The Marketization of Gender Equality: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

Gender relations in post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet Republics have undergone a marked shift since the early 20th century. Both democratization and neoliberal market reform since the collapse of the USSR have entailed a pronounced social and political reconfiguration concerning gender equality, largely guided by a Western capitalistic market logic. Indeed, the transition from Socialist legality to Capitalist legality has fundamentally altered the sociopolitical and sociocultural fabric of post-Soviet nation states. Contemporary feminist engagements with such new forms of governance and culture in the post-Soviet framework have had various implications for the current state of gender equality, in both regressive and progressive terms. Evolving from a socialist gender parity model originally cultivated by the Bolshevik Party in the early 20th century to a neoliberal, individualistic feminist model today, gender equality in post-Soviet Russia as well as the former Soviet Union (FSU) has undergone deep social, political, and economic transformations. Specifically, there has been a noticeable shift from “state feminism” to “market feminism,” resulting in the normalization of market privilege and the subordinate status of feminist agendas. But it has also resulted in, as Kantola and Squires note, the “emergence of new, flexible institutions pursuing gender equality” and a heightened feminist influence in the labor market (2012). While this “state” to “market” shift in feminist agendas has been a prevalent trend in most Western democracies paralleled by the rise of neoliberalism, in post-Soviet Russia and the FSU it has been particularly revealing of the socially regressive aspects of neoliberal market reform. In contrast to the optimistic theories regarding the fall of communism in the late 20th Century (Modernization Theory, Fukuyama’s “End of History” Thesis, etc.), it seems that the neoliberal, democratic restructuring of Russia and the Eastern Bloc Socialism and Democracy, 2021 Vol. 35, Nos. 2–3, 149–166, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2021.2103905