Abstract
The early feminist phrase “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” aptly summarizes the central argument in Jennifer Utrata’s new book on single women in Russia. Utrata’s careful and empathetic ethnography describes a country where men die young of alcoholism or other disease and those who are alive tend to be fairly useless as partners, providers, or parents, so women, especially lone mothers, must fend for themselves and they do so heroically. How they manage to provide for their children, what kinds of support networks they utilize, and how they and those around them make sense of their family status, material deprivation, and general abandonment by state institutions—these are the key questions the book raises.
Women without Men profoundly reshapes our notion of “single motherhood.” Unlike in many Western European and North American countries, in Russia, this family status is the norm and—given the circumstances—many women regard it as an easier way to raise children than within marriage. Although struggling with poverty, lack of child care options, and a male-biased labor market, the women in Utrata’s book tend to emphasize their skills at managing it all and diminish the importance of material deprivation and hardship.
State provisions and fathers are conspicuously absent from the lives of lone mothers and their children. Instead many of them receive support from within the family: from their own mothers. The description and analysis of grandmothers’ roles in the lives of their daughter is perhaps the most interesting contribution of the book. Russian grandmothers, who, unlike in the United States, tend to live close by, have fewer children to share attention among, retire, and are widowed younger are easily available to do care work in support of the wage-earning activities of their daughters. In contrast to the positive conceptualization of retirement as a second chance at life, Russian women without the resources available in richer countries have fewer alternative options after retirement. In addition, the mainstream understanding of their duties as women include helping out in their daughters’ households. The relationship between mothers and grandmothers is loving but often fraught with problems, and Utrata carefully describes the ways in which inequalities along the lines of age, intersecting with gender-based discrimination suffered by both grandmothers and mothers in the labor and marriage markets, shape this bond to the advantage of younger women.
Utrata’s ethnography is an in-depth depiction of the life of single mothers from a variety of social classes and cultural backgrounds. The book is full of lovely stories, some heartwarming, some tragic, some funny—each adding new nuance to the main argument. As does Utrata’s honest discussion of her many dilemmas as a researcher, even the kind not typically addressed by research methods textbooks: from which chocolate to bring as a token gift to an interview to whether or not to abandon a meeting when a husband arrives home unexpectedly and is drunk and abusive. Utrata describes the process of getting accepted and gaining trust, which holds lessons for ethnographers young and experienced alike.
This book could easily be enjoyed by nonacademics as well because its backbone is formed by eloquently told life stories. But at the same time, it is much more than a simple discussion of the hardship experienced by young mothers in Russia. A focus on the continuities and changes in family arrangements tells us a great deal about the social and economic consequences of the transition toward market-based capitalism in Russia, state entrenchment, as well as the ways in which neoliberalism as an ideology of the self as rational, independent, and self-governing has taken hold even in conditions that scream of the need for alternatives.
Utrata describes a world of women in which men are considered irresponsible and inadequate both by their former spouses but also, more surprisingly, by themselves. She notes but does not pursue the contradiction in this learned insufficiency of men and their overwhelming power in other areas of society, which presents an altogether novel relationship between public and private patriarchy.
Indeed, this book is an excellent source of knowledge about everyday life in post-communist Russia, as if showing us what happens to gender relations when neoliberal processes, state austerity, and marketization are taken to an extreme and human stamina and meaning must be gained from destitution and constraints rather than from freedom, choices, and opportunities.