About spacesuits and sexism in Russia. It's true that we had more female
doctors than male ones since 1930's. As well as teacher or accountant,
physician was considered a "feminine" profession. Kind of like
Elementary Education. At the same time, it could be part of the reason why
an emergency-room physician was making less money than an ambulance car
driver (who were mostly men). Also, women usually worked on road
construction and rail-road repair, while all management-level positions,
especially government ones, were male-only.
I did not know the meaning of the word "housewife" till I was about
15, because I never saw a non-working woman. And as long as I
remember myself, women around me were complaining that they would
rather stay home (in USSR, it was illegal not to work). This could be
part of the reason, why now, in Russia women are very much
anti-feminist. For them, "equality" means working on the railroad for
nothing, and then come home, do all the housework, cook and serve a
dinner for kids and the husband who sits in front of the TV, complaining
that the meal is not ready, and he, the breadwinner, is hungry. (Equal
pay was a law, but "male" jobs simply paid a lot better, whether it was a
government official or a truck driver, than "female" - a doctor or an
accontant, so the man was still the "breadwinner").
This is why, for most of Russian women, "gender equality" means degrading
exploitation (harder work for less pay plus humiliation), and men see it
as another ridiculous Communist idea (together with international
brotherhood of working class, etc). And there is no way they would let a
woman to repair the space station, whether she were "too tiny" or not.
Marina
This is part of the reason On Sun, 14 Sep 1997, Nimal Jayawardhana wrote:
> >I can bet anything this has nothing to do with the spacesuit sizes. The
> >reason is much more simple -- "Fixing the space station that men had
> >trouble with is not a job for a woman." Russia is the most sexist country
> >in Europe, in case you did not know. If Wendy Lawrence was the "right size",
> >they would say they had "limited bathroom facilities for females due to
> >emergency conditions on the station", or something else. There is no way
> >they would let a girl to tamper with high technology equipment, it's not
> >a sewing machine or something. Besides, it would not be gentlemen-like to
> >send the poor little girl for such a dangerous task. Geez, I haven't
> >been there for three years and this still makes me mad.
> >
> >Marina
>
> It's really rather disturbing considering that theoretically the Soviet
> Union was a very egalitarian place (highest proportion of female doctors and
> Engineers in the world etctera) on earth, but stats can be deceiving.
>
> |\| | |\/| ~8>B
>
"Femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society
happens to be selling at the time."
Naomi Wolf
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