Are Differences Between Men and Women Being Blurred?

I. Rudenko, One Time, After A Dance. Polemical Notes About a Strange Weakness of the 'Weaker Sex.'. May 14, 1978

In this Komsomol newspaper discussion, a young journalist and readers debate a recurring late Soviet anxiety: whether women were becoming “too masculine” and men “too weak,” and what that supposedly meant for family life and social order. The letters range from admiration for women’s competence to complaints about blurred roles, manners, and authority, often circling back to work, domestic labor, and everyday behavior. As a document, it is less a settled argument than a snapshot of contradictory expectations in a society where women’s public equality coexisted with persistent gender norms and private burdens.

Original Source: Komsomol'skaia pravda, May 14, 1978, p. 2.

Fistfights and drinking bouts among men and boys have always been regarded as "privileges" of the male sex, not worth a newspaper's attention. But among girls? The dismaying truth is that more and more often girls are engaging in what used to be considered purely male behavior.

Fact: Four ninth-grade girls strolling through a city park after a school dance sit down on a bench. Four other girls challenge their right to it. One girl nudges another with the toe of her boot. The shover gets a punch in the face. A fistfight ensues.

Fact: Schoolgirls now fling off their white uniform pinafores and run to join the boys in the new custom of "washing down" each exam they pass.

Fact: Higher-school corridors, theater lobbies and cafes are all jammed with girls sporting cigarettes as proof of their "emancipation."

I am aghast at the contrast between two recent letters to Komsomol'skaia pravda. One is a shameless self-portrait of a 19-year-old named Natasha, who has lost all trace of femininity. When you feel a boot kicking you in the face, this girl writes, your only thought is how to hit back. " Then you hit and kick the person Is face, and you feel no pity." In a sneering tone, she describes how the girls she works with try to stay in her good graces. And when she struck one of them: " What do you suppose ? The girl began to grovel!"

Compare this cocky letter, signed with full name and address, to an anonymous one from another girl who responded very differently to a similar situation. When a classmate struck her, this young lady retained her poise and refused to fight back, although she was clearly the stronger of the two. The other girls called her a coward for not "getting involved." And, she concludes, "Now I'm beginning to wonder whether they were right."

Why is it that Natasha, whose letter betrays no pangs of conscience, no hints of regret, brags about her toughness, while the girl who remains a lady is torn by doubts and loses the respect of her peers?

"Why do girls get into fights?" I asked a group of 10thgrade girls. " For the same reason boys do!" was the immediate reply.

This is a gross misunderstanding of equal rights. Equal does not mean identical. Whatever else a woman may be, she is a member of the only sex that can bear children. The high calling of mother preordains many of the qualities that we call feminine. Not necessarily the femininity epitomized by Natasha Rostova's ball gown, but rather femininity that embodies tenderness, kindness, and -a forgotten word chastity.

The time has come for us to give just as much attention, at school and on the job, to what makes men and woman different as to what makes them alike. If this were done, we could define what the concept of "female work style" really means in a way that would threaten neither men nor women. Then too, women wouldn't waste their valuable energy in an effort to remove the last sex barriers in athletics and we will be spared the sorry spectacle of persons of neuter gender tearing around the soccer field.

We need to start a cult of feminine charm, and not only for the benefit of girls like Natasha. Men need it, too, to reverse the trend toward feminization we hear so much about these days.

Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XXX (1978), No. 42.