Women: Ukrainian society's pragmatists and doers (12/26/82)

Women's conference keynote address

Women: Ukrainian society's pragmatists and doers

by Dr. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak

Following is an adaptation of the Ukrainian-language keynote address delivered by Dr. Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak at the Ukrainian women's conference, "Ukrainian Woman in Two Worlds," on Saturday, October 2. Dr. Bohachevsky-Chomiak, professor of history at Manhattanville College, is completing a book on the Ukrainian women's movement from the 19th century to the present.

Ukrainian women are, and have always tried to be, an integral part of their societies. But, they have not always been as conscious of the importance of their position. Nor have their societies always appreciated their genuine roles. In this respect they share the major problems of perception and self-perception with the rest of the women in the world.

Women have historically either been confined to women's ghettos or have been socialized by the men to think in categories created by men. The irony is that this allows men to better understand women than women understand themselves. Only rarely do women see themselves in realistic terms.

Take, for instance, the so-called "women's issues" or even the whole "women's question." The issue was formulated almost 100 years ago by the writer Olha Kobylianska. She wrote:

"Nature, in creating women, did not ask, 'Is it a man or a woman, so that I might endow them with suitable aptitudes?' No - nature only said, 'Here you are - now live!'"

Life, for all members of society, is determined to a greater or lesser degree by society, along with the roles the individual chooses or is expected to play. Role juggling is a fact of life; for women, however, it is viewed as a problem, an issue, a "question." Even a glance at aspects of the women's issue shows that what is at stake is central to the whole society, and not only to women.

Child and family care, welfare, even folk art are some of these issues central to society. Because societies have traditionally not paid as much attention to them as to other matters, and precisely because the children, the sick and the needy had to be taken care of, they became women's issues.

For the most part, Ukrainian women have not questioned the system. In modern times they defined the family as the building block of society, a burden to be shared with other duties expected by society. Work in and outside of the home has always been a part of the lives of most Ukrainian women. The standard of living of most Ukrainian families did not allow for the luxury of the woman being only a mother and a wife. Many women worked in the fields and in cottage industries. Those women who acquired a position of authority in society frequently denied both the relative merits of feminism and their own feminism.

Rarely is there a discussion of feminist concerns among Ukrainians today. Such discussions as do occur involve the sacred duties of the mother and the woman's role as wife. Women do not even object when Iryna Knysh - one of the few contemporary Ukrainian women social historians, publicists and journalists - is characterized, rather flippantly as "the only ideologue of Ukrainian womanhood." Ukrainian women - and by that I mean any woman who has some connection with some aspect of Ukrainianism, regardless of the language in which she communicates - do not know the history of Ukrainian women. They cannot know it, for it has not been studied. Relatively little has been done on the social history of Ukraine, virtually nothing on the history of women. Women have been studied either within women's organizations, or from an idealized perspective of preconceived notions of motherhood - seen mainly as care for children (tell that to the woman working in the fields), preservation of national heritage (in ravioli-like varenyky, more frequently called pyrohy, made by women, eaten by men) or struggle against the invader (on those occasions the woman's conduct is described in terms of manly valor and overcoming feminine weakness).

Genuine study of the Ukrainian women's movement and the history of Ukrainian women forces one to tackle issues of the whole society in which the women lived, and also some essential issues in Ukrainian history. Let me touch on a few issues in which nationalism and feminism - both attempts to assert human dignity - intersect for Ukrainians.

Ukrainianism, ethnicity, nationalism, patriotism - are as much our characteristics, part of us, as is the biological fact that we are women. It is not some externally defined concept that some of our fellow Ukrainians, wherever they might be, choose to foist upon us. We have a right to our own individual definition of what it is that characterizes us.

Men talk much about the preservation of ethnicity, the preservation of the nationality, but somehow the nitty gritty of the preservation often devolves upon the women. The Ukrainian Museum of the UNWLA in New York is but an obvious case in point.

A nation as adept in having symbols as is ours overlooked an obvious one in the case of Olena Pchilka, the mother of the poet Lesia Ukrainka and the sister of Mykhailo Drahomaniv, the political thinker and essayist. She was an influential woman in her own right, but rubbed many people the wrong way. Perhaps that was the reason many of her accomplishments have been overlooked.

In 1876, in the year in which the tsarist government outlawed the use of the Ukrainian language in print, Pchilka published a book on the ethnographic ornaments used by the Ukrainian peasants. It was as if the nation, now made mute, found an alternative language in the folk ornament, which no power of the Russian tsar could stifle. The symbolism is clear, and unused. Strange, is it not, that this symbolism was overlooked? Yet, lesser proclamations have been duly recorded by their makers, and revered by readers.

Pchilka fostered the folk arts, but did not stop there. Her goal was to adapt Ukrainian life, culture, language, children, peasants to the world, to all that was new in it; to make certain that Ukraine kept in step with progress. She would have understood us well, in our attempts to hold on to some type of Ukrainianism while at the same time being in step with the world. Just as it was 100 years ago, today Ukraine is still largely cut off from the main currents of modernity, and Pchilka's program is still a valid task.

The conference theme was "Ukrainian Woman in Two Worlds," as if there were two separate worlds! If only there were just two worlds in our lives which we needed to balance! Our lives - the lives of each one of us - are intricate feats of juggling various roles, careers, functions, worlds, existences. We function simultaneously on many levels. We perceive many multi-hued reactions through the single prism of our life. Our lives are fluid permeations from one role, from one compartment to another. That has been a fact of human existence, of which women were more aware then men. Society has continually confronted women with the "double burden" - work and family. And the women have stubbornly insisted on yet a third level, keeping themselves, their egos, their own aspirations, in the picture.

The first woman who openly raised the issue of the double burden was Natalia Kobrynska, a daughter and wife of Catholic priests, who lived in western Ukraine in the last decades of the previous century. She, as many leading intellectuals of the time, was a convinced socialist. Early in her public life she also became a convinced feminist.

She was probably the first thinker in Europe to argue openly that socialism in itself would not be a factor in the liberation of women unless the women, while working for social reforms, would also specifically work for sexual equality. She maintained that sexual equality would not emerge automatically with a more equitable economic or social system.

She also argued against revolutionary rhetoric in Galicia, maintained that the road to progress lay through peaceful, effective reform. She predicted that revolutionary upheavals would lead to violations of individual liberty. She saw women as yet another emerging constituency in the changing configuration of Galicia.

The men who understood her, however, did not support her; the women en masse were not in a position to understand her, since they could not even attend high schools. Her potential was not utilized; and she remains known only as an early organizer of Ukrainian women and a minor writer. Her theoretical views on feminism and socialism, especially the manner in which she integrated them, remain largely unexplored.

In part Kobrynska fell victim to the ideological exclusiveness that is so frequently a characteristic of the male intelligentsia. Since she refused to accept unquestionably the dictates of her male colleagues, although, God knows, she was deferential to them, they criticized her and accused her of being petulant and petty, and, in the final analysis, a lady and a feminist. Her plans for day care centers were accepted without crediting her with any originality. Her ideas on communal kitchens were not seriously discussed. Her argument that the conveyor belts of new ideas into the villages were the wives and daughters of priests were laughed out as a theory, while used effectively without discussion in practice.

Kobrynska's pragmatic approach to issues of feminism and socialism actually reflected the pragmatism that is frequently a characteristic of women and women's organizations. Women, not being conditioned to ideological thinking, did not exhibit the ideological exclusiveness that often plagued - and continues to plague - many Ukrainian community organizations.

Nor were Pchilka and Kobrynska the only Ukrainian women to fall victim to misrepresentation by Ukrainian males and even some women historians. Before World War I, Ukrainian authors commonly stressed the similarities between Ukrainian and Russian women, overlooking the crucial formative Kozak and frontier experience which the Russian women lacked (not to mention the differences stemming from the different nature of the Tatar yoke - something that was stressed by Lesia Ukrainka, who was educated by her mother and not by the Ukrainian or Russian intelligentsia).

That, combined with the democratic and progressive nature of Ukrainian nationalism, predisposed the Ukrainians in the tsarist empire to write off feminism as a middle-class phenomenon and to deny its existence among Ukrainians. Thus, the significant contributions of the Ukrainian women to the establishment of higher education courses for women and various philanthropic societies in Kiev and Kharkiv have been overlooked, mainly because they reflected achievements of women who did not readily fit into the progressive intelligentsia mold.

An extremely important chapter in both women's history in general and in Ukrainian history in particular was contributed by the Soyuz Ukrainok, Ukrainian Women's Union, in the interwar years on the territories of western Ukraine. Even here, however, the women tended to downplay their roles. The Ukrainian women's organization on the territories of interwar Poland alone was proportionately the largest women's organization in Europe. The policies of modernization it pursued - effective, moderate, yet ones that did not challenge the traditional values of society - foreshadowed similar effective policies used by the Third World women.

The western Ukrainian women offered an example of women with some degree of autonomous status of pre-industrialized societies trying to preserve and expand that autonomy while helping to better their economic position. The very real threats to the existence of the Ukrainian nation in the interwar years, however, led most of the participants, and the few persons who write on the subject, to concentrate on the patriotic importance of the work of women.

I am not denying the patriotism of the women - far from it! I am, however, saying that it went beyond rhetoric, and was effective because it was practical and because it was suited to the needs, the problems at hand. As usual, women, without much talk, got down to the tasks that had to be done.

Today, in the organized community life of Ukrainians and of Ukrainian women in the New World, there is a bifurcation in the perception of women. We seem to function differently on Ukrainian-language and English-language planes. Ukrainians tend to be uneasy about terms like liberation and people's struggle in English. Yet, in Ukrainian, these terms, full of justified patriotic attraction, are proudly used. Words like feminism and women's rights, however, make most Ukrainians uncomfortable in any language.

Few of us are aware of the non-traditional activities of other Ukrainian women. A gathering such as the women's conference, women meeting as women, regardless of age, profession, marital status, political convictions and language used for communication, makes most Ukrainian men uneasy - a traditional response to demonstrations of women's power.

The topic of the conference - "Ukrainian Woman in Two Worlds" - has already generated a number of witticisms, and will probably continue to do so. Humor is a defense mechanism of the endangered.

What is it that we women want? Not the equality the Ukrainian men have - or profess to have - with its inequality bickerings, innuendos, cross-purposes.

We want the same two things for which our predecessors had striven. We want the right to be ourselves, and the freedom to determine, each and every one of us, what it is we are, without anyone dictating what we should be and how to be it.

We want individual autonomy in a society which fosters the growth of the individual, for any society which hampers individual growth is not only a limiting society, but a limited one.

We want a society within the Ukrainian community without double standards - sexually, linguistically, geographically. The community is us, and without us the community is neither truly representative, nor can it be truly effective.

We want to strive to achieve our full potential as individuals, as women, as Ukrainians, as Americans. And we want it on our own terms.

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