Iryna Hrabovska,
a literary critic, author of essays dealing with the gender issues
The issues that the feminist movement deals with are of a great topicality for Ukrainian society. But their topicality is not determined by the social need widely understood and supported by Ukrainian society. This need is formed by the compliance with international documents which Ukraine has accepted and ratified in order to move toward being admitted to the European Union. Besides, the gender issues are popular to be dealing with — you can receive grants and develop interesting projects.
Ukrainian women are sometimes said to have always been rather independent. It is a myth rather than reality. It happened many times in the Ukrainian history that the nation was threatened with destruction, and the men left home to fight the invader. So many of the fighters died in battles and it was the Ukrainian women who were to save the nation from extinction. They were the actual Protectresses of the family and of the people as a whole.
Ukraine was indeed a borderland between the wild steppe in the east, the Tartar south and the civilized Europe in the west. In the absence of men who were either fighting or dead, the women raised children, took care of the households and upheld the traditions. And it led to another problem — the image of the Ukrainian father did not get properly formed. In fact, it is absent both in Ukrainian folklore and Ukrainian literature. We have Ukraine-Mother, Ukrainian Woman-Protectress. Ukrainian women protected their children, they were responsible for them, and they could not help forming their own views on life; they had to make decisions all by themselves and decision making developed their sense of independence. They were forced, as it were, to be independent — it was a matter of survival. On the other hand, Ukrainian women did not have any social options, they did not have a choice of wanting to be independent, or not wanting it. And their independence was limited to a close circle of their families.
I am of the opinion that the problem of Ukrainian women and men is a problem of deeply ingrained servileness of the public mind, of slave psychology — the Ukrainian women seem to be lacking any desire to ponder things, to arrange things in a better, purposeful way (incidentally, the same can be said about the Ukrainian men as well). Ukrainians in Ukraine continue to be, similarly to the way it was in the Soviet times, little cogs in the machine. The machine, the political system that is, has fallen apart and is in a chaotic state, and the woman’s mind is also in a state of chaos. You can hear from one and the same person contradictory opinions expressed within a short time — at a conference, delivering her report, a feminist says that women in Ukraine should struggle for better social and family position for herself, etc., but during the break, in a private conversation, she would say that everything is all right, women are not discriminated against, there are many ways to get their opinions heard, there are grants to be used for conducting research and writing books.
However there are several problems that the women in Ukraine face. The problem number one, as far as I am concerned, is violence, and it is not violence only in the family against women, it is violence perpetrated by society — manipulation of the mind.
Even according to the official statistics, there are over 120,000 children abandoned by their mothers. Mother and child is another problem.
In many spheres, it is much more difficult for a woman than for a man to find a job. Women are forced to go into all kinds of “shady” businesses or into prostitution.
The present-day Ukrainian society does not give women much of an option — 95 percent of average Ukrainian families cannot survive without women contributing to the family budget. Perversely, the mass media propagate the image of a happy housewife in an opulent household, and the official demographers call for women “to produce more children.”
