Soviet gender experience. Masculinity in Post-Soviet Ukraine The Ukrainian state created after the collapse of the Soviet Union officially embraced democratic values. At the same time, in contrast to most Western European democratic countries, post-Soviet Ukraine has seen an increase in the popularity of traditional views about men’s and women’s roles. Accordingly, men’s success is measured by achievements in professional life, while the primary realm of women’s selffulfilment is the family and keeping home and hearth. The post-Soviet period has thus been characterized by the growing legitimization of men’s dominant position in the public sphere and more encouragement for women to move into the private sphere. These views have received particular support from the national media, as well as from political, religious, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Traditional gender models have often been presented as a way to revitalize the Ukrainian nation, to preserve the family, and to renew moral traditions that the Soviet system destroyed. Some theorists have called this post-Soviet return to tradition in the gender regime (Zdravomyslova and Temkina 2007b, 177) a ‘patriarchal renaissance’ (Attwood 1996;

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Watson 1993). This renaissance emphasizes the negative consequences of the artificial obliteration of gender differences during Soviet times as a means of promoting a traditional gender order, which proponents consider to be the ‘authentic’ gender norms and ideals that the Soviet system ruined. Thus, the search for ‘true’ Ukrainian femininity and masculinity in post-Soviet times can also be deemed neo-traditionalism – that is, harkening back to gender models from Ukraine’s past and offering them as gender ideals for today. Ukrainian Female and Male Ideals: Berehynia and the Cossack These ideals include Berehynia (family guardian, the woman’s ideal) and Cossack (warrior, the man’s ideal). Their common function is to help construct a national identity and a version of history in which Ukrainian people struggle for an independent culture, language, and traditions. Although placed side by side, these female and male ideals actually have significantly different origins. The image of Berehynia refers to ancient history and archaic beliefs, yet Kis (2004) contends that it is an ideological invention of Ukrainian writers at the beginning of 1990s. In contrast, the Cossack ideal refers to a real, although generalized character from the Ukrainian past: Cossacks were a military community, which played an important role in European geopolitics and Ukrainian history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Cossack model has been significantly idealized in its contemporary interpretation. Current Cossack values give them the shape of noble heroes – bravery, courage, independence, and a devotion to principles and national values. Cossacks have been compared to knights in Western European history (Kosenko 2006, 576), glorifying traditional male qualities like dominance, leadership, courage, physical endurance, and sexual potency. For those promoting this ideal, these values are desirable for ‘real’ Ukrainian men (Bureychak 2006). The Cossack idea has been introduced into discourses and practices of education. Beginning from early childhood, little boys are taught to restrain their feelings, because, as the popular saying goes, ‘Cossacks do not cry.’ As well, various sports groups for boys and young men, like Spas (meaning ‘Saviour’) or Sokil (meaning ‘Falcon’), have opened in recent years and emphasize becoming physically strong like the Cossacks. ‘Combat hopak,’ a Ukrainian Cossack dance combining elements of martial arts, is one means through which this strength can be achieved. An invention of the late 1980s, this mixture of dance and

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fighting is designed to be an integral part of raising healthy and patriotic male youth. ‘Healthy youth are the future of Ukraine,’ writes Volodymyr Pylat, the founder of combat hopak, in his manual on the sport (1994, 336). The popularity of the image of the Cossack has also made it attractive for local Ukrainian manufacturers, who have transformed it into a Ukrainian brand. Today the Cossack is used to mark public spaces related to consumption, such as restaurants that offer Ukrainian cuisine, as well as to advertise locally produced Ukrainian goods and services. Some of the examples of this kind of application of the Cossack image are presented in Figures 13.15 and 13.16. The popularity of the Cossack image rests on its ability to oppose Soviet ideals while fighting for Ukrainian national values and an independent state. Yet, closer consideration of the qualities ascribed to the Cossack reveals similarities to those of the Soviet models of men

Figure 13.15. ‘Mazepa’ and ‘Doroshenko’ Vodka. A photograph taken by the author, Lviv, Ukraine, 2007.

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(defender of the motherland, physically strong man, and builder of communism). The Cossack presents a militaristic ideal, devotion to state principles, and heroic masculinity. There are two major differences between the new Ukrainian masculine ideal and the Soviet models of masculinity, however. First, they are based on different ideologies (nationalist versus communist). Second, they suggest different roles for the state in regulating the ideological portent of the image. The Cossack suggests a less coercive state position. Nonetheless, he is a retro-ideal based on a symbolic reconstruction of the imagined past. Western Ideals of Masculinity in Today’s Ukraine The collapse of the Soviet Union not only made it possible to articulate a national ideal of masculinity in Ukraine, but it also opened up space for and promoted the popularity of masculine images emerging from Western culture. Media and advertising play an important role in the

Figure 13.16. Sugar – ‘Cossack’ Brand. A photograph taken by the author, Lviv, Ukraine, 2008.

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introduction and spread of these images in Ukraine. Powerful superheroes, successful businessmen, and ‘New Lads’ are all ideals of Western masculinity that appeal to independence, control, and individual freedom respectively.5 Unlike with the Cossack, which opposes Soviet ideals only superficially, the attractiveness of these images in post-Soviet Ukraine, especially in the first years of independence, has been connected with their fundamental difference from Soviet ones. They refer to Western lifestyle values, which symbolically represent ideals of success and prosperity. The common feature between these Western masculine images and the Cossack ideal is that they offer a new version of traditional masculinity as a model of masculinity for today. Another Western ideal that has recently been promoted by advertising in Ukraine, as it has been throughout Europe, is the erotized, metrosexual man,6 or man as an object of women’s gaze.7 The primary audience for this advertising consists of young, well-to-do, urban, consumption-oriented men. These images stress the importance of grooming and aspiring to an attractive appearance – practices traditionally associated with femininity. It would be premature to say that metrosexuality has been accepted as normal by the majority of Ukrainian males; however, its growing public visibility is transforming existing ideals about men, who are not traditionally supposed to demonstrate interest in their appearance. It also gradually promotes tolerance for practices that build men’s physical attractiveness. At the same time, metrosexuality does not necessarily challenge or undermine hegemonic masculinity, since grooming practices and focus on appearance can simply be employed as additional resources for the enhancement of social status among professionally and financially successful men. Revived Religious Ideals and Traditional Gender Roles On the other end of the spectrum, very traditional gender roles and ideals promoted by the Orthodox Church have also experienced a surge in popularity and a kind of revival in post-Soviet times. Annual allUkrainian sociological surveys reveal that at least 87 per cent of the population considered themselves religious in the past five years (Golovakha and Panina 2008, 75). Most of these people affiliate with the Orthodox Church, which has not undergone the same modernization processes as Western Christianity. As a result, Orthodox gender ideals support traditional stereotypes of man as a breadwinner and woman as family guardian. As seen in Table 13.1, these stereotypes are reflected

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Table 13.1. Opinions of Men and Women on Who Should Be the Head of the Family (%) Answers

Men

Women

Average

Man

66

57

61

8

10

9

Woman Both

16

20

18

Neither

3

4

4

Difficult to answer

7

9

8

Source: All-Ukrainian opinion poll conducted by the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, 2007 (UNDP 2007, 71).

in the attitudes of many Ukrainians who took part in a recent survey about family roles. This result, showing that Ukrainians see men as the natural heads of the family, is supported by another survey finding, as seen in Table 13.2, related to who should be responsible for contributing most to family income. Traditional ideals also impact attitudes towards parenthood. In most cases, a woman is considered to be the primary caregiver for children. Although contemporary Ukrainian legislation provides equal rights to parental leave for men and women, most often it is the mother who takes it. Men are discouraged from taking parental leave and involving themselves in child care because of stereotypes surrounding men’s incompetence in this area, and because of the absence of positive examples of involved fatherhood in Ukraine. Economically, it is an advantage for men to continue working, since they generally have higher incomes and better opportunities for promotion and career advancement. In fact, traditionally, good fatherhood has been equated with (and, to an extent, limited to) financial support. These stereotypes are supported and promoted at the highest official levels in Ukraine.8 Nonetheless, in recent years a growing number of fathers have taken parental leave; but this number remains very small (around 3%).9 Recent survey results also point to the dominance of traditional ideas about gender roles in the public sphere. Table 13.3 breaks down survey results that show Ukrainians’ opinions about who should lead in which public sphere – men or women? These results demonstrate that responsibilities related to child care and cultural work are considered more suitable for women, while responsibilities related to power, status, and prestige, such as in business

Models of Masculinity 353 Table 13.2. Opinions of Men and Women on Who Should Earn the Most Money in the Family (%) Answers

Men

Women

Average

Man

66

65

65

Woman Both

7

8

7

21

18

19

Neither

1

1

1

Difficult to answer

6

8

7

Source: All-Ukrainian opinion poll conducted by the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, 2007 (UNDP 2007, 71).

and politics, are considered the domain of men. These views map onto dominant views about qualities inherent to men and women. Thus, kindness, friendliness, discipline, diligence, and communication are considered to be more typical of women, whereas career orientation, high professionalism, and aggressiveness are more often seen to be men’s characteristics (UNDP 2007, 54). In practice, these ideas convey many advantages to men in the sphere of employment and career, increasing their chances for jobs and advancement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the transition to a market economy in Ukraine has brought with it an increased salary gap between men and women. According to data from the State Committee of Statistics, as of 2007, this gap was still in place, with men’s average salary in all spheres being around 30 per cent more than that of women (DKSU 2007, 71). Men in Crisis? While benefiting from these advantages, men also experience higher expectations of success in the public sphere. In fact, the collapse of the USSR only intensified the pressure to emulate a work-focused masculine ideal. But that ideal was harder to attain because of the adverse economic conditions in Ukraine, which were most dramatic in the early and mid-1990s. This was a time of massive unemployment, descending mobility, and deterioration of living standards for most of the population. The resulting loss of social status for men was painful (Shevchenko 2002). Many men sought escape. As a result, this period was marked by an increase in alcohol and drug addiction. Many began to express

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Table 13.3. Opinions on Whether Society (Selected Spheres) Would Function Better if Headed by a Woman or by a Man (%) Spheres

If Headed by a Woman

If Headed by a Man

No Difference

Education

44

9

47

Culture

44

7

49

Social policy

45

14

41

Institutions that provide services to families and children

67

4

29

9

53

38

Politics Big business

6

55

39

Law

9

37

54

Source: All-Ukrainian opinion poll conducted by the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, 2007 (UNDP 2007, 37).

concern with the state of men’s health, as they were living much shorter lives, experiencing much higher rates of illnesses such as tuberculosis (MFYSU 2006, 16), and committing suicide in greater numbers (KDSU 2007, 24). As of 2007, the average life expectancy of Ukrainian men was 62.3 years, almost twelve years less than that of women and among the lowest in Europe (Amdzhadin 2007). This number reflects early mortality among able-bodied men. In particular, Ukrainian men aged twenty to forty-five years die at a three times higher rate than women of the same age due to a range of genetic and social factors, including greater involvement by men in high-risk activities such as crime and employment in health-hazardous industries (MFYSU 2006, 16) like many construction and heavy metallurgy. Violent deaths are also many times more common for men than for women. With regard to addiction, alcoholism is six to seven times more prevalent among Ukrainian men than women (MFYSU 2006, 18). Rural areas of Ukraine, where permanent employment is difficult to secure, and where vodka is commonly used as payment for men’s assistance in household or farming tasks, are particularly affected by widespread alcoholism. Furthermore, public consumption of strong alcoholic drinks (at gatherings of friends or family or at work parties) is considered to be a way of displaying and proving masculinity. Thus, the refusal to

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drink is an obstacle to being a ‘real’ man. Drug addiction is also a bigger problem for men than women (p. 19). One of the social reasons for men’s poor health relates to traditional expectations of men’s physical toughness (Thompson and Pleck 1986), which presumes physical strength, endurance, and firmness. Men often try to live up to this through activities intended to intensify masculine characteristics, like increasing muscle mass by pumping iron, doing martial arts, and participating in endurance sports. A more passive way to contend with this expectation and a more common one is for men to become attached to national sports teams and celebrity athletes (such as Ukrainian football teams, world boxing champions like the Klitschko brothers, and the world’s strongest man in 2004, Vasyl Virastiuk). But expectations of toughness promote an exaggerated idea of men’s physical endurance, which makes them inclined to disregard their health problems and not ask for medical help in time. Asking for help and public manifestation of weakness are often considered to be confessions of one’s own ‘weak’ masculinity. Thus, current gender standards support men’s unrealistically positive self-assessments of their health, their fear of looking weak, and their inclination towards risk in order to prove ‘real’ masculinity. Men pay the price for these behaviours with poor health, and sometimes with their lives. The norm of physical toughness also requires that men express aggression in certain situations where choosing not to demonstrate violence could be considered to be a ‘non-masculine’ action. Reinforcing oneself via aggression is often used as a way to compensate for a man’s inability to fulfil oneself otherwise. Much research indicates that men who are inclined to aggression often have low self-esteem and low social status (Burn 1996, 173–5). Criminal activity is generally gendermarked, and contemporary Ukraine is no exception in this regard. The number of men convicted for premeditated murder is more than seven times higher than the number of women (KDSU 2007, 86). A similar gender gap can be observed for other types of crimes (p. 86). Numerous studies show that most crimes are committed by young, often unemployed, working-class men (Edwards 2006, 11). Sometimes, lack of access to power, money, and resources also encourages men to compensate through family violence. According UNDP data, every third woman in Ukraine is a victim of violence from her male partner (Yabchenko 2009). Despite this high incidence, domestic violence is rarely discussed with regard to preventing men’s aggression in Ukraine. The focus is on outcomes and support of victims, mostly accomplished by women’s

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NGOs. Until recently, the only men’s NGO working on the prevention of domestic violence was Men against Violence, established in 2004 in the city of Kherson and consisting of thirty members. In March 2009 another similar NGO, the National Network of Men-Leaders against Violence, was founded in support of the United Nations multiyear international campaign ‘Unite to End Violence against Women.’ Men’s destructive behaviour and the crisis of Ukrainian men are the subjects of much popular literature and mass media in Ukraine; see, for example, the articles ‘Devaluation of Men or Who Should Ukrainian Women Marry?’ (Godovanets 2008) and ‘Men Should Enter the Red Book!’ (Pokotylo 2006), which create an image of men as extinct species. However, the nature of the crisis remains highly contested (Bureychak 2008). There is a difference between a ‘crisis of masculinity’ connected with changes to, and attempts to undermine hegemonic masculinity, and a ‘crisis of men’ (i.e., of men’s experiences), which relates to destructive behaviour, stress, depression, aggression, violence, poor health, suicides, and so on. Although a crisis of masculinity may influence a crisis of men, there is no causal link. The destructive experiences of modern Ukrainian men are connected not with the crisis of masculinity (as a crucial reconsideration of the notion of masculinity), but with too-narrow, strict, and rigid norms of traditional masculinity that are promoted in modern Ukrainian society as a part of revitalizing and constructing a modern national identity, but which are difficult to attain for a number of reasons, including their being unrealistic and the lack of resources given an adverse economic situation. Conclusions The construction of masculinity in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine inevitably reflects state ideology, cultural norms, and social ideas dominant at the particular period. Even though both Soviet and post-Soviet ideals of masculinity appeal to traditional masculine ideals, their meanings and the conditions under which they are emulated vary considerably. The construction of modern Ukrainian masculinity often occurs as a rejection of the Soviet system and involves the invention of masculine ideals that correspond to a new Ukrainian national identity. In recent years, one can observe the intensification of traditional or patriarchal expectations of men’s conduct. This is legitimized as a way to reconstruct an ‘authentic’ Ukrainian model of masculinity that was undermined by the Soviet regime. The common feature of both periods is

Models of Masculinity 357

that men hold more power and resources compared with women. At the same time, the pressure to succeed in the public and professional spheres makes men vulnerable in terms of health and socially destructive behaviour.

NOTES 1 Only in the 1980s did fatherhood issues somewhat reappear on the state agenda. For detailed discussion of this period see Chapter 14 in this volume. 2 More personifications existed, such as Soviet superheroes like Chekists or KGB-ists, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss them all. 3 Setting records and achievement in labour were built into the Soviet fiveyear economic plans. Labour competitions were also a part of state ideology aimed at proving the superiority of the USSR over capitalist countries. 4 Moral’nyi Kodeks Stroitelya Communizma (Moral Code of Builders of Communism), available at http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/250607. 5 ‘New lad’ is a concept of new masculinity that appeared and started to be promoted by men’s magazines (such as FHM, Maxim, and Loaded) since the 1990s. Arguably, the emergence of an anti-feminist ‘new lad’ ideal can be a reaction to the ‘new man’ model – a narcissistic and pro-feminist man – that was popularized in men’s magazines in the 1980s. 6 Mark Simpson (1994) refers by metrosexuality to a type of masculinity concerned with attractive appearance, shopping, and a wish to attract other people’s attention and win their admiration. 7 Traditional conventions of looking define men as the subjects of gaze, thus conferring the symbolic power of gaze, while women are the object of looking. As John Berger puts it, in ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972), men ‘look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (p. 46). Thus, the advent of the attractive and eroticized man who is oriented towards being looked at by women undermines traditional ideas about whose gaze is powerful. 8 In his presentation to the roundtable discussion ‘On the State of Men in Ukraine’ before the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), on 19 February 2009, Olexandr Marchenko, president of the International Centre of Fatherhood and head of an all-Ukrainian Civic Committee on Family and Responsible Fatherhood, stressed that responsible fatherhood involves the participation of a man in the conception, games, school life, and sexual education of the child, the child’s entrance into society, and being

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a grandfather. Marchenko also emphasized that the crisis of fatherhood in Ukraine can be overcome by encouraging men who support their families and are good fathers, by which he meant fathers who provide financial support and spiritual education to their children. The participation of fathers in child care was never mentioned in the presentation. See www. civicua.org/main/data?t=2&c=1&q=1168230. 9 For more on this issue, see Chapter 14 in this volume.

REFERENCES Amdzhadin, L. 2007. Genderni vidminnosti zdorovya ukrayintsiv [Gender Differences in Ukrainians’ Health]. In M. Skoryk, ed., Genderni Peretvorennia v Ukrayini [Gender Transformations in Ukraine], 131–8. Kyiv: UNDP. Attwood, L. 1996. The Post-Soviet Women in the Move to the Market: A Return to Domesticity and Dependence? In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 255–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, J. 1972 Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books. Bonnell, V.E. 1999. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bureychak, T. 2006. Kozak yak genderno-natsionalnyi marker Ukraininskoi consumerystskoi kultury [Cossack as Gender and National Marker of Ukrainian Consumer Culture]. Methodologiya, teoriya ta praktyka sociologichnogo doslidzhenna ukrainskogo suspilstva [Methodology, Theory and Practice of Sociological Research of Ukrainian Society] 2: 241–7. – 2008. Kryza maskulinnosti v teoretychniy ta empirychniy perspectyvi [Crisis of Masculinity in Theoretical and Empiric Perspectives]. In Genderni teorii ta genderni praktyky: nalagodzhuyuchy mosty [Gender Theories and Gender Practices: Building Bridges], 20–7. Kharkiv: Raider. Burn, S.M. 1996. The Social Psychology of Gender. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chernova, Z. 2007. Model ‘sovetskogo’ otsovstva: diskursivnye predpisaniya [Model of ‘Soviet’ Fatherhood: Discursive Prescriptions]. In E. Zdravomyslov and A. Temkina, eds., Rossiyskiy gendernyi poryadok: sociologicheskiy podhod. [Russian Gender Order: Sociological Approach], 138–68. St Petersburg: Publishing House of the European University. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Derzhavnyj komitet statystyky Ukrainy/State Committee of Statistics of Ukraine (DKSU ). 2007. Zhinky I choloviky v Ukraini: Statystychnyi zbirnyk [Women and Men in Ukraine: Statistical Digest]. Kyiv: DKSU. Edwards, T. 2006. Cultures of Masculinity. London: Routledge.

Models of Masculinity 359 Gerasimova, E., and S. Chuikina. 2004. Obshchestvo remonta [Society of Renovation]. Neprikosnovennyi zapas [Reserve Stock] 34(2): 70–7. Also available at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2004/34/ger85.html. Gilmour, J., and B.E. Clements. 2002. ‘If You Want to Be Like Me, Train!’ The Contradictions of Soviet Masculinity. In B.E. Clements, ed., Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 210–22. New York: Palgrave. Godovanets, O. 2008. Deval’vatsiya cholovikiv, abo za kogo vyhodyty zamizh ukrains’kym zhinkam? [Devaluation of Men or Who Should Ukrainian Women Marry?] Glavred, 24 July. Available at http://glavred.info/ archive/2008/07/24/114129–7.html. Golovakha, Y., and N. Panina. 2008. Ukrainske suspilstvo 1992–2008: Sociologichnyi monitiryng [Ukrainian Society 1992–2008: Sociological Monitoring]. Kyiv: Institute of Sociology NAS. Haynes, J. 2003. New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kis, O. 2003. Modeli konstruyuvannya gendernoi identychnosti zhinky v suchasniy Ukraini [Models of Construction of Gender Identity of Woman in Contemporary Ukraine]. Ji 27: 37–58. Available at http://www.ji.lviv.ua/ n27texts/kis.htm. Kon, I. 2001. Muskulistaya masculinnost: Atletizm ili militarism? [Muscular Masculinity: Athleticism or Militarism?] Gendernye issledovaniya [Gender Research] 6: 114–27. – 2005. Seksualnaya kul’tura v Rossii [Sexual Culture in Russia]. Moscow: Airis-Press. – 2006. Rossiyskiy muzhchina I ego problemy [Russian Man and His Problems]. Mezhdiscyplinarnye issledovaniya: Sociologiya, psyhologiya, sexologiya, antropologiya [Interdisciplinary Research: Sociology, Psychology, Sexology, Anthropology], 506–17. Kosenko, L. 2006. Kozaky: Lytsarkiy orden Ukrainy [Cossacks: Knight Order of Ukraine]. Kyiv: Shkola. Lafont, M. 2007. Soviet Posters: The Sergo Grigorian Collection. Munich: Prestel. Lapidus, G.W. 1977. Sexual Equality in Soviet Policy: A Developmental Perspective. In D. Atkinson, A. Dallin, and G.W. Lapidus, eds., Women in Russia, 115–38. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lenin, V. 1918. Decree of Soviet People’s Commissars about Organization of Workers and Farmers Red Army. 15 Jan. Available at http://www.aha.ru/~mausoleu/ documents/army80.htm. Magun, V.S. 1998. Rossiyskie trudovye tsennosti: Ideologiya i massovoe soznanie [Russian Labour Values: Ideology and Mass Consciousness]. Mir Rossii [World of Russia] 4: 113–44.

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Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports of Ukraine (MFYSU). 2006. Zaluchennya cholovikiv do zberezhennya zdorovya v Ukraini. Analitychnyi zvit [Involvement of Men in Health Care in Ukraine: Analytical Report]. Kyiv: MFYSU. Pokotylo, O. 2006. Cholovikiv–v Chervonu knygu! [Men Should Enter the Red Book!] Den’ [Day] no. 174, 12 Oct. Pylat, V. 1994. Boyovyi hopack [Martial Hopack]. Lviv: Galytska Sich. Rotkirch, A. 2000. The Man Question: Loves and Lives in Late 20th Century Russia. Helsinki: Department of Social Policy, University of Helsinki. Semikhat, E. 2009. Media-obraz ukraintsa: Opyt sociologicheskogo issledovaniya sovetskogo kino [Media Image of a Ukrainian: Experience of Sociological Research of Soviet Films]. In Naukovi studii L’vivskogo Sociologichnoho Forumu ‘Tradicii ta innovatsii v sociologii’ [Academic Studies of Lviv Sociological Forum ‘Traditions and Innovations in Sociology’], 246–52. Drogobych: Provit. Shevchenko, O. 2002. Esli ty takoi umnyi, to pochemu takoi bednyi? Utverzhdaya muzhestvennost’ technicheskoi intelligentsyi [If You Are So Smart, Why Are You So Poor? Affirmation of Masculinity by Technical Intelligentsia]. In S. Oushakine, ed., O Muzhe(n)stvennosti [On Masculinity]], 288–302. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Available at http://www.genderstudies.info/sbornik/muzhest/14.htm. Simpson, M. 1994. Here Come the Mirror Men. Independent. 15 Nov. Available at http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/mirror_men.html (accessed 18 Aug. 2010). Tartakovskaya, I. 2005. Gendernaya sociologiya [Sociology of Gender]. Moscow: Variant. Thompson, E.H., and J.H. Pleck. 1986. The Structure of Male Role Norms. American Behavioral Scientist 9: 531–43. United Nations Development Program (UNDP). 2007. Genderni stereotypy ta stavlennya gromadskosti do gendernyh problem v ukrainskomu suspilstvi [Gender Stereotypes and Social Attitudes to Gender Problems in Ukrainian Society]. Kyiv: UNDP. Watson, P. 1993. Eastern Europe Silent Revolution: Gender. Sociology 27(3): 471–87. Yabchenko, M. 2009. Choloviky lidery obyednuyut’sya, shchob zupynyty nasyl’stvo proty ukrainskyh zhinok [Men-Leaders Unite in Order to Stop Violence against Ukrainian Women]. Available at http://www.undp.org. ua/ua/media/1-undp-news/769-ukrainian-celebrities-join-un-ledstop-violence-against-women-campaig (accessed 17 Aug. 2010). Yuval-Davis, N. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.

Models of Masculinity 361 Zdravomyslova, E., and A. Temkina. 2002. Krizis masculinnosti v pozdnesovetskom diskurse. [Crisis of Masculinity in Late Soviet Discourse]. In S. Oushakine, ed., O Muzhe(n)stvennosti [On Masculinity], 432–51. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. – 2007a. Sovetskiy etakraticheskiy gendernyi poryadok [Soviet Etacratic Gender Order]. In E. Zdravomyslova and A. Temkina, eds., Rossiyskiy gendernyi poryadok: Sociologicheskiy podhod [Russian Gender Order: Sociological Approach], 96–137. St Petersburg: Publishing House of the European University. – 2007b. Sovetkie gendernye kontrakty i ikh transformatsyia v sovremennoi Rossii [Soviet Gender Orders and Their Transformation in Modern Russia]. In E. Zdravomyslova and A. Temkina, eds., Rossiyskiy gendernyi poryadok: Sociologicheskiy podhod [Russian Gender Order: Sociological Approach], 169– 200. St Petersburg: Publishing House of the European University. Zhurzhenko, T. 2008. Gendernye rynki Ukrainy: politicheskaya ekonomia natsyonal’nogo stroitelstva [Gendered Markets of Ukraine: Political Economy of National Building]. Vinus: EGU.

14 Cash and/or Care: Current Discourses and Practices of Fatherhood in Ukraine ir y na k o s h u la p

The family, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood are under the State’s protection. – Constitution of Ukraine, 1996, Article 51 (emphasis added)

It is hard to assess how many men in Soviet times and in the early years of Ukrainian independence had to tramp the grass behind maternity hospitals as part of their rite of passage to fatherhood, but the experience of waiting for the news about the newborn under the hospital windows is believed to have been almost uniform. It was a part of Soviet folklore and continues to feed numerous jokes, caricatures, and comic episodes in various movies and television shows. Indeed, the personnel-and-expecting-mothers-only entry to the maternity hospitals and wards (for the sake of sterility and hygiene), the prevailing medical ethics of having more important things to do than providing updates to the relatives of the woman who has just become a mother (or has she yet?), and the limited visitation times for family to see the newborn and mother (and then only through a prison-like glass wall) made young fathers’ pilgrimage to the windows of maternity hospitals all the more poignant. Not only poignant, however, but also overwhelmingly acceptable, raising no reaction apart from some innocent humour around the topic of the tipsy young men. The blatant exclusion of fathers from any access to their children in the first days of their lives was merely a reflection of the existing expectations the society had about a father’s share in his child’s upbringing. Nurturing, child care, and emotional attachment

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to a baby were never legitimate parts of Soviet hegemonic masculinity. The overall marginal meaning given to fatherhood was communicated in state legislation and welfare policy – both directed at protecting and supporting the mother and child without recognizing father’s rights or encouraging his responsibility towards his children. Consequently, the prominence given to fathers as equal parents in the new Family Code,1 and the promotion of ‘conscious fatherhood’ (svidome bat’kivstvo) by the government of Ukraine in the mid-2000s, marked what can be evaluated as revolutionary changes. At the same time, little attention has been paid to determining whether, with these newly recognized rights and duties, Ukrainian men were ready to shoulder the burden of fatherhood. In this chapter, I offer a closer look at the ideals behind the ‘new father’ in contemporary Ukraine and show that ‘conscious fatherhood’ has come to integrate two competing images – a traditional view of the primary role of a father as breadwinner, and ideas of involved fatherhood, which stress the importance of the father–child connection – to address needed changes to children’s development, men’s emotional fulfilment, and more egalitarian and harmonious family life. While maintaining the requirement that men be breadwinners, in conscious fatherhood, involved parenting has been proclaimed to be ‘in the best interests’ of men themselves, and, for the first time, nurturing and primary caregiving are conceived as legitimate aspects of fathering. Most importantly, for the first time, the whole discussion on fathers’ involvement has outgrown the pages of expert literature on parenting and entered government policy making and popular discourse. The father-nurturer, however, has turned out to be a challenging role for young men in Ukraine to embrace; despite being seen as highly desirable, fathers’ involvement in child care is the exception rather than the norm. To complement existing statistics – which seem to prove that traditional gender stereotypes related to the ‘proper’ distribution of family roles take a lifetime to change towards more egalitarian views – this chapter presents a discussion of the experience of young fathers in ten Ukrainian families who welcomed their first child during the period when fatherhood began to receive enhanced attention from the state and the public. As different as their stories are, they all bring to light the main contradictions between the ideal and lived practices of fathering, compelling us to reflect upon the influence that public discourses have on individual men’s lives.

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Images of Fatherhood in Ukraine: Past and Present Fatherhood and Gender Equality in the USSR As a sociocultural coding of men as parents, ‘fatherhood’ involves certain discourses and practices that define the rights and obligations as well as the status of fathers (Hobson and Morgan 2002, 10). It is generally agreed that during the Soviet era, notwithstanding fluctuations in state ideology, men were perceived to be workers, soldiers, and citizens, and there was no place for fatherhood in their profile (Ashwin 2000). Recent changes in the state and public discourses on fatherhood in Ukraine have been influenced by a number of factors, including the Soviet legacy in the area of social provision, the country’s economic development, and the ideals of modernity and Europeanness. To say that in the Soviet Union fatherhood did not become an object of explicit state politics does not mean to claim that the state was a bystander in the processes that shaped it. As some researchers have argued, the whole project of women’s emancipation and the state’s efforts to engage women in paid labour were triggered not so much by a true commitment to gender equality or urgent economic necessity as by the need to challenge the rule of the father-patriarch, who stood in the way of the state’s new ideology regarding other family members (Kukhterin 2000). By proclaiming marriage to be a union of equal partners and by recognizing the rights of children born out of wedlock as early as 1917, the state made its first confident steps towards deeming individual fathers redundant (Ashwin 2000, 14–15).2 These policies were further supported by declaring the protection of mothers and children to be mainly the duty of the state and by adhering to an economic model that engaged dual-earner families. Having stripped fathers of their traditional authority as patriarchs and having weakened their role as breadwinners, the state did not, however, propose new responsibilities for men within the family. Instead, achievement at work and success in the public sphere laid the basis for the masculinity of the new Soviet man. The domestic sphere became associated with women, who very soon were expected to both take up full-time paid employment and maintain the burden of housework and child care by themselves, with some assistance from public services. This gender division of care-work was maintained with

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remarkable consistency through all the changes in state family policies over the decades of Soviet rule. Some favourable circumstances for a slow rehabilitation of men’s inclusion into the private sphere started to emerge in the 1980s, when lower birth rates in the European part of the USSR made the country’s leaders pay attention to the family once again. Provisions were introduced in 1981–82 aimed at encouraging families to have more children, but they were designed with the same traditional gender expectations in mind – a longer maternity leave for women, as primary caregivers, to combine their work and family life, as well as additional child care allowances to compensate for the loss of the wife’s salary, and thus to buffer the additional financial burden put on the family. By that time, however, the state’s failure to provide sufficient public facilities that could help women juggle their paid employment and motherhood had become evident. A survey conducted in 1978 showed that over the previous decade available public facilities had reduced women’s engagement with household work by only 5 per cent (Zhurzhenko 2002). Never backing away from its commitment to develop a more efficient system of public support in the near or distant future, the state looked for alternative resources, leading to renewed attention towards men and their contribution to the life of a family (p. 56). The family policies that came out of this renewed attention never went so far as to make specific mention of fathers or fatherhood. The expert literature on family and child care, however, in the form of manuals for young parents, which acted as ‘soft’ propaganda for the state,3 did begin to address men’s parenting responsibilities by introducing and testing some new ideas in the safer context of a limited but very targeted readership. Literature on family and parenting published during the 1980s began to remind men that they had equal rights and responsibilities for their children’s upbringing and that a proper fulfilment of their parental role was their ‘moral duty and legal obligation’ (Soloviev 1988, 5). Husbands were encouraged to take up an equal share of domestic work as part of this obligation, as opposed to ‘helping out’ their wives on occasion. Still, even the most outspoken advocates of fathers’ involvement with children saw the father’s role as complementary to that of the mother. This distribution was explained by natural differences between the sexes: ‘It has always been important to organize family’s leisure time, especially

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at weekends and holidays. This is where the father with his male’s managerial experience comes into the picture. There is one simple reason for this – mother is preoccupied with other activities which are not of a lesser importance . . . In other words, while the mother is cooking dinner, father is engaged with children’ (p. 13). Describing the new generation of men who were ready to embrace some child care duties as ‘proud,’ ‘thoughtful,’ ‘self-respecting,’ ‘most prudent,’ ‘energetic,’ and ‘creative,’ the authors of these manuals took particular care to underline that involved fatherhood did not mean feminization of men and was quite compatible with traditional masculine features. To substantiate this, examples were provided to show that men could use their ‘craftsman’ skills in this process: ‘The creativity with which some [fathers] invent different gadgets is amazing. One of them made an alarm lamp that indicates that the diapers need to be changed. Another set up a mike on the balcony so that the baby’s cry could be heard in the room. And such examples are numerous’ (Grebeshova et al. 1990, 26). Involved fatherhood was presented as a challenge and an achievement for a modern man whose experience with child care was limited at the beginning, but who could easily master this ‘unsophisticated science’ (Kaliuzhyn and Deriugina 1990, 65). It proved hard to make nurturing sound compatible with masculinity, however, especially since most of the expert literature was heavily imbued with traditional ideas about the father’s role as educator and mentor rather than caregiver. Analysing the shifts in gender roles in the public and private spheres during perestroika, Meshcherkina (2000) concludes that men were reluctant to take up housework or child care because they saw these as a ‘women’s job.’ The total feminization of caregiving and teaching professions, together with the continuing glorification of motherhood, supported this view, which was shared by the majority of women, too; women expressed highly traditionalist views on family gender roles despite advocating for gender equality in the public sphere (ibid.). The unwillingness of men to accept a greater share of housework and child care in response to women’s increasing involvement in the paid labour market has been continuous across post-Soviet and Western countries. Similarly, a surprisingly high number of women have remained unwilling to relinquish their role as the primary parent and housekeeper (Kukhterin 2000, 72; Kay 2006; Hobson and Morgan 2002). Current research no longer tries to explain this through the idea of false consciousness, but rather shows that motherhood can be more

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fulfilling and empowering for women than many advocates for change have wanted to admit (Dienhart 1998). This does not mean that men should be limited in their parenting involvement; in the end, they are the ones who can gain from it despite the sacrifice that is required to raise a child. Changing Images of Fatherhood in Post-Soviet Ukraine: Coding a New Father in the Family Code Changes in family and gender politics in independent Ukraine have had multiple effects on the institution of fatherhood. ‘Protection of women’ – the main, underlying principle of Soviet gender politics – was replaced by ideas of gender equality and human rights, and the family was proclaimed to be at the core of nation building. The state was to create ‘favourable conditions’ for the revival of ‘family values,’ which were said to have been ruined by the Soviet ideology (Zhurzhenko 2004). Starting from the mid-1990s, state family policies explicitly guaranteed not only the sovereignty and autonomy of a family’s decision making, but also equality and partnership between women and men in all spheres of life; that is, the policies were designed to provide women and men with equal opportunities in the labour market and in the private sphere, including parenting and a fair division of family duties. For Ukrainian men, this meant official recognition of their right to fatherhood, which was now protected by the law and, unlike through Soviet equal-rights policies, included the right to be a primary caregiver. The need to provide fathers with the same rights to shorter work-days in full-time employment, parental leave, and various subsidies was first voiced during perestroika. However, these and other rights were not granted to fathers until the 1990s. By 1992, ‘support for mothers with many children,’ for instance, was transformed into an ‘allowance for mothers/fathers who look after three or more children under sixteen’ (Alekseenko et al. 2004, 183). Maternal leave was replaced with parental leave, which includes a job guarantee and pen-sion entitlement, and can be used by either parent or shared. Most family benefits are now payable to a ‘parent who is looking after the child’ rather than to a mother (p. 183). Furthermore, the equality of rights of both parents is stated in the 1996 Constitution, and the underlying principle of the new 2002 Family Code is to eliminate any preferential rights in custody or claims for alimony for either parent.

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It was this recognition of men’s parenting rights that was seen to be among the most progressive provisions of the Family Code and was considered a big step forward to gender equality in Ukraine. As it serves national interests, the commitment to extend gender equality has also been used as a marker and proof of Ukraine’s ‘European choice.’ On its official website, the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine opens the discussion of the changes in family regulations with, ‘Being on the crossroads between the East and West, Ukraine slowly but steadily walks towards Europe’ (Pavlova 2007). The authors of the Family Code stressed that they used ‘the best European experience’ when drafting regulations related to family issues, and that the new law was compatible with European legislation (Parliament of Ukraine 2000; Konovalov 2004). ‘European,’ however, has come to be applied to nearly any context. Perceived as a synonym for ‘new’ and ‘modern,’ it has been used not only to qualify provisions that have been adopted in accordance with international norms, but also to deny any connection with Soviet practices, even in cases where a new law closely resembled an old one. For example, with regard to the Family Code, this rhetoric of ‘European approaches’ helped to justify some more conservative rather than modern attitudes to family and presented an overwhelmingly generalized view of the ‘European’ experience, neglecting the diversity of family law across Europe. Defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman and claiming this to be in line with the European standard, Ukrainian lawmakers obviously missed the fact that six European Union countries legally recognize same-sex marriages and many more give same-sex civil unions identical or very similar rights to marriage.4 ‘Conscious Fatherhood’ Ukrainian legislators, however, rightly noticed that without more active promotion of a positive image of involved fatherhood, and without the introduction of some direct incentives, men would not rush to embrace their new rights and responsibilities in the family. This has been a shared experience of all European countries, which are still trying to put official ‘parental equality’ into practice.5 Even in Sweden, where men have been reminded of the benefits of active parenting since the early 1970s, the introduction of ‘father month’ or ‘daddy month’ as a part of parental leave in 1994 did not go as

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smoothly as expected and required further campaigning and additional incentives for families to use it eagerly (Bergman and Hobson 2002; Hearn 2006, 132). In Ukraine, with its decades-long history of marginalized fatherhood, there could be no expectation of quick and easy change. Shortly after the adoption of the new Family Code, the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on Gender Equality (2006) recommended more active promotion of ‘conscious fatherhood’ that would raise the social status of fathers and eliminate gender discrimination in the family. Suggestions ranged from amendments that would encourage men to take parental leave, to the establishment of an official Father’s Day, and the introduction of ‘schools for daddies’ that would prepare men for fathering. None of the above have been implemented so far, with the exception of the few ‘schools for daddies’ established in some local communities as a result of the efforts of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). At the same time, several projects have been introduced by different state bodies to popularize the idea of ‘conscious fatherhood.’ In 2006, the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport, which has as one of its priorities the promotion of a father’s role in the family, ran a social advertising campaign called ‘Holding the Father Tighter by the Hand’ (Z bat’kom za ruku mitsnishe). Big posters depicting two silhouettes easily identifiable as a father and little son going fishing could be found in every big city and small town in Ukraine. In 2005, the mayor of Kyiv introduced an award for single fathers who were raising their children by themselves: Each year, during the official celebration of the International Day of Families in Kyiv, ten young fathers received a certificate of merit and 1,000 UAH. Winners of this Single Daddy of the Year award were selected based on ‘the father’s success in the child’s upbringing, his achievements in the social sphere, the child’s achievements at studies and extracurricular activities, and the family’s welfare and living conditions’ (Office of the Mayor of Kiev 2006). In 2008, the financial part of the award was doubled, and its terms were revised to include single mothers along with fathers. This move could arguably allow placing the single fathers, who often stand out as something exotic and extraordinary, into the broader context of one-parent families. At the same time, by choosing to use ‘single fathers and single mothers’ throughout the new mayor’s decree, instead of the generic ‘parent,’ as well as by establishing ten separate awards in each category, it was ensured that the fathers who raise their children without spousal support continue receiving recognition and assistance.

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For a while, it even became popular among male state officials to tell personal stories about their participation in their children’s upbringing. Their message: that a tight work schedule cannot serve as an excuse – being a good father is one of the main responsibilities of a modern man. To quote the Minister of Family, Youth, and Sport of the time, ‘It is very important that a father finds time for communication with his children. That’s why, whenever I have a spare moment, I try to spend that time with my sons. And that’s why I often take my wife and children to different events in which I have to participate’ (Pavlenko 2006). President Viktor Yushchenko (2006) often took up the job of personally popularizing the idea of conscious fatherhood: ‘Being a father of five and a grandfather of two, I try to spend all my free time, even if it’s not more than a couple of hours per week, with my children. Often we spend this time doing sports and games, we go swimming together, ski, play some ball games, and hike. I know that these are the best and the happiest moments for my kids.’ When one of the most popular TV anchormen, Oles’ Tereschenko, became a father, it was highlighted as ‘the most welcome news of the day’ on the evening news. In addition to information on the baby’s weight and the usual congratulations to the parents, the broadcast noted that the father was beside his wife during the eight-hour delivery. Oles’ confessed that it had not been an easy decision to take, but it was worth it – he really felt as if they both were giving birth to the child, the reporter detailed. This is one of a growing number of examples of favourable media representations of a father’s responsible attitude to his parenting role. Be it a discussion of the importance of the introduction of Father’s Day (Korrespondent 2007) or a personal story of a stayat-home dad, fathers’ involvement in nurturing and caring for their children is welcome, even if sometimes proponents have to admit, with regret, that this is much more of a trend in the West than in Ukraine (Husachenko 2006). There is some evidence that a pinch of pessimism about the willingness of Ukrainian fathers to join the trend is not totally groundless. In terms of sheer numbers, only 1 per cent of one-parent families are male-headed, and only up to 3 per cent of children stay with their father after divorce, while custody is granted to fathers almost exclusively in cases when a mother abandons the child (Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee 2006). Another media product, a documentary Who Will Sing a Lullaby (Khto zaspivaie kolyskovu; Rudik 2006), filmed with the support of the International Ukrainian Women’s Fund and

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the Open Society Institute, depicts the challenges and misunderstandings that men face if they decide to take parental leave and shows the resiliency of the belief that child care is a ‘woman’s job.’ As these examples demonstrate, understandings of fathers’ involvement with children can range from the more traditional paradigm, where it complements a mother‘s caregiving (playing, going fishing), to the role of a father-caregiver who can be a substitute for the mother (Single Daddy Award, schools for daddies, encouragement of fathers to take parental leave). It is the latter perception that is the most challenging to establish after the decades of feminization of child care. However, history shows that even the most persistent gender stereotypes could take less than a generation to vanish (Dienhart 1998). After all, while at the beginning of 2007, a husband present at a delivery made the news, in 2008, some city hospitals reported that over 80 per cent of couples opted for partner labours.6 Breadwinners Despite Themselves? In the new discourses around fatherhood, a man’s role as bread-winner is rarely mentioned, except in relation to divorced and non-resident fathers. This has happened not because decades of women’s employment have erased the expectation that a man should provide for the family – this expectation is simply taken for granted, and thus is not seen as requiring additional acknowledgment. Access to paid work undoubtedly enhanced women’s financial independence. However, studies of the Soviet labour market as well as the most recentreports on gender equality in Ukraine confirm the persistence of a nearly 30 per cent pay gap and high job segregation throughout the history of women’s employment in this country (Ashwin 2000, 13; Kukhterin 2000, 73). As a result, a man’s ‘natural’ role as the family’s main breadwinner has rarely been challenged, even though few men can actually boast of being the only family providers. In a way, their work and money has long been the only legitimate contribution to the family and household that husbands and fathers have been able to make. This becomes particularly obvious in cases of long-term unemployment, which causes feelings of shame and helplessness for men as they fall out of the labour market and, with few exceptions, fail to find a position in the household that would be acceptable for them and their family (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004).

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In granting more independence to individual families, the Ukrainian government has also toyed with the idea of shifting most of the financial burden connected with child rearing to parents. A new approach to the distribution of responsibilities among the state, family, and society was spelled out in the government program ‘Children of Ukraine’ (1996),7 which specified that the family ‘should be the main source of financial and emotional support, and of psychological security.’ The state took up the obligation to promote the legal and social protection of children, but assumed direct responsibility only for certain categories of children, primarily those being raised without parental support or in ‘problem families.’ In line with this, alimony payments were regulated to make it more difficult to evade them and to create stricter penalties for non-payment (Alekseenko et al. 2004, 165). Liberal approaches have not gained enough support in Ukraine, however, and the ensuing yet temporary shift from universal family welfare to a means-based system was mainly dictated by the need to optimize the limited economic resources available at that time. While most of the family allowances provided under previous Soviet legislation were kept and some new provisions were added, state family support remained nominal for a long time and was more of a declaration of intention than an effective system that would reduce the cost of having children. The decreased value of allowances resulting from inflation and constant delays in payments made the situation even worse. One example of the government’s helplessness in the context of economic deficit was the Presidential Decree on the Improvement of the Welfare of Families with Many Children (1999),8 which did not increase family support payments for these families, as might have been expected, but only required a timely payment of the family benefits (Zhurzhenko 2002, 154). Under such circumstances, the role of the father as breadwinner became much more important, especially during the initial period when the mother had to withdraw from the labour market and rely on child care payments while looking after the baby. Beginning in 2005, riding a new wave of pro-natalist politics, which aimed to increase birth rates in a country that was experiencing a continuous population decline, child allowances were increased considerably compared with previous years. However, this has never been discussed as a new opportunity for men to relieve their worries about providing for the family and free more of their time for looking after their children. Maybe this is because state support has not yet reached a

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high enough level; but whatever the reason, as my interviews show, cash and care has not been conceptualized as an either-or option for fathers yet. Fathering a Baby in Modern Ukraine: Insiders’ Opinions State politics represent only one of the discourses around fatherhood; these set certain conditions for, but do not determine the actual practices of fathering. In assessing men’s performance as fathers, researchers point out the important role of personal experience and the models of parenting set forth by one’s own family, conditions created by the market economy, religious beliefs, not to say attachment to the child’s mother (Lupton and Barclay 1997, 140; Ostner 2002, 165; Dienhart 1998). There is evidence to claim that, in Ukraine, the idea of ‘conscious fatherhood’ is currently countered by prevalent gender stereotypes that favour traditional views on the distribution of roles between the parents. According to a recent survey, when it comes to questions of parenting, the majority of men (93%) and women (96%) support the idea that both parents should take equal part in a child’s upbringing. In addition, 87 per cent of men and 83 per cent of women believe that fathers can be as good and caring parents as mothers. However, the age of a child turns out to be important in this assessment, and when the question is placed with regard to the care of a small child (under 3 years of age), only 54 per cent of men and 58 per cent of women agree that a father can cope. Besides, 13 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women add that they cannot imagine such an arrangement for their family anyway.9 Drawing on interviews with ten couples who have young children,10 I examine the actual versus desirable involvement of fathers in their children’s upbringing, their understanding of parental responsibilities, their emotional attachment to the child, and their perception of the compatibility of child care with masculinity. I name three major types of fathering based on fathers’ participation in child care. However, I also focus on discourses that can be traced across these groups and that appear to be formative for the men’s perception of their role as fathers. Before making any generalizations about the role of the state and other discourses in the construction of fatherhood in Ukraine, it should be noted that this study embraces only the experiences of married, first-time fathers who live in the Western region of Ukraine; the differences that may exist across groups with other educational, ethnic, or religious backgrounds remain unexplored here. The choice of

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the sample group is based on several factors, including the generally accepted idea that the politics of fatherhood are usually directed at middle-class men. Men belonging to different minority groups (ethnic, sexual, and so on) can be denied benefits offered by the system, and their practices of fatherhood can be described as deviant in contrast to the hegemonic ones. In addition, the conditions and practices of fathering change through a man’s lifespan, being influenced by the child’s growing independence (Curran and Abrams 2000; Hearn 2006, 253), as well as by changes in employment patterns for both parents and the entry of other children into the family (Lupton and Barclay 1997, 141). To exclude these variables from the study, I focused on early-stage, first-time parenting and existing discourses around that experience. Given the homogeneity of the families interviewed and the limited number of interviews, the sample cannot be seen as representative. Instead, it offers insight into the perception of state policy by fathers, the direct and indirect effects that those policies and discourses have on the division of child care duties within the family, and the issues that still need to be addressed to make the state policies that are related to fatherhood more efficient. Fathers, Dads, and Daddies In all the families that participated in the study, it was the mother who took the parental leave and stayed with the child most of the time. When it came to discussing the father’s role in raising children, the ideas expressed by both men and women resonated with the general public discourse on conscious fatherhood; fathers’ actual partici-pation in child care varied noticeably, according to the same interviews. Borrowing some of the terminology from earlier research (Hovorun et al. 2004), one can single out three types of fathers among my interviewees: the ‘father-nurturer,’ the ‘child’s best friend,’ and the ‘helping hand.’ As the promising code-name ‘father-nurturer’ suggests, this type of father could be a substitute for a mother in any activity. It was a matter of very little surprise that in my sample there was only one father who, although not a primary caregiver, took up the equal parenting role and found it rewarding. Despite working two jobs, he tries to use every available opportunity to spend time with his daughter. He manages the baby with confidence without seeking advice or assistance from his wife and is proud of being such a skilful parent. Since his

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wife was very weak after the delivery and could hardly get up from bed, he took a two-week leave from work to help with the baby: ‘That’s when I learned how to hold her, change diapers, put her to bed – how to be a real father.’ He refers to this learning process as having been a challenge at the beginning, but unlike other fathers, who often felt embarrassed when they could not cope with the baby or had to ask for help, our ‘father-nurturer’ perceived it to be a natural process and did not feel any discomfort: When the baby arrives no one knows how to do certain things [. . .] mothers have to learn it as well. Then the better you come to know your baby, the easier it becomes. You can tell the hunger cry from the hey-you-Ineed-my-diaper-changed cry from the I’m-bored-from-lying-in-my-bedall-alone one.

Fathers for whom the role of the ‘child’s best friend’ was most compelling engage with their child’s upbringing at a later stage, when it becomes ‘interesting’ to play with the baby. They compare their experiences of fatherhood with ‘returning to their own childhood,’ when even reading a fairy tale is turned into a performance with every animal having its own voice. Neither housework nor child care belongs to a father’s profile for them, which is why they find it difficult to ‘bond’ with the baby during the first year. A child is like a family guest who causes trouble and is the wife’s responsibility. Another apt comparison is to say that the baby is like a caterpillar that will eventually turn into a playful butterfly, and the fathers in this group seem to be waiting patiently for that moment to arrive (Hovorun et al. 2004, 78). Or, as one of the fathers put it: A child is such a thing which you wouldn’t like to break, you can hurt it. I wouldn’t risk doing something wrong, so it’s better to be on the safe side. As the child grows up, learns some basic things, it becomes more interesting. I can take it for a walk, for example. I also get more used to it, learn some things and professionalize as a father. So the interaction between us grows.

It is important to mention here that wives in this group do not demand much of their husbands, believing that a father has little to offer during the first year of a baby’s life, or that mothers are ‘naturally better’ at child care.

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Most men in my study fall into the third category of a ‘helping hand’ father, for whom patterns of behaviour and attitudes can range between those of a father-nurturer and those of a father-playmate. Despite being quite active fathers, they remain in secondary roles and are helping their wives rather than substituting for them. In general, men in this group say that they can do any domestic work, if their wives need help, and can look after the baby, if they have time for it. Early physical contact with the baby right after birth seems to be among the important factors that help men develop emotional ties with their child and engage in their care in the early stages. Those men who were present during the delivery and/or had to take care of the child right afterwards, as well as those who attended prenatal classes were better at ‘bonding’ with the newborn and more willing to take up the nurturing role.11 Why Can’t Men Nurture? Although the above examples show that the actual practices of fathering vary considerably, most of the parents were quite unanimous in their definition of a good father. That he should ‘spend time with the child’ was by far the most frequent answer given by both men and women. And even though this could imply a number of different activities, from bathing and putting the baby to bed to going out for a walk together, more often than not the answers revealed that it did not matter how the time was spent as long as it was spent together with the baby. Just ‘being there’ to help raise the child or to set an example seemed to be the best thing a father could offer to confirm his love and responsible attitude. This was directly or indirectly contrasted with the father’s responsibility to earn money, which was important, but could not justify the father’s absence. Describing his childhood, one of the male interviewees complained: My brother and I saw our father only on Sundays. He worked, he had lots of money – his pockets were always packed full with it, but there was no father around.

A number of the interviewed fathers saw their responsibilities to make a living and participate in the upbringing of the child as competing, and they acknowledged that the latter was more important for

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them than the former. Mothers also named their husband’s work as impeding their ‘real’ involvement. One mother said: He works Saturdays, so he spends only Sundays with the child. What kind of participation in the upbringing is that? The father should be there, should teach the child, educate him, be an example.

‘To set his own example’ was representative of these families’ expectations concerning a father’s involvement in the upbringing as well. ‘Teaching’ and ‘educating,’ either through ‘explaining things’ or ‘setting his own example’ were named as the most important roles for fathers. At the same time, child care, if mentioned at all, was discussed in terms of ‘helping’ the wife or ‘being able to substitute for the mother in almost everything.’ Thus, it is the mother who is considered to be a primary caregiver, while the father’s duty is education of the child. This division of roles between parents is visible in sharper contrast if the responsibilities of a ‘good mother’ are added to the analysis. First of all, unlike a father, for whom the time he should spend with the child and the particular duties are not specified, for a mother, as some parents confirmed, the expectation is clear that she should ‘give all her time to the child’ and ‘the child should be in the first place for her.’ Most of her duties are reduced to nurturing, with only one mother mentioning that in addition to making sure that the baby should have the diapers changed on time, be fed and not to cry. . . a good mother has to play with the child, to develop him or her.

Both men and women clearly define a mother’s primary responsibilities as nurturing and caregiving, but men tend to describe these duties in general terms. Instead of saying what a good mother must do, they usually specify personal characteristics that a good mother should exemplify, including been ‘caring,’ ‘patient,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘kind,’ ‘loving,’ and ‘hardworking.’ In this way, they perceive mothering as requiring some traditionally feminine qualities. One of the fathers even used the term ‘maternal instincts’ when talking about a good mother: First, all her maternal instincts should be okay; that is, the child should be in the first place for her and then everything else. And it is difficult to add anything to it.

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A number of the interviewed women observed that even though their husbands felt comfortable displaying emotions when they were with the baby at home, they avoided doing so in public, sometimes, as one mother described, to the extent of passing the pram to the mother whenever the baby started crying so that nobody would think the father was the one who was soothing the child. This last example can also be interpreted in terms of the fear many young fathers harbour that they may not be able to manage the baby in the right way, as they generally lack experience doing it. Such fear abets a vicious circle where limited contact with the baby prevents fathers from learning all the necessary skills, while not knowing how to manage the baby discourages them from taking up child care. Forwarded by both fathers and mothers, a standard justification for this reluctance was that a father could change the diapers or prepare some food, but, as one of the men in the study put it: The mother spends more time with him [the baby] and knows how to do it better.

Want to Be European? Although ‘a good father is a good father everywhere,’ as one male interviewee said, ‘there can be a difference between an average Ukrainian and Western fathers,’ said another. He explained: Our parents want to interfere more, want to ‘discipline.’ In the West, I guess, though I’ve never been there, parents and kids are more autonomous, more equal in their rights. Our kids know their place and look up at/to their parents; over there it’s the opposite.

Half of all references to ‘the West’ or Europe made in the interviews included this idea of higher equality of rights, not only between parents and children, but between the parents themselves; and although in general more women paid attention to these assumptions, men shared the view, too. One of them said: In the West, a woman cannot be considered a servant, men and women don’t have such rigid roles there, while in Ukraine we see the traditional view on duties in the majority of families – husband earns money, wife

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does shopping. Well, husband can also shop with her if they need to carry a lot of bags from the store [laughing].

Another area of discussion that was brought up in relation to ‘Europe’ was the connection between fathers, child care, and emotional attachment. Several interviewees mentioned that European fathers were ‘kinder’ and ‘joking all the time,’ while Ukrainian fathers were rather reserved. ‘Maybe we were just raised like that,’ said one mother. Five out of twenty interviewees noted that fathers were ‘better respected’ in other countries, not in terms of having greater authority, but in their ways of experiencing fatherhood. They could have fun and enjoy being fathers. As one of the male interviewees put it, he would like to participate in all those ‘“father and son ballroom dances” and other ridiculous things they do together on Father’s Day,’ but cannot, as there is no Father’s Day in Ukraine yet. No one mentioned any financial responsibilities for fathers when reflecting on the European practices of parenting: all the comments were about care, not cash. State support was also discussed in the context of encouraging men to become involved fathers, with little reference to social payments or any other type of family benefits, and such support was seen as positive and needed. One interviewee explained: From what we know, maybe the main difference is that the state encourages fathers’ involvement. They organize prenatal courses for the couple where fathers also do some exercises, have to wear a belly to feel what it feels to be pregnant themselves. In our country, no one encourages fathers to attend those courses. They are called Shkola materynstva (motherhood schools) – what father would go there?

Conclusions The popularization of the idea of ‘conscious fatherhood,’ which embraces a man’s involvement in child care alongside his breadwinning obligations, is quite recent in Ukraine. It took form under the influence of a number of contradictory discourses and aims at promoting the status of fathers in a society where, as statistics show, egalitarian views on the distribution of rights and responsibilities in the public sphere are combined with traditionalist expectations about family gender roles. It is hard to argue that state-led discourses have a defining influence on day-to-day practices of fathering; but as incomplete

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and often contradictory as the state promotion of ‘conscious fatherhood’ has been, the qualitative data in my study demonstrate that it has affected at least perceptions among individual fathers, and therefore, it should be seen as an important first step towards the legitimization of fathering and men’s attachment to their children as a part of proper masculinity. More willing to take up additional financial responsibilities than to look after a newborn, the young fathers in my study, however, see the real or imagined opportunities of spending time with children enjoyed by German or Swedish fathers as an example to look up to. The most common difficulties that men in Ukraine face on their way to involved fatherhood are the absence of male role models from their own childhood that they can draw from, and gender stereotypes that depict nurturing or emotional involvement as feminine and thus endangering their masculinity. Many fathers, even those who do not adhere to the traditional distribution of parental roles, find it ‘safer’ to wait until the child grows up enough to be worthy of their attention and to leave all the child care responsibilities to mothers until that time. One may want to conclude that men in Ukraine are far from being ready to enjoy the right of parental leave; but it may be more accurate to say that gender equality in both the public and private spheres should be promoted and enforced as a whole before men and women can embrace the idea of a truly shared parenthood. Indeed, when one of my male interviewees heard the question, ‘Would you consider taking the parental leave instead of your wife if she was earning more than you?’ and snapped back, ‘I cannot imagine where she could earn more than me,’ he was probably being quite sincere and accurate in his assessment of women’s career opportunities in today’s Ukraine. For gender-conscious legislation to become a success story, it must be seen as a beginning, not the end of the campaign for shared parenting. The hospitals that proudly announce a considerable increase in the number of partner labours had to redesign the delivery rooms as well as train their personnel to make it possible for fathers to be present during the birth of their child. Prenatal schools for parents that manage to engage fathers-to-be in their courses made an effort to design classes that would be relevant for both parents and to create a supportive atmosphere for them. There is still a considerable amount of work to be done to transform the public sector into a father-friendly environment, starting with kindergartens and schools that must no longer assume that mothers are the only involved parents in the child’s

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education and upbringing, and progressing to family-friendly employment policies that would be equally aimed at women and men.

NOTES 1 Simeinyi kodeks Ukrainy (Family Code of Ukraine), 2002, available at http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=2947–14. Official English translation available at http://www.mfa.gov.ua/data/upload/ publication/usa/en/7148/family_kideks_engl.pdf. 2 Aimed at women’s emancipation, these provisions were made in two decrees passed in 1917 by the Bolsheviks. 3 For more on the use of the manuals on parenting in the Soviet Union to promote ‘appropriate’ gender norms see Chernyaeva (2000). 4 Zhurzhenko (2004, 25) argues that Western framing was also used to justify a ‘return’ to traditionalist ideas about gender roles at the beginning of the 1990s, when the image of a Soviet working woman was opposed to an American ‘happy housewife’ of the 1950s, which was presented as the Western model to follow. 5 For a discussion of the challenges that the United Kingdom and Sweden have faced in the implementation of equal rights for both parents, see, respectively, Collier (2008) and Bergman and Hobson (2002). 6 Kyiv City Hospital reported that, in 2008, fathers were present for their partner’s delivery in 84% of cases; similarly, Uzhgorod City Hospital said their achievement was 85%. In both cases, the hospitals encouraged the couples to consider this option; they also invested in special personnel training and redesigned the wards and delivery rooms for that purpose. For more on this change, see http://clipnews.info/newstopic.htm?id=766. 7 Natsionalna prohrama ‘Dity Ukrainy’ (State program Children of Ukraine), from 18 Jan. 1996. Available at http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/ main.cgi?nreg=63%2F96. 8 Ukaz Prezydenta Ukrainy Pro zakhody shchodo polipshennia stanovyshcha bahatoditnyh simei (Presidential Decree on the Improvement of the Welfare of Families with Many Children), 12 Nov. 1999. Available at http://zakon. rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=1460%2F99. 9 The survey was a part of a government-run project, ‘Formation of Gender Parity in the Context of the Current Socio-Economic Change’ (cited in Alekseenko et al. 2004, 156). 10 This part of the study is based on twenty semi-structured interviews with first-time parents (10 fathers and 10 mothers) who, at the time, had a child

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under 12 months of age. The age of the interviewees ranged between 21 and 27 years for women, and 22 and 29 years for men; they were all urban middle-class professionals with a university-level education. The couples lived apart from their extended families, and the mother was taking the parental leave. Including mothers in the research allowed the possibility of a more accurate picture of gender roles in the family, the father’s actual participation in child care, and the prevailing discourses on fatherhood and motherhood that circulated in the family. 11 This observation resonates with findings from other studies on fatherhood; see, e.g., Lupton and Barclay (1997).

REFERENCES Alekseenko, T., O. Balakireva, Y. Halustian, and S. Holiuk, eds. 2004. Simya v umovakh stanovlennia nezalezhnoyi Ukrayiny (1991–2003) [Family in the Context of the Establishment of Independent Ukraine]. Kyiv: Derzhavnyi instytut problem sim’i ta molodi [State Institute for the Family and Youth Development]. Ashwin, S., 2000. Introduction: Gender, State and Society in Soviet and PostSoviet Russia. In S. Ashwin, ed., Gender, State and Society in Soviet and PostSoviet Russia, 1–29. London: Routledge. Ashwin, S., and T. Lytkina. 2004. Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization. Gender and Society 18(2): 189–206. Bergman, H., and B. Hobson. 2002. Compulsory Fatherhood: The Coding of Fatherhood in the Swedish Welfare State. In B. Hobson, ed., Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood, 92–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chernyaeva, N. 2000. Proizvodstvo materei v sovetskoi Rossii: uchebniki po uhodu za detmi epokhi industrializatsii [Production of Mothers in Soviet Russia: Manuals on Child Care during the Industrialization Era]. Gendernye Issledovaniya [Gender Research] 4: 120–38. Collier, R. 2008. Fragmenting Fatherhood: A Socio-Legal Study. Portland: Hart. Curran, L., and L. Abrams. 2000. Making Men into Dads: Fatherhood, the State, and Welfare Reform. Gender and Society 14(5): 662–78. Dienhart, A. 1998. Reshaping Fatherhood: The Social Construction of Shared Parenting. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Grebeshova, I., N. Ananieva, and S. Gribakin. 1990. Vash rebenok. [Your Child]. Moscow: Meditsyna. Hearn, J. 2006. European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities: National and Transnational Approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hobson, B., and D. Morgan. 2002. Introduction. In B. Hobson, ed., Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hovorun, T., V. Kravets, O. Kikinezhdi, and O. Kiz’, eds. 2004. Henderni aspekty usvidomlenoho bat’kivstva [Gender Perspectives of Conscious Fatherhood]. Ternopil: Navchal’na Knyha. Husachenko, I. 2006. Tatusi stayut’ mamamy [Daddies Become Moms]. Dzerkalo Tyzhnya [Mirror of the Week] no. 15, 22–8 April. Kaliuzhyn, G., and M. Deriugina. 1990. Vazhnaya missiya – byt’ ottsom [The Important Mission of Being a Father]. In V. Soloukhin, ed., Nastol’naya kniga molodykh roditelei [Reference Book for Young Parents], 64–6. Minsk: Vysshaia shkola. Kay, R. 2006. Men in Contemporary Russia: The Fallen Heroes of Post-Soviet Change? Burlington: Ashgate. Konovalov, D. 2004. Simeynyy kodeks Ukrayiny – shlyah do Evropy [Family Code of Ukraine – The Way to Europe]. Yurydychnyi Zhurnal [Law Journal] 10: 34–9. Korrespondent. 2007. Ukrainskim muzhchinam sdelayut prazdnik [Ukrainian Men Will Have Their Special Holiday]. Daily Online Newspaper Korrespondent. 18 Jan. Kukhterin, S. 2000. Fathers and Patriarchs in Communist and PostCommunist Russia. In S. Ashwin, ed., Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, 71–89. London: Routledge. Lupton, D., and L. Barclay. 1997. Constructing Fatherhood: Discourses and Experiences. New York: Sage. Meshcherkina, E. 2000. New Russian Man: Masculinity Regained? In S. Ashwin, ed., Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, 90–117. London: Routledge. Office of the Mayor, Kyiv. 2006. Official Announcement. http://kmv.gov.ua/ press.asp?Id=67301 (accessed 14 March 2009). Ostner, I. 2002. A New Role for Fathers? The German Case. In B. Hobson, ed., Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood, 150–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parliament of Ukraine. 2000. Verkhovna Rada Ukrayiny, Transcript of the 47th session. 12 May. Available at http://www.rada.gov.ua/zakon/skl3/ BUL35/120500_47.htm (accessed 21 Jan. 2007). Pavlenko, Y. 2006. V kariernykh pytannyah do rodychiv stavlyusya zhorstkishe, nizh do inshykh. [In the Issues Related to Career, I Am More Demanding towards My Kin than towards Others]. Interview. Available at http://ua.for-ua.com/interview/2006/10/06/100059.html (accessed 9 May 2011).

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Pavlova, L.M. 2007. Realizatsiya pryrodnoho prava na shlyub, simyu, materynstvo ta batkivstvo [Realization of the Natural Right to Marriage, Family, Motherhood, and Fatherhood]. Available at http://www.minjust.gov.ua/0/3666 (accessed 17 March 2007). Rudik, N., director. 2006. Khto zaspivaie kolyskovu. . . [Who Will Sing a Lullaby. . . . Documentary. 29 min. Ukraine. Soloviev, N. 1988. Otets v sovremennoi semie kak predmet sotsiologicheskogo issledovania [Father in a Modern Family as a Subject of a Sociological Study]. In S. Rapoport, ed., Otets v sovremennoi semie [Father in a Modern Family], 4–14. Vilnius: Institut Filosofii, Sotsiologii i Prava AN Litovskoi SSR [Institute of Philosophy, Sociology, and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the LSSR]. Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on Gender Equality. 2006. Rivni prava ta rivni mozhlyvosti v Ukrayini, realii ta perspektyvy: Rekomendatsii parlaments’kykh slukhan’. [Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities in Ukraine, Present and Future: Recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee]. Kyiv: Verkhovna Rada Ukrainy. Yushchenko, V. 2006. Proclamation on Family Day. 15 May 2006. Available at http://www.president.gov.ua/news/data/25_8199.html (accessed 21 Jan. 2007). Zhurzhenko, T. 2002. Staraya ideologiya novoy semyi. Demograficheskii natsionalizm Rossii I Ukrainy [Old Ideology of the New Family: Demographic Nationalism of Russia and Ukraine]. In S. Oushakine, ed., Semeynye uzy: modeli dlya zborki [Family Ties: Do-It-Yourself Models], 268–96. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. – 2004. Strong Women, Weak State: Family Politics and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine. In K. Kuehnast and C. Nechemias, eds., Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition, 23–43. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

15 Ukrainian Societal Attitudes towards the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities ta m a r a m artsen yu k

In this chapter, I explore attitudes towards homosexuality in contemporary Ukrainian society. Taking a sociological approach, I analyse aspects of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities of Ukraine, Ukrainian attitudes towards them, and homophobic public discourses in the country today. This analysis usefully problematizes existing ideas about heteronormativity in understandings of gender issues in general and gender politics particularly.1,2 Given that up to now there has been a lack of debate in Ukraine and a paucity of research on LGBT issues in Ukrainian universities and in the Academy of Sciences,3 the chapter makes an important contribution in bringing together existing research and advancing the terms of debate on this issue. Shortly after gaining its independence in 1991, Ukraine repealed criminal responsibility for non-violent male homosexual intercourse between adults. It was the first of the former Soviet republics to do so; Russia followed suit two years later, in 1993.4 At that time, LGBT communities within these two and other post-Soviet countries were faced with the task of trying to convince the majority of the population and state authorities of the truth of statements such as the following: ‘Along with race, national and religious affiliation, gender and other characteristics, sexual orientation and gender identity are inherent elements of everyone’s dignity and personality and, thus, should not be a ground for discrimination or violation of rights’ (Tagankina and Petrov 2009, Introduction). Nearly twenty years later, this task is ongoing. Homosexuality is still largely considered a deviant behaviour in Ukrainian society, as analysis of public opinion survey data clearly demonstrates. Meanwhile, homophobia receives tacit and explicit support from state officials and the

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media, and it is ‘normal’ and acceptable that a politician responsible for the protection of human rights would utter ‘hate speech’ against homosexual people in public (Martsenyuk 2009). In response to this situation, the LGBT communities have organized and are represented by a number of different non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In fact, taken as a whole, these communities are becoming institutionalized. LGBT NGOs are typically the only organizations commissioning and/or conducting research on issues related to homosexuality, as well as on issues of discrimination and violations of human rights. It is in this context that I present the results of initial research into LGBT issues, with particular attention to illustrating an alarming increase of homophobia in Ukrainian society in recent years. I tackle the difficult question of why, far from becoming more tolerant of homosexuality, public opinion in Ukrainian society has actually become less so. First I should note that, like elsewhere in the world, LGBT communities in Ukraine are complex in diversity and organization. These communities represent many different people and their relationships, many of which are further marginalized even within community designations. For example, transgender and bisexual people (about whom we have the least information and sociological data) are, for the most part, invisible among so-called sexual minorities, both in the general public and inside LGBT communities. Notwithstanding this diversity, for the sake of clarity, when I refer to ‘LGBT communities’ in this chapter I refer primarily to gay- and lesbian-identified people, and I take as my starting point an understanding that membership within LGBT communities typically means to recognize one’s own sexual and/or gender identity, and/or to share that information privately and/or publically. LGBT Communities in Ukraine As mentioned above, contemporary Ukrainian LGBT communities are now in the process of institutionalization. Since Ukrainian Independence, the number of LGBT NGOs has increased and become geographically diverse. According to the latest data provided by the Gay Forum of Ukraine, there are twenty-four officially registered LGBT organizations in Ukraine and twenty informal LGBT groups.5 During 2009 and 2010 alone, six LGBT organizations appeared (both in Kyiv and in different regions of the country). While the first LGBT NGOs

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 387

started their activities at the end of 1990s (the Nikolayev Association of Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals, or ‘LIGA,’ was established in 1996;6 the Nash Mir Gay and Lesbian Centre,7 in 1999), a quarter of all existing LGBT NGOs in Ukraine appeared in the past two years. Today in Ukraine there are many types of LGBT NGOs working at the national level (the Gay Forum of Ukraine,8 the Gay Alliance of Ukraine,9 and others), the inter-regional level (Nash Mir Gay and Lesbian Centre for Kyiv, Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, etc.), and down to the local (either oblast or city levels). Despite this wide regional coverage of LGBT NGOs, there remain regional disparities. The smallest number of NGOs are in Western Ukraine, where there are only two – half that found in other regions (there are five NGOs in the Northern region, five in Central Ukraine, four in the South, and four in the East).10 The limited presence in Western Ukraine, which is the more religious and traditional part of the country, could be attributable to the difficulties of organizing public activities in this region (i.e., mobilization of members of the LGBT community and the peaceful functionality of this type of NGO). People there tend to support the values of the traditional patriarchal family. In addition, according to the latest data provided by the Gay Forum of Ukraine, while there are thirty-two service organizations in Ukraine directed towards men having sex with men (or MSM),11 thirteen of which are also LGBT NGOs;12 only one MSM-service NGO operates from the Western oblasts, which is perhaps indicative of the difficulty in reaching a so-called critical mass there of people in need of support. LGBT activists unite their forces and ideas in LGBT organizations in order to have the legal opportunities to defend their human rights, particularly at the state level. There are approximately 150 activists within the LGBT community, and LGBT organizations members hail from approximately sixty Ukrainian cities (Women’s Network 2009). According to an evaluation by Svyatoslav Sheremet (leader of the Gay Forum of Ukraine), in Ukraine there are between 800,000 and 1,200,000 LGBT community members. Some of these individuals belong to same-sex couples, which are estimated to number between 100,000 and 200,000 (Maymulahin et al. 2009, 25). However, there are no official (state) statistical data to support such estimates. These numbers refer only to people who identify themselves as practising homosexual ‘risk behaviour’ for HIV/AIDS infection. The International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine conducts

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research and evaluates the size of most-at-risk populations vulnerable to HIV infection, among whom are men who are having sex with men (AIDS Alliance Ukraine 2008, 86). We should thus distinguish between identity and behaviour as two different characteristics of homosexual people. Not all people who practise homosexual behaviour identify themselves as homosexuals. In the case of MSM, not all men who practise homosexual behaviour (that could be ‘risk behaviour’ for HIV/AIDS infection) identify themselves as homosexual men. According to the various results, and taking into consideration the high level of stigmatization of MSM that leads to underestimation of the size of the MSM group, the total number of MSM at the country level in Ukraine appears to range between 117,000 and 430,000 (Balakiryeva et al. 2006, 38). Although, as mentioned, most research on homosexual behaviour is conducted to evaluate risk behaviours in relation to HIV infection, other aspects of LGBT issues are researched predominantly by LGBT NGOs themselves (or through cooperation with other NGOs, mostly international ones). Attention paid by the international community to members of the LGBT community (particularly to homosexual men), especially through NGOs that finance strategies for the prevention of HIV/AIDS infection in Ukraine has been deemed by some to be a type of ‘victimization’ of this community, as problematic. On the other hand, some leaders of the LGBT movement of Ukraine believe that, without international HIV/AIDS support, LGBT communities would not have the same strength in terms of financial and human resources.13 MSM-service NGOs provide not only medical support but also information (e.g., legal consultation) and opportunities for mobilizing activists (e.g., through encouraging participation in events). Thus, even while working only for homosexual men and mainly with regard to HIV/AIDS issues, MSM-service NGOs encourage a wider number of activities and support for LGBT communities as a whole. On 13 June 2008, three organizations that had experience both in working with homosexual issues and developing a common strategy to advance Ukrainian LGBT communities co-founded the Union of Gay Organizations of Ukraine (UGOU).14 The goals of the UGOU are the following: (1) to unite the efforts of its participants in advocating for the rights and freedoms of gay people; (2) to mobilize the LGBT communities towards building civil society in Ukraine; and (3) to improve the effectiveness of preventing HIV infection among

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 389

homosexuals. The UGOU provides support to fledgling LGBT organizations and works to educate LGBT activists. The LGBT NGOs that are most active in the public sphere aim to work both with their members and with other LGBT people in particular, as well as with the whole Ukrainian society and state in general. The Nash Mir Gay and Lesbian Centre mentioned above has two main goals: (1) the protection of human rights and freedoms of homosexuals and the improvement of their legal protection at the state level, and (2) the improvement of society’s attitude towards homosexuality and homosexuals. The Centre also monitors homosexuality issues in Ukrainian society and organizes public events such as conferences. In 2005, Nash Mir organized the large international conference, ‘Our World: Extending the Borders,’ which included a roundtable discussion on ‘New Homophobic Trends in Central and Eastern Europe,’ at which LGBT activists and researchers from across Europe and the post-Soviet nations were present. The most recent international conference took place at the end of 2008 with the topic ‘Gay and Lesbian Rights Are Human Rights,’ and covered a wide variety of issues from human rights and homophobia to tolerance issues in education. The Informational and Educational Centre Women’s Network,15 meanwhile, works on gender issues, feminist theory and practice, and human rights within the lesbian community of Ukraine. Its strategic goals are to participate in the formation of state policy related to lesbianism; to form tolerant attitudes within Ukrainian society towards lesbians; and to provide informational, educational, and consulting services to lesbians, their relatives, and friends, as well as to interested specialists. Being outside of MSM-service, lesbian NGOs are less ‘visible’ and therefore get less financial support from international NGOs. The NGO called ‘Insight’ is an LGBT organization in Ukraine that includes representation for transgender people.16 Insight was founded in June 2007 and became officially registered on 26 May 2008. Its mission is to represent and lobby for the rights of LGBT communities at the national and international levels. Its four strategic program areas are (1) information and education, (2) advocacy, (3) health, and (4) organizational capacity building. In 2010, Insight presented its first research results on transgender people in Ukraine.17 From this breadth of organizations, we can see that during the past few years LGBT communities have become more ‘diverse,’ that is, have included active work not only with homosexual men (MSMservice) but also with lesbians and transgendered people. Other

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features of the movement include the drive towards consolidation, including close cooperation among active LGBT NGOs, the creation of the Union of Gay Organizations of Ukraine, and so on; strategic planning (e.g., the Strategic Program of LGBT Community Development is now in place18); and compromise with state authorities by homosexual leaders (particularly Svyatoslav Sheremet, president of the Gay Forum of Ukraine). This latter feature has been the case specifically with regard to two main issues: (1) the organization of large public manifestations of gay pride, which leaders have agreed not to carry out because Ukrainian society is not ‘ready’ to tolerate this; and (2) legal marriage, which is currently not being advocated for – in its place the idea of legal registered partnerships has been put forward (Sheremet 2008). Still more can be said of the Ukrainian LGBT movement as a whole. For example, it lacks cooperation with other parts of civil society, other NGOs that work with human rights issues, women’s NGOs, and so on. In order to avoid marginality, therefore, LGBT communities should align themselves more closely with Ukrainian civil society. In my opinion, this could be accomplished through the organization of more common activities to help overcome xenophobia and to educate Ukrainian society (first of all, younger generations) to be more tolerant. LGBT Issues in Public Opinion In this section, I provide an overview of research on LGBT issues (predominately public opinion surveys) that has been conducted in the past five years. As discussed earlier, studies about homosexuality in Ukraine are done mostly by representatives of LGBT communities. During the one-year period between October 2004 and October 2005, the organization Nash Mir (2005) conducted a project to monitor, report on, and protect the rights of the LGBT communities in Ukraine by systematically examining human rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation in Ukraine. The results showed that 90.4% per cent of Ukrainian citizens noted that they had experienced one or more instances of discrimination on some basis (p. 13). Discrimination by health and age were most often cited (58.9% and 52.6% respectively), while sexual orientation was indicated as a basis of discrimination by 14.4 per cent of Ukrainians. Among young people (those under 35 years of age), 21 per cent of respondents indicated sexual orientation as a potential source of discrimination (p. 27).

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 391 Table 15.1. Opinions in Ukraine on the Human Rights of Homosexual People, 2002 and 2007 In your opinion, should homosexual citizens of Ukraine have the same rights as the rest of the population?

March 2002 %

March 2007 %

Yes, everyone should have equal rights.

42.5

34.1

No, some restrictions are needed.

33.8

46.7

I am not sure.

23.7

19.2

Source: Nash Mir, Ukrainian Homosexuals and Society: A Reciprocation. Overview of the Situation: Society, State and Politicians, Mass-Media, Legal Position, GayCommunity (Kyiv: Atopol, 2007), 67.

At the request of Nash Mir, another public opinion survey was conducted in March 2007 about Ukrainian attitudes towards equal rights for homosexual citizens.19 This survey, the results of which were published in a report called Ukrainian Homosexuals and Society (2008), took up earlier polling work done in 2002 and thus provided insights into how the public’s views had changed in the five-year interim. Results from the 2007 survey (see Table 15.1 below) show that the number of people who oppose the idea of granting homosexual people in Ukraine the same level of rights as heterosexual people increased by 13 per cent, from 34 per cent in 2002 to 47 per cent in 2007 (Nash Mir 2007, 67). Nonetheless, in general one-third of the Ukrainian population said it supports equal rights for homosexual citizens. When asked about specific rights for LGBT people, such as registered same-sex partnerships (see Table 15.2) and raising children (see Table 15.3), more Ukrainians said they were against same-sex partnerships or child rearing by homosexuals than when asked a general question about human rights. In 2007, only 16 per cent of respondents supported the idea that homosexual people should have their relationships officially recognized by the state, while the proportion of those who were against this increased to 52 per cent from 40 per cent in 2002. With regard to homosexual people raising children, which could be considered the most sensitive measure of intolerance towards LGBT communities, in 2007, less than one-fifth of respondents supported the idea that homosexual citizens have a right to raise children, which is 5 per cent less than five years earlier. The proportion of Ukrainians who were against this right increased in the five-year period, from 49 per cent in 2002 to 60 per cent in 2007 (see Table 15.3).

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Table 15.2. Opinions in Ukraine on Registered Same-Sex Partnership for Homosexual People, 2002 and 2007 Do you think homosexual citizens should have the same right as heterosexual couples to have their relationship officially registered?

March 2002 %

March 2007 %

Yes, they should have such a right.

18.8

15.8

No, they should never, ever be given such a right.

40.2

52.3

There should be exceptions (individually considered).

13.6

11.4

I am not sure.

27.4

20.5

Source: Nash Mir, Ukrainian Homosexuals and Society: A Reciprocation. Overview of the Situation: Society, State and Politicians, Mass-Media, Legal Position, GayCommunity (Kyiv: Atopol, 2007), 67.

The report also described levels of homophobic attitudes by different socio-demographic groups within Ukrainian society (Nash Mir 2007, 68). For example, Ukrainian women were typically more in favour of equality for homosexual people than Ukrainian men. As well, people with higher education showed greater tolerance towards homosexual people, with double the number of affirmative answers from people with higher education compared with respondents with primary or incomplete secondary education. In 2007, 39.1 per cent of those with incomplete or complete higher education said they supported equality for homosexuals, compared with about half that number (21.5%) among people with primary or incomplete secondary education. In general, these results show that respondents in all age groups have become more homophobic during the recent five-year period under study. Nevertheless, young people aged 16 to 29 years still remain the most tolerant of LGBT people. The final report warns: ‘Here are seen the most clearly negative tendencies: if in 2002 respondents favouring equality for homosexuals comprised 63.2 per cent among [those] 16–19 [years of age] . . . (19.5 percent being against), then by 2007 we see that the proportion of positive answers for this age category has decreased to 40 percent (42 percent being against). This tendency is one of the most dangerous that the poll has uncovered’ (Nash Mir 2007, 68). In just a five-year period, intolerance among teenagers had doubled, a tendency that can be perceived to be rather challenging for the future of Ukrainian democratic society.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 393

Visible regional differences in people’s attitudes to LGBT rights issues also emerge in the survey. The greatest tolerance towards homosexuals is seen among people in Kyiv and Crimea; less tolerant are people in the Eastern region of the country; and the most homophobic are the Western and Northern regions of Ukraine. For example, among the respondents who supported equality for LGBT people, the breakdown by city/region is stark: Kyiv (58.2%), Eastern region (25.4%), Northern region (15.6%), and Western region (27.2%) (Nash Mir 2007, 68). These differences can be largely explained by the level of urbanization of each region. The Western and Northern parts of Ukraine hold more conservative views on gender and sexuality issues and in general traditionally have higher levels of religiousness compared with other Ukrainian territories (ibid.). Given the earlier discussion regarding regional aspects of LGBT NGO activity in Ukraine, these survey results make clear why there are only a few LGBT and MSM-service NGOs in the Western part of the country (one of the most homophobic). To conclude, Ukrainian citizens became less tolerant towards LGBT people during the period between 2002 and 2007. Attitudes towards homosexual people are not homogeneous across Ukraine and depend on the respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics. It is also important to note that approximately 20 per cent to 30 per cent of respondents (depending on the question) were unsure of their answer when asked about the rights of homosexual people. This could mean that in Ukrainian society there is a lack of debate on the issue of homosexuality and the human rights of LGBT communities in general. Another comparative public opinion survey on the topic of homosexuality, which showed differences in views between the years 1991 and 2006, was carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).20 KIIS presented results of this large survey in a document entitled, Opinions and Views of the Ukrainian Population on the Eve of the Referendum about Independence and after 15 Years. Within this survey, one block of questions concerned homosexual people and AIDS. These results showed that homosexuals are still stigmatized as a group. According to the KIIS data, the level of tolerance towards homosexuals has not changed significantly over time (see Table 15.4). To the question ‘Do you agree or disagree with the statement that “Society should treat homosexuals the same as other people?” ’ the proportion of those who disagreed decreased only slightly from 34.9 per cent in 1991 to 28.5 per cent in 2006, and the proportion of those who agreed remained stable, at 33.7 per cent in 1991 and 33.3 per cent in 2006.

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Table 15.3. Opinions in Ukraine on the Right of Homosexual People to Raise Children, 2002 and 2007 Do you think that homosexual citizens have a right to raise children?

March 2002 %

March 2007 %

Yes

21.5

17.1

No

49.2

60.2

I am not sure.

29.3

22.7

Source: Nash Mir, Ukrainian Homosexuals and Society: A Reciprocation. Overview of the Situation: Society, State and Politicians, Mass-Media, Legal Position, GayCommunity (Kyiv: Atopol, 2007), 67.

What are the reasons for such a change in public opinion attitudes towards homosexuality in Ukraine? I would argue that the following three main factors have had an influence on the formation of intolerant attitudes of Ukrainians to LGBT communities: (1) The decriminalization of homosexual behaviour in 1991 and the activism of LGBT communities during the post-Soviet period (2) Negative public discourse, including hate speech (on the basis of sexual orientation) by Ukrainian politicians; media portrayals of LGBT issues as deviant and abnormal; and a lack of diverse information on homosexuality and homosexuals (i.e., beyond the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS and Ukraine’s demographic crisis) (3) The negative position of the Ukrainian church (mainly Orthodox Christian) towards homosexuality and the impact of homophobic initiatives like the so-called movement, ‘Love against Homosexuality.’ Decriminalization and Silence On 18 December 2008, the U.N. General Assembly proclaimed for the first time the Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. The statement was signed by sixty-six countries.21 Ukraine was not among them and did not support the statement. In justification of the government’s decision, Vasyl Kyrylych, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, made the following comment in an interview given to STB Television on 19 December 2008: ‘We don’t have such a

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 395 Table 15.4. Opinions on the Statement: ‘Society Should Treat Homosexuals the Same as Other People,’ 1991 and 2006

Disagree absolutely

1991 %

2006 %

27.6

19.5

Change % –8.1

Rather disagree than agree

7.3

9.0

+1.7

Both disagree and agree

8.9

16.3

+7.4

Rather agree than disagree

7.1

13.5

+6.4

Agree absolutely

26.6

19.9

–6.7

Difficult to say

22.6

21.9

–0.7

100.0

100.0

Total

Source: Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), Opinions and Views of the Ukrainian Population on the Eve of the Referendum about Independence and after 15 Years (Kyiv: KIIS, 2007). See www.kiis.com.ua.

problem and we do not need to discuss it. Since this phenomenon was decriminalized in Ukraine, there has been neither punishment, nor persecution.’ The idea that one of the so-called solutions to the perceived problem of homosexuality is to keep silent and avoid the issue of LGBT people’s rights because it is not as important as other social problems has been promoted in other post-Soviet countries too, including Russia, as can be seen from the following statement: ‘The Russian government prefers to ignore and keep quiet about the problem of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity’ (Tagankina and Petrov 2009, section 3.4). Information War: Ukrainian Media and Politicians Marginalize Homosexuality Intolerance towards LGBT people is also influenced by official state discourse (as broadcast by the media). Several LGBT NGOs have understood the importance of keeping track of this discourse and analysing it. Thus, they monitor examples of ‘hate speech’ in Ukrainian society (society-wide homophobia, including the actions of several governmental bodies, as well as anti-gay statements by political

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leaders and homophobic groups). The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) is one of these groups, and in 2007, they put out a press release entitled ‘Hate Speech by High-Ranking Politicians in Ukraine’ (ILGA Europe 2007). In Ukraine, Nash Mir has also done this kind of monitoring. According to their work, since mid-2006, the mass media have carried a considerable number of statements by politicians about homosexuals and their rights (Nash Mir 2007, 75). Homophobia is also typical of Ukrainian politicians of any ideology.22 In February 2007, there was a clear example of hate speech based on intolerant attitudes towards homosexual people from an official whose responsibility it is to protect human rights in Ukraine. The Communist Party member Leonid Grach, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, National Minorities, and Interethnic Relations, stated in an official capacity that ‘the state must protect society against evil, violence and particularly against homosexuality and lesbianism.’23 In reply to his statement towards homosexuality, Ukrainian LGBT organizations addressed a letter to Grach in which they called for him to respect and protect the rights of homosexual people; Grach not only did not change his attitude, he continued to express new hate speech towards homosexuals. Likewise, in answering a question about same-sex marriages, Olexandr Turchynov, who, at the time was the second most important figure in the bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko declared: ‘We are categorically against! It is a big sin.’ After a journalist commented that this answer was more typical of the Conservative Party, Turchynov added: ‘I do not agree. If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy – you label them progressive. All of these are perversions’ (Nash Mir 2007, 69). Other examples of politicians’ homophobic comments abound, such as the following: ‘Personally, I won’t support political ideas and demands of homosexuals . . . I believe that we need to protect the family and spiritual values of Ukrainian society’ (MP Socialist Mykola Danilin in 2006), and ‘Personally I think, that gays and lesbians violate all norms of morality. It is a physical failing that is necessary to hide, not to expose’ (a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Social Policy and Labour, Vasyl’ Khara, Party of Regions) (Nash Mir 2007, 69). On 14 December 2006, the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, was asked during an Internet conference: ‘What do you think about the legislation of same-sex marriages in Ukraine?’ The president replied: ‘Can I answer in one word? – Complicated.’ He added, ‘Though by

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this I would not like to give a differing opinion from that which is given by the society and law’ (Nash Mir 2007, 69). According to Russian sociologist Igor Kon, sexuality discourse used to be a controversial phenomenon for post-Soviet countries (particularly for Russia). In discussing sexual liberation and attitudes towards homosexuality, Kon identifies two polarities in these countries: ‘conservative traditionalists, nationalists, and communists, with a common blending of sexophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, on one side, and liberal “Westerners,” on the other side’ (Kon 1999, under the heading ‘Unity of Opposites’). Kon concludes that, for the state, the main task is either to reconcile these two views or to choose ‘the proper one’ for its politics. Religious Discourse and LGBT Rights Meanwhile, the LGBT community in Ukraine has had to face ongoing challenges from powerful religious groups that shape public opinion about homosexuality. The same-sex marriage issue is one of the most controversial issues arising in Ukraine between LGBT supporters, state authority, and the Church. In response to what they felt was an unfair stance towards same-sex marriage, on 21 August 2006, LGBT NGOs sent a public letter to the president of Ukraine and to legislative and executive officials that reads, in part: We, the leaders of non-governmental and charitable organizations working for gays and lesbians in Ukraine, appeal to you with this letter in response to the recent initiative of His Excellency Lubomyr Huzar, Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was put forward by him on June 2nd this year at the session of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations. Cardinal Huzar proposed to elaborate and adopt amendments to current legislation, which would entrench the concept of a ‘married couple’ as a union exclusively between a man and a woman, and which would legislatively define the concept of ‘sexual minorities.’ This would allegedly serve to prevent the creation of same-sex families in Ukraine, legalization of same-sex marriage, and the upbringing of children in such families. We treat all religious organizations, registered in Ukraine, with respect and tolerance. Undoubtedly, both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and other religious organizations have the right to formulate and

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publicly express their opinion on homosexuality and homosexual behaviour. However, it is necessary to consider that any intolerant statements can provoke incitement of hate towards homosexual citizens and can lead to violence against them. (Nash Mir 2007, 71)24

Moreover, in this open letter, LGBT NGOs emphasized that homosexuality is neither a disease nor a personality disorder, nor is it a criminal offence. They demanded a ‘civilized attitude’ towards people of homosexual orientation, following the example of most countries in the free democratic world (Nash Mir 2007, 72). Among other things, LGBT activists asked for the following: that a legislative prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in all spheres of public life be introduced; that same-sex marriages between citizens of Ukraine or between citizens of Ukraine and foreigners, lawfully contracted in another country, as well as civil partnerships, lawfully registered abroad as valid be recognized; and that the rights and needs of gays and lesbians be taken into account while drafting and implementing normative and legislative acts. LGBT NGOs received answers from several ministries that, on the one hand, mentioned the problem of ‘preconceived attitudes towards gays and lesbians on the basis of their sexual orientation’ (Ministry of Ukraine for Family, Youth, and Sport; Nash Mir 2007, 74). On the other hand, the issue of the protection of the human rights of LGBT people was considered to be not very urgent compared with other social problems in Ukraine: ‘Today the question of the legalization of same-sex marriages is not timely. And personally I am against such legalisation,’ said Minister for Family, Youth, and Sport Yuriy Pavlenko, in an interview with NTN News, on 16 November 2006. Hate speech with reference to sexual orientation has become normal state discourse in Ukraine, especially in the media. Such discourse is supported by initiatives like ‘Love against Homosexuality.’ Since 2003, this organization has conducted public activities and issued press statements in Kyiv to further its homophobic agenda.25 In 2007, it launched an initiative to establish criminal prosecution for the spread of information supportive of or leading to the popularization of homosexual behaviour on the ground that it threatens the national security of Ukraine (Nash Mir 2007, 75). This appeal was sent to the country’s legislative institutions and prime political actors, including the president, the prime minister, and members of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine). In October 2007, in Kyiv, a march was held under the

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slogan ‘For the Moral Cleanliness of Ukrainian Society,’ organized by the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom Divine for All Nations26. Nearly five hundred persons marched from Kyiv’s central square to the offices of the president of Ukraine. Love against Homosexuality stated that they had in their possession a letter from the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information that addressed propaganda of so-called sexual perversions in mass media: ‘Such situation urges the government to take resolute and immediate measures to stop the popularization of homosexuality, lesbianism, and other sexual perversions that do not conform to societal moral principles’ (Love Contra 2008a). Love against Homosexuality blames homosexual people for spreading HIV/AIDS in Ukraine and publishes articles with titles such as ‘AIDS Kills Gays’ on their official website (Love Contra 2008b). In the Report on the Situation of LGBT People in Ukraine submitted to the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe Monitoring Committee from ILGA Europe, the following summary of the current situation was provided:27 homophobic attitudes in Ukrainian society are intensifying; mainstream politicians increasingly oppose the fundamental rights of LGBT people with intolerant language, and their statements go unchallenged by persons in authority; the Legal Department of the Supreme Court, instead of upholding fundamental rights, and defending a vulnerable minority, opposes proposals to protect LGBT people from discrimination in intolerant terms; and all leaders of mainstream faith organizations in Ukraine have now united in opposing the rights of LGBT people, expressing their opposition in disturbingly intolerant language. Fighting Homophobia On 25 April 2007, members of the European Parliament debated and adopted a new Resolution on Homophobia in Europe in which homophobia is compared with other forms of xenophobia: ‘homophobia can be defined as an irrational fear of and aversion to homosexuality and to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people based on prejudice and similar to racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and sexism’ (European Parliament 2006, subsection A). Moreover, the language of the resolution acknowledges that homophobia manifests itself in the private and public spheres in different forms, such as hate speech and incitement to discrimination, ridicule, and verbal,

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psychological, and physical violence, persecution, and murder, as well as discrimination in violation of the principle of equality and unjustified and unreasonable limitations of rights, which are often hidden behind justifications based on public order, religious freedom, and the right to conscientious objection (European Parliament 2006, subsection B). According to the results of the first specialized study of the legal situation of LGBT communities in Russia, made by the Moscow Helsinki Group in cooperation with the Russian LGBT Network in 2007–08, the situation with homophobia as a part of general xenophobia is even more subtle: ‘the tolerant attitude of the government and the society towards discrimination of LGBT people contributes to the legitimacy of neo-Nazi and religious fundamentalist groups which are rather homophobic’ (Tagankina and Petrov 2009, under the heading ‘Conclusions and Recommendations’). To focus attention on homophobic attitudes that continue to be widespread in many countries, including post-Soviet countries, special dates and events are devoted to this issue. May 17 has thus been designated as the International Day against Homophobia. The International Lesbian and Gay Association chose this time of the year to launch a report on state homophobia around the world in order to raise awareness of the extent of institutionalized homophobia (ILGA 2007). On this day in Ukraine, LGBT NGOs (and others that work on human rights protection issues) organize special events, such as Queer Week, an annual festival of LGBT culture, to fight stereotypes about LGBT communities and draw attention to the problem of homophobia in Ukrainian society. But these initiatives have rather local impacts and are not organized on the state level. For official bodies (even those that are supposed to work with human rights protection in general), the rights of LGBT communities are a marginal problem that is not seen or discussed. LGBT Community Rights: State Politics towards LGBT Issues in Ukraine Founded in 1978, ILGA is now a federation of more than 670 groups in over 110 countries campaigning for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex rights.28 It is a worldwide network of national and local groups dedicated to achieving equal rights for LGBTI people everywhere. Amnesty International believes that ‘all people, regardless of

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their sexual orientation or gender identity, should be able to enjoy the full range of human rights’ (Amnesty International USA 2009). In 2006, a group of international human rights experts met in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to outline a set of international principles relating to sexual orientation and gender identity. The result was the ‘Yogyakarta Principles: a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all states must comply.’ In the introduction to the Yogyakarta Principles (2007, 6), it is mentioned that ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. All human rights are universal, interdependent, indivisible and interrelated. Sexual orientation and gender identity are integral to every person’s dignity and humanity and must not be the basis for discrimination or abuse.’ These Yogyakarta Principles were a focus of discussion in Kyiv in October 2008 at the International Conference on Human Rights Issues for LGBT people, where the theme was Gay and Lesbian Rights Are Human Rights. The key points in the development of a LGBTI human rights legal doctrine can be categorized as follows: (1) non-discrimination, (2) protection of privacy, and (3) the ensuring of other general human rights protection to all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity (O’Flaherty and Fisher 2008). Amnesty International (2009) calls on states ‘to take all necessary legislative, administrative, and other measures to prohibit and eliminate prejudicial treatment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at every stage of the administration of justice’; it also seeks ‘to end discrimination in civil marriage laws on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and to recognize families of choice, across borders where necessary.’ LGBT communities in Ukraine are also working to establish human rights legal doctrine to protect privacy rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity issues. Yogyakarta Principle 24, ‘The Right to Found a Family,’ notes: ‘Everyone has the right to found a family, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Families exist in diverse forms. No family may be subjected to discrimination on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender identity of any of its members’ (Yogyakarta Principles 2007, 27). LGBT NGOs (e.g., Nash Mir) stress the need for the discussion of human rights topics in state politics related to sexuality and family. First of all, they underline the absence of anti-discrimination articles in the 1996 Constitution (Art. 24), the Labour Code (Art. 2.1), and the Criminal Code (Art. 161) (see Nash Mir 2007, 81). In particular, these groups are concerned that

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the list prohibiting unequal treatment of citizens and discrimination does not contain the concept ‘sexual orientation.’ Ukrainian LBGT communities have also tried to lobby for official recognition of same-sex unions in Ukraine, which are not recognized either in the form of official marriages or as civil marriages. According to ILGA Europe webpage data, legal recognition of same-sex relationships can be categorized into the following four main types: (1) marriage, as is the case in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain, where the rights, responsibilities, and legal recognition given to samesex couples who marry is the same as for different-sex couples who marry; (2) registered partnership, as is the case in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, and Iceland, where a particular form of registration is often exclusively open to same-sex partners although some countries have also made it available to different-sex partners; (3) registered cohabitation, which is often available to both same-sex and different-sex couples and requires that the couples prove that they have lived together for a determined period of time before they can accede to their registration; and (4) unregistered cohabitation, such as in Croatia, France, and Portugal, where very limited rights and responsibilities are automatically accrued after a specified period of cohabitation – these rights are almost always available to unmarried different-sex couples as well (ILGA Europe 2007b). As discussed earlier, however, in Ukraine, none of these forms of recognition are in place, and the debates between the LGBT community, religious forces, and the state are ongoing. The human rights of people in LGBT communities in Ukraine are being neglected in other areas as well. For example, rights are frequently abused in the labour market. Results of interviews with nine hundred homosexuals conducted in 2005 demonstrate that ‘often homosexuals face problems in the workplace, and during contacts with representatives of law enforcement bodies’ (Nash Mir 2007, 82). For example, 78.2 per cent of respondents who were employed or had tried to find a job noted that they faced one or another violation of their rights, unequal treatment, and a prejudiced attitude towards them in the labour sphere. Mostly, this took the form of refusal of employment or dismissal (p. 82). Moreover, 61.5 per cent of respondents who had to contact representatives of Ukrainian law enforcement bodies during the previous year noted one or more violations of their rights (p. 82). In the sphere of education there is also a negative attitude towards LGBT people. According to the results of the same round of 2005

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interviews conducted by Nash Mir, approximately three-quarters of ‘open’ homosexuals felt themselves subjected to a prejudiced attitude on the part of teachers or other pupils (p. 85). Finally, privacy and information rights are subject to abuse. Of the gays and lesbians surveyed by Nash Mir, 23.4 per cent said that their right to privacy had been violated (p. 86). Particularly, information about their sexual orientation had been shared without their permission. In the main, this confidentiality had been violated by police officers, colleagues at work, or other persons to whom previously private information had become known. Homosexuals could be blackmailed in order to force them to provide information, to leave their job, and so on (p. 86). In the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (2007), in the chapter entitled ‘Other Societal Abuses and Discrimination,’ the authors refer to Nash Mir’s explicit concern with ‘ongoing police abuse of gays, threats by police to inform gays’ families and employers of their lifestyle, and the lack of access to medical treatment and information for gay men on prevention of HIV/AIDS’ (U.S. Department of State 2008, under the heading ‘Other Societal Abuses and Discrimination’). Much work remains to be done in these areas. At the end of 2007, the LGBT community submitted a draft review of the Labour Code to the Rada that was adopted at first reading on 20 May 2008. The antidiscrimination article of the draft did not include prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. One of the authors of the draft review of the Labour Code, the Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Labour and Social Policy, Deputy Vasyl Khara (Party of the Regions), said in one of his interviews: ‘Personally, I think that gays and lesbians violate all norms of morality. It is a physical defect that should be concealed, not flaunted. On the other hand, what they [sexual minorities] are demanding is a European norm that is likely to be included in the draft of the Code. I am against it, though.’ Despite numerous appeals by the Nash Mir Centre to the Rada concerning the urgent need to include prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in employment, the issue was not included in the draft (Nash Mir 2008). All these examples of human rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity show that, in Ukraine, there are no legislative, administrative, or other measures to prevent this situation. In September 2008, Ukrainian LGBT organizations proposed a Plan of Actions to Combat Discrimination on the Ground of Sexual Orientation and

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Gender Identity in Ukraine to a number of governmental agencies. This document contains a long list of actions that must be taken to ensure civil rights and freedoms for LGBT people; however, this proposition received no constructive response (Nash Mir 2008). Not only at the local (country) level, but also at the European level, the Ukrainian state is not ready to support human rights issues on the basis of gender identity. Conclusions and Further Discussions Compared with twenty years ago, in post-Soviet Ukraine, the activities of LGBT NGOs have become more visible in the ‘public eye,’ while the organizations themselves are more institutionalized and official, which has a reality that has played the most important role for the LGBT rights movement in Ukraine. While the stronger, more solid movement may account for a stronger voice for members of the LGBT communities, it may also definitely provoke public opinion (formed mainly by the media) towards homosexuality and challenge heteronormativity that is standard in Ukrainian society. Despite all the evidence outlined above of intolerance towards LGBT community members and the lack of protection for their rights, state officials in Ukraine responsible for human rights issues do not even keep statistics concerning the violation of rights among LGBT people in Ukraine. This represents an important gap in research. In order to combat discrimination against vulnerable groups of people, public opinion about attitudes towards these issues should also be studied more widely and the results made public. These results could be presented together with other statistics on discrimination as part of the European Commission Eurobarometer Special Surveys. In these reports, attitudes towards vulnerable groups are studied thoroughly according to different socio-demographic and cross-cultural perspectives.29 Such sociological research on discrimination could be helpful for adopting measures that provide equal opportunities for everyone in fields such as employment and education where, as we have seen, LGBT community members are now suffering abuse. On the other hand, LGBT organizations should try to cooperate actively with the research community and with universities. Information and knowledge sharing benefit from the promotion of human rights issues. As results of sociological research demonstrate, better educated people tend to be more tolerant.

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Public opinion surveys and statistical information are the main tools used to demonstrate attitudes towards discrimination in Ukraine. Right now in Ukraine, such sociological research is carried out in great part by LGBT NGOs themselves and predominantly with funding from international grants. In general, the international community is more interested than are Ukrainian authorities in monitoring uman rights on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In closing, as this chapter has demonstrated, homophobic attitudes in Ukraine are intensifying. One of the primary reasons for increased homophobia in Ukraine is state discourse led by politicians who are themselves homophobic. Since 2006, there has been an increasing number of hostile statements (hate speech) uttered by Ukrainian politicians about LGBT rights. It is therefore incumbent upon Ukrainian politicians in particular and society in general to take Eurointegration as a direction for state development. In order to advance the rights of LGBT communities in Ukraine, increased social tolerance as evidenced through non-homophobic state discourse and human rights policies that specifically promote protections for LGBT people must be encouraged and implemented at the highest official levels.

NOTES 1 Heteronormativity is understood here as a norm-building system that discriminates against, neglects, and denies everything that is not heterosexual (Alsterhag 2007, 13). 2 Although I believe that debates over terminology are extremely important in gender studies – and queer studies especially, given the marginality of gender studies in Ukraine – it is beyond the scope of this chapter to unpack and discuss the complexities in terminology typically used to describe and differentiate meanings in gender and sexuality, such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sexual identity,’ ‘queer issues,’ etc. 3 In Ukraine, only a small number of researchers have worked on queer and LGBT community issues; e.g., Mariya Mayerchyk and Viktoriya Sukovataya. 4 For a more complete discussion of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Russia, see Tagankina and Petrov (2009). 5 This is according to the Gay Forum of Ukraine. Svyatoslav Sheremet, personal communication, 28 April 2010.

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6 Nikolayev Association of Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals, or ‘LIGA.’ See http://www.gay.nikolaev.ua. 7 Nash Mir website at http://www.gay.org.ua/. 8 For more information, see the the Gay Forum of Ukraine website at www. lgbtUA.com. 9 For more on the Gay Alliance, visit http://ga.net.ua/. 10 Svyatoslav Sheremet, president of the Gay Forum of Ukraine, personal communication, 28 April 2010. 11 This category includes men of any sexual orientation who identify themselves as practising homosexual ‘risk behaviour’ for HIV/AIDS infection. 12 List of MSM-service organizations of Ukraine (updated database), Gay Forum of Ukraine, as of 28 April 2010. 13 This view emerges from recent field work I conducted, in April and May 2010, with members of the LGBT movement in Ukraine. I interviewed ten leaders of the movement from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Donetsk, and Cherkasy. 14 Groups in the union include the Gay Alliance, Gay Alliance Cherkasy, and Nash Mir Gay and Lesbian Centre. For more information, please visit the Union of Gay Organizations of Ukraine website at http://gay.org.ua/ activity/union-e.htm. 15 Informational and Educational Centre Women’s Network website at http://www.feminist.org.ua/english/basic.php. 16 Insight website at http://www.insight-ukraine.org.ua. 17 Situatsiya Transgenderov v Ukrayine: Otchyot po Issledovaniyu (Situation of Transgender People in Ukraine: Research Report), Kiev, 2010. Available at http://insight-ukraine.org.ua/media/TRP_report.pdf. 18 The program was approved on 7 November 2009. It contains ten areas for implementation (social, political, legal, organizational, informational etc.). 19 The poll was representative in terms of age and sex of the Ukrainian population: 1,200 respondents between 16 and 75 years of age took part. The mathematical accuracy of the sample is ± 3%. 20 For full survey details, see http://www.kiis.com.ua. 21 For more information, see http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/1211. 22 For the purposes of this chapter, I employ a rudimentary definition of homophobia as an irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals. 23 Author’s translation from Ukrainian. Excerpt retrieved 11 April 2007 from the website ForUm at http://ua.for-ua.com/analytics/2007/02/14/112933. html.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 407 24 The letter was signed by heads of the following organizations: Gay Forum of Ukraine, Women’s Network, LIGA, Nash Mir, Gay Alliance, and Chas Zhyttya Plus. 25 For more detail on the activities of the Love against Homosexuality organization, see their website at http://love-contra.org/. 26 See http://www.godembassy.org/en/embassy.php. 27 Information on submitted findings was received directly by the author from administrators at the Nash Mir Gay and Lesbian Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine: Submission to the Parliamentary Committee Monitoring Rapporteurs on the situation of LGBT people in Ukraine, and the need to make strong recommendations on combating sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. See ILGA Europe. 28 In biomedical terminology, intersex is commonly used to label a wide variety of chromosomal, gonadal, and genital characteristics that are deemed ‘anomalous,’ according to the narrowly defined scientific and medical norms of female and male sexes. 29 One of these reports, Discrimination in the European Union, examines the six legally prohibited forms of discrimination on the basis of sex, ethnic origin, religion or beliefs, age, disability, and sexual orientation. As a result, perception of the different forms of discrimination is measured among Europeans. In general, discrimination in the European Union is widespread (European Commission 2007, 4). Particularly, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is the third most widespread form of discrimination (after discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin and disability); 50% of respondents (EU citizens) perceived discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be widespread (p. 4).

REFERENCES AIDS Alliance Ukraine. 2008. Monitoring Povedenija Muzhchin, Kotoryje Praktikujut Sex s Muzhchinami Kak Komponent Epidnadzora Vtorogo Pokolenija [Monitoring the Behaviour of Men Who Are Having Sex with Men as a Component of Epidemic Control of Second Generation]. Available at http://www.aidsalliance.org.ua/ru/library/our/monitoring_reports/pdf/ report_MSM_rus.pdf (accessed 30 July 2009). Alsterhag, S. 2007. Open Up Your Workplace: Challenging Homophobia and Heteronormativity. A Publication of TRACE (The Transnational Cooperation for Equality). Available at http://www.homo.se/upload/homo/pdf_homo/ HelaOpenupyourworkplace.pdf (accessed 10 Aug. 2009).

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Amnesty International. 2009. Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity (accessed 5 Aug. 2010). Amnesty International USA. 2009. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Human Rights. Available at http://www.amnestyusa.org/lgbt-humanrights/about-lgbt-human-rights/page.do?id=1106573 (accessed 4 Aug. 2009). Balakiryeva, O.M., L.M. Gusak, H.V. Dovbakh, O.O. Lavryenov, V.I. Paniotto, T.V. Petrenko, N.B. Pogorila, T.O. Saliuk, S.V. Sydiak, D.O. Khutkyi, and T.S. Shamota. 2006. Evaluation of the Size of Most-at-Risk Populations Vulnerable to HIV Infection in Ukraine. Kyiv: ICF International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine. Available at http://www.aidsalliance.org.ua/ru/library/our/ monitoring_reports/pdf/size_en.pdf (accessed 2 Aug. 2009). European Commission. 2007. Discrimination in the European Union – Summary. Special Eurobarometer. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/public_ opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_263_sum_en.pdf (accessed 6 Aug. 2009). European Parliament. 2006. Homophobia in Europe: European Parliament Resolution on Homophobia in Europe. P6_TA[2006]0018. Brussels: European Parliament. Available at http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/news/ilga_ europe_welcomes_europarliament_s_resolution_on_homophobia_in_europe/full_text_of_the_adopted_resolution (accessed 4 Aug. 2009). ILGA. 2007. State-Sponsored Homophobia. Available at http://www.ilga.org/ news_results.asp?FileCategory=9andZoneID=7andFileID=1058 (accessed 1 Aug. 2009). ILGA Europe. 2007a. Press Release: ‘Hate Speech by High-Ranking Politicians in Ukraine.’ Available at http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/guide/country_ by_country/ukraine/hate_speech_by_high_ranking_politician_in_ukraine (accessed 1 Sept. 2009). – 2007b. Marriage and Partnership Rights for Same-Sex Partners: Countryby-Country. Available at http://www.ilga-europe.org/europe/issues/ lgbt_families/marriage_and_partnership_rights_for_same_sex_partners_ country_by_country (accessed 10 Aug. 2009). KIIS. 2006. Dumky i Pogliady Naselennya Ukrayiny Naperedodni Referendumu shchodo Nezalezhnosti ta cherez 15 Rokiv [Opinions and Views of the Ukrainian Population on the Eve of the Referendum about Independence and after 15 Years]. Available at www.kiis.com.ua/txt/doc/30112006/ press30112006.doc (accessed 30 July 2009). Kon, I. 1999. Sexuality and Politics in Russia, 1700–2000. In F.H. Eder, L. Hall, and G. Hekma, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories. Manchester:

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Communities 409 Manchester University Press. Also available at http://sexology.narod.ru/ publ012.html (accessed 6 Aug. 2009). Love Contra. 2008a. Palka v koliosa sodomii ot ukrainskih narodnyh deputatov [Grit in Sodomy’s Machine from Ukrainian People’s Deputies]. Available at http://love-contra.org/index.php/news/issue/146/ (accessed 30 July 2009). – 2008b. Spid ‘kosit’ Geyev. [AIDS Is ‘Mowing Down’ Gays]. Available at http://love-contra.org/index.php/expert/issue/195/ (accessed 30 July 2009). Maymulahin, A.Y., M.G. Kasyanchuk, and Y.B. Leshchynskyy. 2009. Odnopoloye Partnyorstvo v Ukrayine: Otchyot po Issledovanyiyu [Same-Sex Partnership in Ukraine: Research Report]. Donetsk, Atopol. Martsenyuk, T. 2009. Strah Rozmayittya: Natsional’ni Vlastyvosti Tolerantnosti i Homophobiyi [Fear of Diversity: National Peculiarities of Tolerance and Homophobia]. Krytyka 12(11–12): 145–6. Available at http://krytyka.com/ cms/upload/Okremi_statti/2009/2009–11–12/10–13–2009_11–12.pdf.pdf (accessed 24 May 2010). Nash Mir. 2005. Gay Rights and Human Rights: Report about Discrimination on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation in Ukraine. Kyiv: Nash Mir. Available at http:// gay.org.ua/publications/report2005-e.pdf (accessed 4 Aug. 2010). – 2007. Ukrajinski Homosexualy i Suspilstvo: Vzajemne Pronyknennya. Oglyad Sytuatsiji: Suspilstvo, Derzhava i Polityky, ZMI, Pravove Stanovyshche, GaySpilnota [Ukrainian Homosexuals and Society: A Reciprocation. Overview of the Situation: Society, State and Politicians, Mass Media, Legal Position and the Gay Community]. Kyiv: Atopol. – 2008. Human Rights Violations Based on Sexual Orientation in Ukraine. Available at www.gay.org.ua/publications/gay_ukraine_2008-e.doc (accessed 5 Aug. 2009). O’Flaherty, M., and J. Fisher. 2008. Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and International Human Rights Law: Contextualizing the Yogyakarta Principles. Human Rights Law Review 8(2): 207–48. Also available at http://www. yogyakartaprinciples.org/yogyakarta-article-human-rights-law-review.pdf (accessed 5 Aug. 2009). Sheremet, S. 2008. Address by S. Sheremet, President of the Gay Forum of Ukraine. Speech given at the International Conference ‘Gay and Lesbian Rights are Human Rights!’ Kyiv, 4–5 Oct. Tagankina, N., and I. Petrov. 2009. Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Russia: The Russian LGBT Network. Available at http:// www.lgbtnet.ru/news/detail.php?ID=4336 (accessed 1 Aug. 2009).

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U.S. Department of State. 2008. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine. Available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/ eur/119110.htm (accessed 2 Aug. 2009). Women’s Network (Ukraine). 2009. Informational and Educational Centre ‘Women’s Network.’ Available at http://www.feminist.org.ua/info/lgbtinfo.php#1 (accessed 2 Aug. 2009). Yogyakarta Principles. 2007. The Yogyakarta Principles: Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. Principles adopted by the International Panel of Experts in International Jurisprudence in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 6–9 Nov. 2006. Full text available at http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.pdf (accessed 1 Aug. 2009).

16 Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Ukraine: Tensions, Challenges, and Possibilities o l e na ha nk ivsky a n d a na sta s i ya salnykova

In the context of Ukraine’s movement towards integration with the European Union (EU), and its efforts to adhere to European norms, gender equality has gained significant political importance. Ukraine was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a constitutional guarantee of gender equality and since then it has signed numerous international documents to affirm the country’s commitment to creating institutional mechanisms for promoting its realization (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007). However, with the exception of a few reports from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and sporadic governmental reports to the United Nations, virtually no attention has been paid to evaluating the implementation of gender equality instruments and, in particular, what could be considered the beginnings of a gender mainstreaming (GM) approach in Ukraine.1 Since 1995, gender mainstreaming, which requires the systematic evaluation of the differential impact of all policies and governmental actions on the situations and needs of women and men, has been recognized internationally as the desired approach for achieving gender equality in the public sphere. Despite its potential, however, evaluations of GM to date (Beveridge and Nott 2002; Daly 2005; HafnerBurton and Pollack 2000; Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2002; Rees 2002; Shaw 2005; Squires 2005; Veitch 2005; Walby 2005; Woodward 2008) reveal a number of substantive shortcomings, particularly with regard to the conceptualization of GM and to the inadequate implementation of this strategy, leading some scholars to question its overall utility (Hankivsky 2005; Powell 2005). Although GM has been examined in developed countries, including the EU states (Booth and Bennett 2002; Mazey 2002; Woodward 2003; Carney 2003), assessment of GM in the

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development context, including within transitional, post-Soviet countries, is rudimentary or non-existent (Galligan et al. 2007). This chapter addresses this significant gap and contributes to the understanding of GM within the political interplay of gender and the dynamics of emerging democracies in post-communist countries such as Ukraine. The discussion is based on thirty-two in-depth interviews that we conducted with experts from three sectors: officials employed by the state, representatives of NGOs (both international and local), and scholars in the field of gender studies. Analyses of key governmental and non-governmental documents and scholarly literature are also a basis for this discussion. The chapter begins with an overview of the concept of gender mainstreaming in the Ukrainian policy context. It then moves on to provide an assessment of Ukrainian society as well as the three areas that are considered crucial in the successful implementation of GM: (1) governmental and national machinery; (2) women’s or equality organizations; and (3) academic research in gender and women’s studies. The chapter ends with respondents’ policy recommendations regarding the future of gender equality in Ukraine. The chapter reveals some of the key reasons why, despite the impressive amount of formal equality policies and legislation in Ukraine, these have not translated into meaningful social or political change. Although education, improved implementation, monitoring, and research are identified (among other factors) as necessary prerequisites for improving Ukraine’s response to gender equality, the research also demonstrates the challenges of implementing a transnational strategy such as gender mainstreaming within a national context in a way that is responsive to current socioeconomic circumstances, language, culture, and traditions, especially in relation to gender issues. The findings point to the limitations of adopting Western-style policy tools without adequate attention to the context and specific social realities of countries that are transforming from communism to democracy, and the chapter provides concrete suggestions as to how these challenges can be addressed. Gender Mainstreaming in Ukraine: Overview of Perceptions Even with calls to expand GM in Ukraine (Hankivsky 2008), and assertions that Ukraine is making attempts to mainstream gender into its policies and programs,2 gender mainstreaming is not an official term in any of Ukraine’s laws or policies. Although ‘certain steps and efforts to mainstream gender have been . . . undertaken by the national

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government with the support of international institutions and in partnership with civil society’ (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007, 3), it is also the case, as one of the study participants from the government explained, that the GM concept is used but not that much in state structures . . . I know the GM concept, but not through state channels; I picked it up from NGOs and through self-education.

Even though gender mainstreaming may be used by certain gender experts working within government and the NGO community, and even though it may be implicit in the government’s strategies, it is not yet part of the mainstream discourse. In government documents, equal rights and opportunities and gender equality are emphasized. To illustrate: the Preamble of the Gender Equality Law aims ‘to achieve parity status for women and men in all the areas of social functioning through legal provision for equal rights and opportunities for women and men, liquidation of sex-based discrimination and use of special temporary arrangements targeted at extermination of the disparity between opportunities for men and women to realize their equal rights.’3 Article 3 of the law states that ‘the state policy of ensuring equal rights and opportunities for women and men is targeted at: establishment of gender equality.’ The last gender strategy, ‘Gender Equality in Ukrainian Society 2006–2010,’ has as one of its aims adapting the legislation of Ukraine to be in accordance with EU legislation in the area of gender equality. In other sectors, ‘gender integration’ or simply referring to ‘gender issues’ is the preferred approach. As an international NGO employee reported, ‘We don’t use gender mainstreaming, instead we use “gender integration.” ’ And a local NGO activist explained, ‘We would rather talk about gender issues.’ It is also important to point out that the term ‘gender’ itself is new for Ukrainian language and society. As a researcher revealed during an interview, it was only in 1995 that the term ‘entered into the consciousness of society and started to be used.’ Not surprisingly, the interview participants highlighted that the term is poorly understood across sectors. According to one state official, Civil servants don’t know the meaning of the word ‘gender’ . . . sometimes even women’s organizations don’t understand these gender things clearly.

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Moreover, a university professor stated, ‘I doubt that even the Family and Youth Minister knows what gender is.’ As was evident throughout the interviews, the lack of understanding also translates into a certain negativity and resistance towards gender-related issues. As one researcher put it, ‘Gender for the state is like a red cloth for a bull.’ The majority of participants mentioned that gender is perceived to be synonymous with women’s issues, which makes it open to ridicule. Reporting on her communications with state officials, a research centre director told us: ‘They say that women thought [gender] up so that they have something to talk about.’ Further, ignorance in terms of gender, according to one university instructor, ‘is extremely widespread at the level of the public service workers and teachers.’ This respondent further elaborated: A couple of years ago a dean in my university said that since we do not have an equivalent for the word ‘gender’ in the Ukrainian language we do not have such a problem in Ukraine.

One state official explained that people do not realize the existence of discrimination: When we ask people if there is gender discrimination, they say ‘no’; but when we ask specifically about applying for jobs or getting bank credits they change the answer to ‘yes.’ This is because we are taught that there is no gender problem in our country.

These attitudes are evident at the highest levels of politics. When the first Gender Equality Law was proposed in 1999, it failed to get political support and was rejected in 2001. One state official recalled: As they discussed the law in the Rada (parliament of Ukraine) even [Deputy] Samoilyk, who was one of the submitters of the draft law, said that ‘when we live better, there will be no need for gender,’ and another deputy said that he was against the law since as believers we are to be against women influencing politics.

A former state official and activist recollected that the next time the Gender Equality Law was on the parliamentary agenda:

Mainstreaming Gender Equality 415 The session moderator from a communist party, Adam Martyniuk, said with cynicism: ‘Colleagues, don’t leave yet. We’ve just adopted the law on extinct species, now let’s also quickly vote to protect women.’

And a local NGO activist reported to us: When we asked the newly appointed provincial head why gender equality was not among his priorities, he said, ‘Because gender is not a Ukrainian word and our reality is different.’

Significantly, a common theme among the majority of respondents was that the concepts of gender, gender equality, and gender mainstreaming are seen to be a Western paradigm, imposed by Western organizations: ‘gender is seen as something foreign [and] something only countries that have nothing else to do are worried about.’ Therefore, there is the widespread perception that ‘gender equality is thought of as not relevant for Ukrainian society’ (university professor) and ‘ as something American’ (NGO representative). One woman activist told us: Gender policy is not natural for Ukraine. We have a different history; we had Princesses Olha and Anna. Women could always take care of themselves. They don’t go to politics today, because their dignity doesn’t fall low enough to engage in it.

Assessing the Status Quo: The Application of Gender Mainstreaming Comparing Ukraine’s progress with other European countries, Serhiy Plotyan, Chief Consultant of the Parliamentary Committee in European Integration, has concluded that ‘regardless of the prolonged cooperation in the framework of the European Council and the declared direction towards European integration, our country has not reached European standards in the sphere of gender equality’ (Plotyan 2006, 109). As one of the study participants stated: As far as GM in Ukraine is concerned, apart from the efforts of NGOs, there are few results because few people understand what it is and what it is for.

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To grasp the current state of affairs in Ukraine, it is necessary to evaluate both the achievements and obstacles to moving forward on issues of gender equality in Ukrainian society in general and, in particular, within three pillars of society that are considered key to successful gender mainstreaming: (1) academic gender and women’s studies research and education, (2) women’s or equality organizations, (3) and national machineries for gender equality (Einarsdóttir 2003). Ukrainian Society Economic insecurity is one key reason that gender is not a priority in Ukrainian society. This point was made by one-third of the respondents and is evidenced in the following statements by our interviewees: Economic instability is a problem. All thinking is about survival. (NGO employee) The general understanding in society is that all social programs are secondary to economic issues. (NGO employee)

Socioeconomic changes following the breakup of the Soviet Union have been challenging in general, but particularly difficult for women, who have become increasingly excluded from the social and political forefront (Pyshchulina 2004) and who experience increases in the feminization of poverty (Hankivsky 2008; Predborska 2005). In addition, women’s work patterns have changed with both paid work and domestic responsibilities increasing (Cockerham et al. 2006). Such a transitional shift has been interpreted as ‘a process of “aggressive remasculinization” ’ (Yakushko 2005, 590) in the development of Ukrainian society. Additionally, sexist images and ideologies are on the rise, and, according to former Deputy Minister for Family, Youth, and Sport Ludmyla Lukinova, ‘stereotypes of public perception create a very powerful barrier in achieving gender equality in our society’ (UNU 2010). The presence and consequences of stereotypical perceptions of gender roles were reported by the overwhelming majority of the study participants, as illustrated by the following statements:

Mainstreaming Gender Equality 417 Not all men think that women have to be equal in all aspects . . . there’s lots of stereotypes that remain. (Research centre director) We live in a stereotypical patriarchal society. (State official) Women here are talked about as physical bodies. (University professor)

In Ukraine, as in many other jurisdictions, there is a strong sense that anything to do with gender is necessarily linked to women or feminism, as evidenced by the following quotes from two of our interviewees: Gender is perceived as something that only concerns women who try to squeeze men out. The notion of gender has a female face whether we want it or not.

These assumptions permeate all levels of society. Recent studies indicate that college students and young professionals endorse highly stereotypical attitudes towards women and men (Yakushko 2005). One state official explained that ‘the presence of discrimination is denied in Ukraine, everyone keeps talking of the image of woman-Berehynia on a pedestal.’4 The perpetuation and celebration of this image and its inconsistency with gender equality is illustrated by former President Yushchenko’s message on International Women’s Day in 2007: ‘This day is marked worldwide. The international community and free mass media draw our attention to the problem of gender inequality. March 8 is officially recognized by the United Nations Organization, and 2007 has been declared a year of equal opportunities in the European Union,’ he said. ‘On the other hand, I want us to never forget that the most precious and important things in our life are associated with women. They are our source of inspiration, tenderness, and love, and guardians of our homes and our country.’5 Significantly, gender stereotypes are also normalized among women. As a policy decision maker explained, ‘Women themselves believe in the Berehynia myth and deny the fact of discrimination.’ This is further sub-stantiated by the following statements from two of our interviewees: There are many gender-insensitive women. (Gender researcher) Women don’t understand that inequality exists. (NGO activist)

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Similarly, Predborska (2005) observed that gender inequality is firmly entrenched in the conservative views of many Ukrainian women. According to close to half of the participants in our study, the mass media play a key role in perpetuating harmful stereotypes, as can be seen from the following statements: The media keep spreading patriarchal stereotypes, especially in women’s and men’s magazines, but not only. (Activist) The media, especially TV series on (pro-)Russian patriarchal channels prevent youth from understanding gender issues. (University professor)

Overall, participants highlighted that there is little knowledge of gender in Ukrainian society, as well as of governmental initiatives that have been developed to work towards gender equality. Most telling is the lack of awareness about the existence of Ukraine’s Gender Equality Law. According to one university professor, We had a national survey . . . about the equality law for men and women: 62 per cent had never heard of it and 31 per cent knew about it but did not know its contents.

Gender Education and Research Gender is a novel problem in academic studies in the region (UNDP 2003, 84). Consequently, it is not surprising that interviewees offered statements such as the following: Gender studies are marginalized, not taken seriously. (Researcher) Education is not performing well in the function of advancing gender equality. (NGO employee)

Moreover, attempts to unify efforts across the country have failed. According to one university instructor and activist, ‘There was a failed attempt in 2000 to create an association of gender studies.’ Another university professor explained that ‘there is an idea to create an interdisciplinary centre for gender studies, but there are not enough specialists.’ These statements are consistent with previous conclusions

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drawn by Shymchyshyn (2005) that ‘feminist theory cannot easily penetrate university curricula because it seriously questions the male-oriented ideology of Ukrainian society as well as the university, which serves as one institution for implementing this ideology’ (p. 173). Yet it is important to acknowledge the progress made in the past decade. In the words of one state official, ‘In terms of gender integration into university education, there are big chang-es.’ For example, the first university course ‘Fundamentals of Gender Studies’ was endorsed by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2003. It is not yet a mandatory subject, but for the departments willing to include it, a staterecommended program has been developed and is readily available. Similarly, the first textbook on gender studies published in Ukrainian is now available.6 As one university professor explained, It is good to finally have something. I include some chapters from it in my course, even though I don’t agree with some others.

Another university instructor and an activist described the many achievements at the micro-level: Six gender courses are being taught at the Culture Studies program in Lviv University, one of them on masculinity studies.

Moreover, a gender researcher reported that ‘up to twenty gender courses are taught in the Karazin University.’ Similarly, another researcher reflected on the recent changes, stating: Five years ago gender was not a topic considered appropriate for a philosopher. In contrast now, as our department chair heard of the EU grant on gender, he started considering a course on gender for our department.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has also helped in organizing educational gender centres at universities. There is one at Kyiv Technical University, and there are more in four other regions. Up to thirty such centres work on university premises across the country as NGOs. At the same time, there remain significant challenges in terms of academic education and research. In the words of one policy maker, ‘I am convinced a lot of courses remain on paper. They’re not taught at

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university.’ This is echoed in the recollection of one university professor, who said: The President of the University doesn’t want to include a gender course into the curriculum, saying that this is feminism.

It is difficult to teach courses and hard to fit them into the study plan of the Ministry of Education and Science. And even when courses are offered, as one NGO director made clear, it is also the case that gender is often taught either from an extreme feminist or traditionalist perspective [and] even students in the universities where gender studies are taught often treat gender as a discipline only, not something to be implemented in real life.

Resistance to gender equality penetrates all levels of education, which is alarming in the context of a need to bring up a more gendersensitive generation. One university professor reported: In teachers’ guides for elementary schools you can find different suggested exercises for boys and girls. The teachers’ instructions for Crimean kindergartens encourage developing patience and friendliness in girls. And when it comes to maths it is suggested to ask girls to count flowers and boys – cars or so.7

Finally, gender research is underdeveloped and often of poor quality. In the words of a university instructor: Now everyone tries to include the word ‘gender’ into their titles and to justify it they simply count the number of men and women, but gender is not just about counting; quality research is lacking.

There is also ‘a lack of good statistics on gender,’ as one of the gender researchers pointed out. It is important to highlight that there is no national program to support gender research, and very little financing is available for such enterprises (UNDP 2003). The precarious nature of the situation was made clear by an NGO director, who informed us that Two key people [academics] who started gender work in Ukraine and did so at their own cost simply died.

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Consequently, there is a lack of gender researchers and specialists in the country. As a result, ‘even interested state officials don’t have many specialists to get advice from because the educational system is not preparing such specialists’ (gender researcher). The general lack of available research and gender specialists greatly impedes any effective knowledge transfer to the policy sector and undermines efforts for moving towards greater gender equality. Women’s Movement or Equality-Seeking Organizations Although close to seven hundred women’s organizations exist in Ukraine,8 half of all respondents reported that there is no strong women’s movement or effective organization that is able to lobby for issues of gender equality. This is made clear in the following statement made by an NGO activist and university professor: There is no strong women’s organization to influence the situation.

The 1980s witnessed the emergence of the first independent women’s organizations, many of which focused on the goal of Ukraine’s independence and, for the most part, used maternalist discourses in their advocacy work. This proved an effective strategy in recruiting Ukrainian women who had never been politically active. Post-independence, this central force lost direction and momentum. As Hrycak (2005) explains, ‘Ukraine’s independence left women activists struggling to understand what role they could or should play in public life’ (p. 72). In the 1990s, after the Fourth World Conference on Women, where gender mainstreaming was first endorsed at an international level, Ukraine experienced an influx of international organizations supporting equality initiatives in the country. Ukrainian organizations started to be shaped by these foreign actors and took up Western gender terminology to secure funds, which were often tenuous and time-limited. These trends ‘cut short the development of promising feminist groups, and created an elite of NGO experts who stopped speaking in local idioms’ (Hrycak 2006, 97). For example, a gender research institute director reported: The only centre that was getting stable support over ten years is the one in Kharkiv. However, its impact is low because it does not cooperate with the Ukrainian authorities, and is pro-Russian.

Similarly, an NGO representative complained: ‘A very narrow circle of organizations have access to big money, and their work is not very

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effective or noticeable.’ In contrast, other organizations on the ground were left without significant financial support which was justified by the donors who referred to them as ‘local traditions’ (Hrycak 2006, 85). In the responses of a number of participants, foreign funds have also been faulted for imposing a cookie-cutter approach to gender equality: They have a standard approach to all, without exploring the specifics of the Ukrainian situation. (Researcher) GM can’t have a universal glossary, we need special terminology for every field . . . Every person has a gender-sensitivity door; but for everyone it is located in different places. (NGO representative)

Moreover, many respondents noted that access to funding often required accommodation to the specific agendas of foreign agencies. To illustrate, one researcher explained: At first we were a women’s organization because we got an American grant, then we collaborated with the Canadian fund and they required a broader mandate, so we changed to a gender organization.

Another NGO worker complained about how difficult it is to have to adhere to changing funding paradigms and priorities of foreign donors and foundations: Four or five years ago the Canada – Ukraine Gender Fund stopped supporting women’s organizations and focused on gender. But you can’t shift like this here; we don’t even have a history of the women’s movement, we can’t go in line with the global tendencies yet.

Despite the problematic aspects of foreign funding, its positive impact is also tangible. One university professor told us: All gender themes remain alive thanks to the support and pressure from international bodies. If not for this, even the formal documents might not have been adopted yet.

Indeed, a lack of funding from the Ukrainian government is generally recognized: ‘women’s organizations don’t do enough lobbying because

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of small institutional capacity.’ Many organizations have simply ceased to exist because they were not able to secure adequate funding. In the words of one state official: During independence struggles women’s movements consolidated but later disintegrated because of economic problems.

Furthermore, according to an NGO representative, ‘the state doesn’t allow NGOs to make money or to become self-sufficient.’ This seemed to be corroborated by another state official and activist, who observed that ‘Canada and the United States support us, why not our own government?’ The lack of coordination and networking between existing organizations was also cited as a serious impediment by numerous interviewees, as the following statements show: There are some organizations that work on this, but they are not united. (University instructor) Women don’t support each other. There is no consolidation of the women’s movement. (State official)

Not surprisingly, there are serious divisions between organizations. Moreover, there is little sharing of information, and most organizations don’t know about each other (Johnson 2007). Perhaps, most importantly, as one local activist put it, ‘Women have lost hope that it is possible to achieve something through the women’s movement.’ Finally, the lack of coordination between women’s organizations and the government was also mentioned. One NGO employee recalled that ‘the Justice Minister signed the decree to create legal gender expertise but invited us – the experts – to the discussion only after.’ As a result, women’s organizations have little influence on the state’s handling of women’s issues (WWICS 2007). Government and National Machinery All thirty-two interviewees stated that the passing of the Ukrainian Law on Providing Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men in 2005 was a watershed in gender equality. Yet each expressed serious doubts about the potential of the law to make transformative

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change. A number of respondents claimed that the passage of the law was only due to international pressures and expressed views such as the following, by two state officials: The passage of the law was influenced by the understanding that without gender regulations we’re not going to get to Europe. The world is putting pressure on Ukraine, that is why some things are getting done but they aren’t taken too seriously.

As a consequence, the law’s potential efficacy in Ukraine is doubted, as can be seen from the following statements: The law was adopted, but internally the state power doesn’t believe in it. (University instructor) We have a law but we don’t have a change of consciousness. (State official)

In a similar vein, one researcher argued: The law will not affect anything, because the officials do not know what to do with this gender, for them gender means spying on the relations between men and women in bed.

And a university professor stated that ‘the law is not enough, there is an urgent need for a strategy of gender development.’ Moreover, while many respondents noted the existence of national plans for gender equality, more than one-third had serious reservations about their value. Many did not see these plans as translating into any type of meaningful state policies, as can be seen by statements like the following: We don’t even have a well-developed state policy regarding gender. (Researcher) There is no government policy targeting GM. (University instructor) There is an action plan on who does what, but there is no common underlying platform on the goals and principles. (Researcher)

Not surprisingly, almost all of the respondents also bemoaned the lack of implementation of both the law and national gender plans. This

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was summarized by a research centre director, who said, ‘There is the law and there is its implementation. These are two different things.’ Similarly, one NGO director reported: Gender policy is not implemented across ministries. Our gender policy is formal. There is no good central body to deal with the issue. The ministry is only preoccupied with the social protection of women which is not enough.

As illustrated by the following, half of the respondents reported that the lack of implementation is linked to the absence of sanctions for non-compliance: There is no monitoring and no punishment for not implementing. (NGO representative) Severity of the law is compensated by the ‘unnecessarity’ of obeying it. (Researcher)

And for one-third of respondents, the key obstacle to implementation is a lack of funding and resources. Besides insufficient financing, the coordinating structures have been subjected to frequent organizational changes (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007, 6). About half of the respondents mentioned that frequent restructuring of power institutions creates organizational chaos and prevents effective work. Over the eighteen years of independence, the Ukrainian state machinery responsible for gender issues has been restructured ten times (Hrycak 2005). From 2004 to 2010, the institutions responsible for gender included the Department of Gender Policy in the Ministry for Family, Youth, and Sport, which was charged with ‘participation in development and ensuring implementation of the state policy on issues of family, children, youth . . . equality of rights and opportunities of women and men, prevention of violence in the family,’ as well as the Sub-committee on Gender Policy in the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007, 8). Yet, in 2011, after the change of government as a result of presidential elections of 2010, gender issues were moved again, now to the responsibility of the Ministry of Social Policy. Importantly, such ‘political instability leads to high personnel flow and the necessity to teach new people over and over’ (NGO employee).

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More than one-third of participants mentioned a lack of awareness at all levels of government around gender issues. This was evident in the following observations: The government needs to take on gender issues but does not know how. (State official) After the presidential decree we have a system of gender advisers, but what can they advise when they don’t have information or experience?9 . . . Our politicians and bureaucrats don’t understand why they should pay attention to gender. (Researcher) Some politicians are carriers of patriarchal values. This is dangerous for both women and men. They came to the Rada just because they were successful businessmen but now they’re making decisions not about business but about the whole society. (NGO employee)

One important reason for the lack of awareness, according to an NGO employee, is that whenever the issue of gender is raised, men say that there is Article 24 of the Constitution that guarantees equal rights to everyone, therefore the gender problem is artificial.

Many stories were recollected by the respondents on how resistant those in power are to change. For example, as one NGO employee reported to us: A male communist politician said, ‘If you [women] become so equal then who will give birth in the country?’

Finally, there is the issue of motivation. One university instructor explained, ‘There are no material benefits from gender promotion; therefore, there is no interest among officials.’ One-third of the participants believe, as does an NGO employee, that one of the key remaining obstacles to gender equality ‘is women’s lack of participation in politics.’ After Ukraine’s independence, women’s participation in politics decreased dramatically. In 1991, it fell from the previous 36 per cent to 3 per cent (Hrycak 2005, 74). In the Rada, formed as a result of the September 2007 early elections, the pro-

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portion of women was 7.5 per cent. A former state official similarly observed, ‘We don’t have women in leadership positions. All the high positions are men.’ Indeed, besides the exceptional Yulia Tymoshenko – Ukraine’s former prime minister – women do not serve in the Cabinet of Ministers, and only three of twenty-seven parliamentary committees are headed by women. The low number of women in the highest levels of power led some respondents such as one state official, to conclude that ‘women in Ukraine are simply not allowed into politics.’ A former state official also asserted that ‘politicians do not want to share their power; without women the competition is lower.’ This extends to women politicians, who as a university professor explained, ‘are against feminism because taking such a position prevents further competition with other women.’ The implications of this are serious. According to the International Centre for Policy Studies (ICPS), ‘Unbalanced representation of women and men in the Rada and local councils contradicts the principles of democracy; it impedes the recognition of international commitments undertaken by Ukraine, and it limits the capacity of elected bodies to comprehensively analyse and reasonably consider social policies’ (ICPS 2007, 2). However, even women who get power are not necessarily supportive of gender equality (Hrycak 2007, 153, 175). As one example, most women deputies were not supportive of the Gender Equality Law. One of them mentioned in reference to the first gender bill proposed in 1999 that Ukraine could not afford this law before it solves the problem of the needy children (Hrycak 2005, 75). Women deputies ridiculed the notion of equal rights legislation, claiming that women are already equal if not over-emancipated and need to devote themselves to motherhood more (Hrycak 2001, 141). One activist interviewee also recalled: Deputy Lilia Hryhorovych, who considers herself a prominent gender expert, said there was no inequality in our society.

Moving Forward: Suggested Directions for Change The role of education figured prominently in the recommendations made by the participants. All respondents identified the need for education – at all levels of society and within all sectors – as the most important prerequisite for making any meaningful inroads in terms of gender equality. For example,

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You have to work at all levels to make change. (Centre director) We need to educate all levels of society. (State official) There is a need for a massive gender literacy campaign at all levels. (University instructor) What is missing is a balanced, broad, and deep understanding of gender issues. (NGO representative)

Many of those interviewed, as evidenced in the following quote from a state official, also underscored the need to distinguish between gender and feminism in order for Ukrainian society to become more open to gender equality initiatives: ‘What is necessary is a general information breakthrough . . . to make people understand that gender is not feminism.’ For two-thirds of the respondents, education should begin with the general public, as the following excerpts show: We need to start with a serious campaign accessible to the people in order to show how GM actually helps each woman and man. (Researcher) First there needs to be an understanding of gender issues by the people. (NGO representative) The general public needs to understand what is written in the Gender Equality Law. Society should evolve and the knowledge base should change. (NGO activist)

Developing information that is historically and culturally relevant and accessible to the general public was also underscored in the following statements made by our interviewees: Information campaigns are often targeting people who are already specializing in the problem, but the regular citizen is not reached. (State official) Even the little information that exists is not available to the wide masses of people. (University professor)

Two-thirds of the interviewees also identified the need to educate politicians and bureaucrats, saying, for example:

Mainstreaming Gender Equality 429 We need to influence the consciousness of public figures. (NGO representative) Education of the representatives in power by the state itself is essential. (Researcher) While difficult . . . training for civil servants is very important. (University instructor)

More than one-third emphasized the need to better engage the educational sector. According to a number of experts, We need to use universities, colleges, and schools to improve gender consciousness. (State official) We have to launch the educational system, so analysts will be prepared by the state because the state needs them. (Researcher) Gender themes have to be incorporated into different educational fields: political science, economics, legal studies, and so on. (University professor) There is a real need to train the trainers; for example, the schoolteachers. (Researcher)

A university professor also called for ‘gender expertise of school textbooks and study programs’ to stop the reproduction of stereotypes through the educational system. Even more specifically, respondents highlighted the need to further develop gender studies in Ukraine. For example, a gender research centre employee observed: ‘We need an institute for gender studies.’ Indeed, there is still no coordinating body for gender studies in Ukraine. The UNDP (2003) made a similar recommendation calling for a national centre that could synthesize gender research in Ukraine, translate research knowledge within and beyond universities to the media and government, facilitate that awareness of gender, and analyse the status and development opportunities of the gender perspective in all areas of society. Importantly, respondents noted that these types of initiatives, even if they are funded by international donors, should be sensitive and responsive to the Ukrainian context. As one NGO representative elaborated, there is a good research centre, but:

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it has specific non-Ukrainian orientation, it is oriented towards Russian research potential, and does not pay attention to the Ukrainian context. It is the responsibility of donors to think who they fund.

Focusing efforts on the media was also considered a priority by nearly one-quarter of the respondents. For example, one state official argued: We need to get the media interested, develop professional training for journalists who would present gender issues. Informing society begins with informing journalists.

In a similar vein, a university instructor noted that ‘there’s an urgent need to work with journalists who keep proliferating stereotypes.’ Yet, one university professor called for ‘gender censorship of ads and TV.’ To achieve more accurate coverage of both women and men in the media, similar recommendations have been put forward by the UNDP (2003). They have suggested professional monitoring groups for news media, an ethical code for journalists, planned and regular trainings, and gender courses in journalistic education. As a state official succinctly explained, ‘Informing the media, you inform society.’ In recognition that ‘wide disparities remain between what has been written on paper and what is practised in reality’ (Kisselyova and Trokhym 2007, 3), nearly all respondents spoke of the need for improvement in how laws and gender plans and programs are actually implemented and monitored. This is evidenced in the following excerpts from interviews: There is a need to develop a national mechanism of implementing gender policy. (State official) The most important step in the future is to strengthen the mechanisms of control and monitoring. (NGO representative)

For example, in terms of the current law on ensuring equal rights and opportunities, there is no mechanism for reviewing cases of discrimination and no procedure for bringing guilty parties to account. Realizing, however, as does an NGO activist that ‘the law is not enough,’ more than one-third of all respondents identified the need to move beyond

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judicial mechanisms of protection to develop a stronger overall state infrastructure to promote gender equality. The numerous suggestions on how the overall infrastructure could be improved included the following: A separate state structure regarding gender. (Researcher) A state program and good central body to deal with the issue, because the ministry is only preoccupied with the social protection of women which is not enough. (Research centre director) It would be good to introduce into the Rada a person responsible for gender equality. (State official) We need a gender lobby in government. (University instructor)

Another theme within these recommendations was that gender issues could not be relegated to one ministry within government. An activist addressed the shortcoming of such an approach by arguing that ‘all ministries have to be responsible for gender law and policies.’ In addition to the formal state structures dealing with gender issues, a little more than one-third of the study’s participants identified the need to equalize the participation of women and men in the political process and decision making at the highest levels of power. For example, in the words of a former state official, ‘We need to reach the 30 per cent of women in the Rada and then it will automatically change everything, we will feel different power, we will feel a change.’ Within the group of respondents who advocated the increase of women in formal politics, there was, however, disagreement on how this would be best achieved. Some were strongly in favour of quotas, and as the following statement from a university professor indicates, some argued that there is support among Ukrainian citizens for such an initiative: Sociological research says that the population of Ukraine is not against the introduction of quotas into the political parties’ electoral lists. This includes 60 per cent of women between the ages of thirty and forty. People don’t need explanations of what gender quotas are.

Yet not everyone is supportive of this idea, and our respondents were divided on this issue. A parliamentary committee member stated that

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quotas will not necessarily make a difference because the elected female deputies will be not women but zhinochky in the Rada.10 This is often the situation today, therefore it doesn’t even make sense to divide the Rada on men and women or to count how many women deputies are there.

Indeed, despite the existence of quotas in the Soviet Union and the presence of the 36 per cent of women in the Ukrainian parliament in the mid-1980s, no profound improvements to gender equality occurred (Hrycak 2005). Another major theme to emerge is the need for better monitoring and research. One-quarter of respondents emphasized the need to systematically track progress and produce knowledge that will lead to change. For example, one research centre director said, ‘Research and analysis of progress are needed because the only evaluation done consists of reports to international foundations.’ Similarly, according to an institute director: The officials always report that Ukraine fulfils everything; only when confronted by facts that they admit that there are problems. That’s why we need gender research – to build the concrete arguments for politicians.

Indeed, as recognized in more general GM literature, one of the biggest challenges to gender mainstreaming lies in the danger of its cooptation by mainstream policy makers (Carney 2003), and one of the reasons for GM’s ineffectiveness is the over-focus of bureaucracies on indicators as opposed to the tangible results of real equality (Phillips 2005). This fear of GM’s co-optation and formalization is especially relevant in the post-communist development context, where officials try to maintain a positive image for Western partners while engaging in a lasting tradition of false reporting – a legacy of the socialist system. According to the respondents, improved monitoring would include, for instance: Gender analysis of work done by all ministries. (University professor) More developed and credible statistics. (Researcher)

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And for such statistics to be produced, said one university instructor, ‘we must think what markers can be used to evaluate the situation.’ Indeed, significant data gaps that remain impede understanding gender dynamics and taking action on gender inequities. One researcher asserted: Only when you give them – politicians and bureaucrats – concrete examples about male mortality, the number of women of childbearing age abroad – only then they recognize its importance.

National statistics ‘provide decision makers with relevant facts . . . and because living conditions differ for men and women, there is a need for these fact, statistics, to be disaggregated by gender’ (UNDP 2003, 84). In the case of Ukraine, respondents emphasized: Gender is not only about subsidies and protection of mothers. (NGO director) There are men’s problems in gender as well. (NGO employee)

Perhaps, as one state official stated rather pointedly: Men are ashamed to report their problems; maybe, the men’s matters are even more complicated than women’s in practice.

The need to explicitly address men’s concerns in Ukraine through the mechanism of gender mainstreaming was described as critical and pressing. Respondents noted that within ‘foreign’ frameworks of GM there is too much focus on women and even resistance to extending GM to men even though, as one researcher submitted; it is now men who are more discriminated against, there is more unemployment among men, more sickness, reduced quality of life, and life expectancy.

In terms of health, this is certainly the case. The average life expectancy for men is ten years less than for women, and this has been identified ‘as one of the most alarming health issues in the country’ (UNDP 2003, 70). In line with this, one NGO employee pointed out,

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‘Male . . . mortality rates are now similar to wartime.’ Similarly, a university professor noted that ‘the death rate among men is three times higher than among women in the 28 to 40 age group.’ The gendered difference in mortality rates is a specific problem in Ukraine that any effective GM effort has to acknowledge and address. Finally, one key to improving GM work in Ukraine is to better connect the work of the state and NGOs. This was emphasized by one state official, who said: There is a need for cooperation between the state that now has to work on gender and the NGOs that know how.

Some scholars have argued, for example, that the transformative potential of GM can only be realized when advocacy coalitions have the opportunity to set policy agendas that incorporate the representation of their interests and, indeed, the specificities of their nation states (Jahan 1995). In Ukraine, this is a challenge because of the current weaknesses and fragmentation within women’s and equality-seeking organizations and because, as Galligan et al. (2007) submit, ‘Women in post-socialist Europe are very rarely involved from the outset in shaping the GM agenda in their countries. Instead, GM initiatives that have been put on the agenda have come from a government decision, usually promoted by the need to comply with EU and international requirements’ (p. 120). The need for active participation from the civil sector is essential because GM strategies that fail to account for the differences in societal and political contexts of developed and transitional countries run the risk of falling short of any type of transformative change. At the same time, as put by an NGO representative: We can’t expect the results from GM overnight. What was established for thousands of years cannot be changed in the blink of an eye.

Conclusions The findings of this chapter contribute to filling the gap in evaluating the implementation of gender equality instruments in Ukraine. In particular, the research provides insights for assessing the application and applicability of gender mainstreaming in transitional countries, which differ from developed countries because of their distinct

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histories, cultures, languages, and identities – and also experiences of communism (Galligan et al. 2007, 13). Although before 1995 the discussion of gender was unheard-of in Ukraine, today the government can boast numerous issued documents that target improving the status of women as well as developing gender equality for both men and women. Although a number of positive developments across sectors were mentioned by the project participants, the overall situation is far from ideal. In response, the study’s participants proposed a number of suggestions for moving forward. Primarily, a massive educational campaign targeting various social groups – such as state officials, educators, and the media, as well as the general public – was emphasized. Second, the implementation of the formal documents was identified as crucial. Third, equalizing men’s and women’s participation in politics was pointed out, although there was no consensus on how this could be achieved. Significantly, the need to create a GM strategy more appropriate to the Ukrainian context was revealed. Most importantly, through communication with gender-related practitioners on the ground, this study reveals a consistent grievance about the transposition of external GM approaches and concepts by international donors onto the situation in Ukraine. Western approaches, Western terminology, and Western modes of work with both officials and the affected populations are not considered to be effective for Ukraine. This is far from saying that GM in principle is inapplicable for Ukraine. It is clear, however, that the strategic goal of GM can be better achieved in a different – more context-driven – tactical way. In particular, this means that the external pressure to simply translate and apply GM mechanisms and policies developed elsewhere needs to be replaced by an approach that engages a range of local actors and country sectors and is sensitive to Ukraine’s sociohistorical context, including specific norms and assumptions regarding language, gender roles, and stereotypes.

NOTES 1 ‘Mainstreaming a gender perspective,’ according to the U.N. Economic and Social Council (1997, 3), ‘is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the

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concerns and experiences of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality.’ See Chapter 1, in this volume, for an in-depth discussion of this theme. Zakon Ukrayiny, Pro Zabezpechennia Rivnyh Prav ta Mozhlyvostei Zhinok ta Cholovikiv [Law of Ukraine on Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Men, in Vidomosti Verkhovnoyi Rady Ukrayiny, 2005, no. 52, p. 561. Available in Ukrainian at http://zakon. rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=2866–15. Translation into English done by the authors. The concept of Berehynia entails a traditional Ukrainian woman taking care of her house and family: seeing to food, clothing, and emotional needs. She is a domesticated source of beauty, order, and well-being. Originally Berehynia was a pagan Slavic goddess of earth and fertility, but later she also transformed into a domestic Madonna and a guardian of family and nation (Hubbs 1988, 14–15). Thus, Berehynia represents a ‘pagan goddess conjoined with the Virgin Mary’ (Rubchak 1996, 320). Today, Berehynia is the ‘main symbol of Ukrainian rural culture’ and ‘the centre of the idyllic world of the lost and adored’ (Pavlychko 1992, 91). This quote was originally taken from the news report on the presidential website. Unfortunately, the link to the exact quote is not available anymore, yet a similar and more recent statement can be accessed at http://en.for-ua.com/news/2007/03/05/132530.html. Osnovy Teoriyi Genderu [Gender Theory Basics] (Kyiv: KIC, 2004). See Chapter 10 in this volume for an in-depth gender content-analysis of Ukrainian school textbooks. This number used to be even more than 1,200, according to Sydorenko (2001). The function of gender advisers was assigned not to gender specialists but to the deputy ministers and deputy oblast governors on top of their prior work responsibilities and regardless of their educational background. This is the equivalent to ‘wifey’ – a diminutive of wife, or a ‘little woman.’

REFERENCES Beveridge, F., and S. Nott. 2002. Mainstreaming: A Case for Optimism and Cynicism. Feminist Legal Studies 10(3): 299–331.

Mainstreaming Gender Equality 437 Booth, C., and C. Bennett. 2002. Gender Mainstreaming in the European Union: Towards a New Conception and Practice of Equal Opportunities? European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(4): 430–46. Carney, G. 2003. Communicating or Just Talking? Gender Mainstreaming and the Communication of Global Feminism. Women and Language 26(1): 52–60. Cockerham, W.C., B.P. Hinote, G.B. Cockerham, and P. Abbott. 2006. Health Lifestyles and Political Ideology in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Social Science Medicine 62(1): 799–809. Daly, M. 2005. Gender Mainstreaming in Theory and Practice. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12(3): 433–50. Einarsdóttir, T. 2003. Challenging the Slow Motion of Gender Equality: The Case of Iceland. Paper presented at the 5th European Feminist Research Conference, Lund University, Sweden, 22–24 August. Galligan, Y., S. Clavero, and M. Calloni. 2007. Gender Politics and Democracy in Post-socialist Europe. Leverkusen: Barbara Burdich Press. Hafner-Burton, E.M., and M.A. Pollack. 2002. Mainstreaming Gender in Global Governance. European Journal of International Relations 8(2): 339–73. Hankivsky, O. 2005. Gender vs. Diversity Mainstreaming: A Preliminary Examination of the Role and Transformative Potential of Feminist Theory. Canadian Journal of Political Science 38(4): 977–1001. – 2008. Globalization, Trafficking, and Health: A Case Study of Ukraine. In C. Patton and H. Loshny, eds., Global Science/Women’s Health, 175–99. Amherst: Cambria Press. Hrycak, A. 2001. The Dilemmas of Civil Revival: Ukrainian Women since Independence. Journal of Ukrainian Studies 26(1–2): 135–58.. – 2005. Coping with Chaos: Gender and Politics in a Fragmented State. Problems of Post-Communism 52(5): 69–81. – 2006. Foundation Feminism and the Articulation of Hybrid Feminisms. PostSocialist Ukraine East European Politics and Societies 20: 69–100. –2007. Gender and the Orange Revolution. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 23(1): 152–79. Hubbs, J. 1988. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. International Centre for Policy Studies (ICPS). 2007. How to Ensure Gender Equality in Politics. International Center for Policy Studies Newsletter 17(364), 21 May. Available at: http://www.pasos.org/layout/set/print/www-pasos members-org/news/how-to-ensure-gender-equality-in-politics. Jahan, R. 1995. The Elusive Agenda: Mainstreaming Women in Development. New York: Zed Books.

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Johnson, J.E. 2007. Domestic Violence Politics in Post-Soviet States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kisselyova, O., and I. Trokhym. 2007. A Gender Analysis of EU Development Instruments and Policies in Ukraine. Kyiv: Network of East-West Women, Gender Watch. Mazey, S. 2002. Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in the EU: Delivering on an Agenda? Feminist Legal Studies 10: 227–40. Pavlychko, S. 1992. Between Feminism and Nationalism: New Women’s Groups in Ukraine. In M. Buckley, ed., Perestroika and Soviet Women, 82–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, L. 2005. Gender Mainstreaming: The Global Governance of Women? Canadian Journal of Development Studies 26: 651–63. Plotyan, S. 2006. Legislative Securing of Women’s Participation in the Process of Decision Making: European Experience for Ukraine. In Women and Politics in Ukraine, J. Sverdljuk and S. Oksamytna eds., pp. 106–109. Conference Proceedings Women and Politics in Ukraine: Benefiting from International Experience. Kyiv, 7 October 2005. Full text available at: http://www.dfc. ukma.kiev.ua/books/women_politics_ukr_text.pdf (accessed January 23, 2011). Pollack, M.A., and E. Hafner-Burton. 2000. Mainstreaming Gender in the European Union. European Journal of Public Policy 7(3): 432–56. Powell, M. 2005. A Rights-Based Approach to Gender Equality and Women’s Rights. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 26: 605–17. Predborska, I. 2005. The Social Position of Yong Women in Present-Day Ukraine. Journal of Youth Studies 8(3): 349–65. Pyshchulina, O. 2004. An Evaluation of Ukrainian Legislation to Counter and Criminalize Human Trafficking. In S. Stoecker and L. Shelley, eds., Human Trafficking and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives, 115– 24. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Rees, T. 2002. The Politics of ‘Mainstreaming’ Gender Equality. In E. Breitenbach, A. Brown, F. Mackay, and J. Webb, eds., The Changing Politics of Gender Equality in Britain, 45–69. Cambridge: Palgrave. Rubchak, M. 1996. Christian Virgin or Pagan Goddess? In R. Marsh, ed., Women in Russia and Ukraine, 315–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, J. 2005. Mainstreaming Equality and Diversity in European Union Law and Policy. Current Legal Problems 58: 255–32. Shymchyshyn, M. 2005. Ideology and Women’s Studies Programs in Ukraine. NWSA Journal 17(3): 173–85.

Mainstreaming Gender Equality 439 Squires, J. 2005. Is Mainstreaming Transformative? Theorising Mainstreaming in the Context of Diversity and Deliberation. Social Politics 12(3): 366–88. Sydorenko, O. 2001. Zhinochi Organizatsiyi Ukrayiny: Dovidnyk. Kyiv: Tsentr Innovatsiyi ta Rozvytku. United Nations Development Proram (UNDP). 2003. Gender Issues in Ukraine: Challenges and Opportunities. Kyiv: UNDP. United Nations Economic and Social Council. 1997. Coordination of the Policies and Activities of the Specialized Agencies and Other Bodies of the United Nations System. Available at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ osagi/pdf/ECOSOCAC1997.2.PDF. United Nations in Ukraine (UNU). 2010. Gender Stereotypes Hinder Gender Equality in Ukraine, UNDP-backed Poll says. UNU Website at http://www. un.org.ua/en/information-centre/news/543–2007–08–22 (accessed 23 Feb. 2011). Veitch, J. 2005. Looking at Gender Mainstreaming in the UK Government. International Feminist Journal of Politics 7(4): 600–6. Walby, S. 2005. Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice. Social Politics 12(3): 321–43. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). 2007. Women’s NGOs in Ukraine and End of Western Aid. Kennan Institute U.S. Alumni Series 14. June. Available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index. cfm?fuseaction=events.event_summaryandevent_id=237920 (accessed 21 Aug. 2009). Woodward, A. 2003. European Gender Mainstreaming: Promises and Pitfalls of Transformative Policy. Review of Policy Research 20(1): 65–88. – 2008. Too Late for Gender Mainstreaming? Taking Stock in Brussels. Journal of European Policy 18(3): 289–302. Yakushko, O. 2005. Ambivalent Sexism and Relationship Patterns among Women and Men in Ukraine. Sex Roles 52(9/10): 589–96.

Afterword o l e na ha nk ivsky a n d a na sta s i ya salnykova

Making this volume happen has not been without its challenges. These included determining the appropriate mix of themes and topics, ensuring that the collection would be primarily shaped by Ukrainian scholars living in Ukraine, dealing with issues of translation and language use, and ultimately responding to various opinions regarding the scholarly merits of contributions, especially those that represented less traditional styles of academic writing. In presenting this wide range of accounts, our intention was to support and accept essays on their own terms, paying close attention to ensuring that the editing process would not impose any uniform system of thought or silence or distort the voices of those who may not conform, as Funk (2006) has cautioned against elsewhere, to the expectations of those who do not live or write in the context of Western feminism. While, in some instances, compromises had to be made – and we are grateful for the cooperation from all our contributors – the purpose was to give, as much as possible, authentic voice to the scholarship of all the contributors and to produce a volume that, despite its inclusion of a wide range of approaches, offers numerous insights. The chapters in this volume have provided critical, in-depth evaluation of gender issues in a select number of political and social realms in Ukraine. They contribute to the advancement of a gendered analysis of transitional countries by promoting an approach that addresses the effects of change on both differently situated men and women and in the relationships between them. All authors were afforded a general set of guidelines to ensure cohesion across the chapters, while also providing maximum flexibility in the treatment of all themes and topics. Specifically, each of the contributors were asked to detail how her chapter con-

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tributes to the understanding of the effects of the post-Soviet transition process on the gender order in Ukraine and to specify the theoretical and methodological approaches of her work. Another requirement was that each chapter engage, as much as possible, with relevant literature on gender and transition in other post-authoritarian states. The final product is a unique mix of contributions that reflect a range of different views from various disciplinary, methodological, and stylistic perspectives on the contemporary situation in Ukraine. A distinctive feature of this volume is that it pays particular attention to the state, its institutions, and policies across conventional disciplinary boundaries and assesses progress to date on gender equality with an eye to uncovering current gaps in activities and research as well as identifying future challenges in the field. It addresses the issues of political elites and power institutions, education, and newly emerging research and policy areas such as the health dimensions of gender, homelessness, masculinities, fatherhood, and LGBT communities. In charting the history and aftermath of transition, the chapters in this collection are especially effective in mapping the positive advances in relation to gender equality in Ukraine. It is not widely recognized, for example, that Ukraine was on the forefront of many international and post-Soviet countries in establishing formal constitutional guarantees of gender equality in its 1996 Constitution, and it was the first among the post-communist states to criminalize trafficking and combat domestic violence in 1998. Ukraine was also the first former Soviet republic to repeal criminal responsibility for non-violent male homosexual intercourse between adults. In the past decade, significant developments in gender studies have occurred in Ukraine as evidenced by the growing number of local research centres, publications, and study programs in many regions of the country. At the same time, the authors in this collection underscore that while state legislation, policies, and programs are progressive, even by any measure of international standards, change in all sectors is hampered by a range of factors including firmly entrenched beliefs, traditions, stereotypes, and assumptions about the lives of women and men and the proper performance of gender within a particular conception of a Ukrainian gender order. Many also highlight the ambivalent effects of democratic advancement for gender equality in Ukraine, illustrating that while in some spheres, improvements have been realized, for the most part, economic hardships related to democratic transition have been crippling. Indeed, this volume demonstrates the extent to which

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the promises of the Orange Revolution in relation to gender equality have not materialized. Although certain positive developments like the passing of a gender equality law did occur, government retrenchment in terms of funding for gender-related programs occurred almost simultaneously and pro-natalist rhetoric continued. To illustrate the multidimensional and multilayered gendered lived experiences of Ukrainian men and women, several authors draw on first person narratives. As such, they effectively situate individual experiences of gender in the context of social processes and structures. They illuminate how consequential gender is for the real lives of real people, in terms of education, labour market allocation, citizen engagement, economic security, mechanisms for coping with stress, health problems, and overall well-being and life expectancy. Despite the breadth and depth of the topics addressed, this collection is far from exhaustive. In many ways, the essays and research featured in this volume represent the tip of the iceberg in an ongoing story and struggle of transition. Much more work needs to be done to reflect on and evaluate developments to date and to identify how to move the field of gender equality forward. However, in identifying lessons learned, the contributions in this collection also foreshadow and signal important areas for future investigation as well as areas that will continue to challenge the Ukrainian state and society. Before closing, we felt that it was worth speaking directly to some of these possibilities. Some fruitful topics for future investigation would include, first, the role of the media in promoting or undermining gender equality. Another topic would be international influences on politics and policy developments with regard to gender in transitional countries, including Ukraine. This would include the effects of Europeanization in terms of discursive power and pragmatic diplomatic pressure, and Western aid with its successes and shortcomings. Other equally important topics that require attention include the following: the gendered effects of migration and trafficking (on men and women); regional differences in relation to gender legislation and equality outcomes (depending on the history, economics, and political power of these regions); mapping the diversity of gender non-governmental organizations in Ukraine and modelling the most effective strategies of their potential cooperation; the expected benefits and shortcomings of the introduction of gender quotas in the Ukrainian political context; labour market discrimina-

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tion towards women in Ukraine; the effects on the issues of gender of diverse religions which have become more widespread and active after the collapse of the Soviet Union; and better understanding of the gendered health care needs and experiences of women and men, and especially the specific health issues of men whose life expectancy, as we have heard more than once in this volume, is unacceptably low in Ukraine. Moreover, such examinations would benefit from improvements in data collection across all sectors in Ukraine and in-depth comparative analyses with other post-Soviet countries. The next phase of research should also challenge the confines of a gender-specific approach to include, in an explicit fashion, other intersecting factors and social locations. For example, Snitow (2006) has observed that ‘sometimes in Central and East Europe, the category “gender” gains currency as a foreign import that holds out promise as an explanatory model. Often, though, it displaces other models or obscures them – most commonly “class,” which in post-communism is still a much-discredited structure of explanation’ (pp. 289–90). Arguably, the primary focus on gender can do more than just obscure issues of class; it can also deter one from examining how gender intersects with age, race/ethnicity, geography, sexuality, ability, and religion to create social inequalities and discrimination. Increasingly, gender theory points to the importance of intersectionality for demonstrating that gender cannot be understood as a stand-alone category. People’s lives, experiences, needs, and subject locations are created by intersecting social locations that include but are not limited to considerations of gender. In Ukraine, this is evident in the analyses put forward in a number of the chapters in this collection which considered differences not only between groups of men and women but also among women and men. Further examinations could also be focused on the specific needs of particularly vulnerable populations such as new immigrants to Ukraine, disabled men and women, Tatar women in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, miners in Donbas, single parents, and men and women living in rural areas experiencing greater poverty and food insecurity. Although this volume starts to touch on these complicating intersections of gender, this is an important line of research that requires further development in the Ukrainian context. All the chapters in this volume point to the need to move beyond formal legislation, plans, and programs to create an enabling environment for transforming gender relations. They also make an important

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contribution by furthering the understanding of gender, power, and privilege in the realms of state structures, politics, policy, and society and by providing new directions for responding to inequality and oppression and for working towards gender equality reform in the cultural context of Ukraine. They highlight new opportunities and new challenges as the country continues to navigate its past, present, and future and negotiate its own identity vis-à-vis gender equality amid both Western and Eastern pressures, tendencies, and influences. Such information provides an important backdrop to analysing how the country moves forward on issues of gender. Certainly, important developments continue. For example, in 2010, the newly formed government called a meeting on gender issues and appointed one of the foremost Ukrainian scholars and activists on gender Larysa Kobelianska to the post of the President’s Gender Adviser. At the same time, no new national gender equality strategy or plan has been ratified. Any future developments and their overall effects will therefore need to be carefully monitored and evaluated. In sum, this collection not only fills an important gap in the literature on gender in transitional post-Soviet countries, we hope that this volume will stimulate further debate and discussion that has begun in the region and encourage more comparative scholarship. Most importantly, however, it is our hope that this volume instigates new attention and interest in Ukraine, a country that has not been front and centre in the literature. For those already working on issues of gender in Ukraine, we trust that this collection will inspire them to continue to develop their programs of research in this field.

REFERENCES Funk, N. 2006. Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: The Imperialist Criticism in Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe. In J. Lukic´, J. Regulska, and D. Zaviršek, eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, 265–86. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hankivsky, O., and R. Cormier. 2011. Intersectionality and Public Policy: Some Lessons from Existing Models. Political Research Quarterly 64(1): 217–29. Snitow, Ann. 2006. Cautionary Tales. In J. Lukic´, J. Regulska, and D. Zavrišek eds., Women and Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe, 287–97. Aldershot: Ashgate.