Work and Leisure of Women Scholars in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia as Assessed by Themselves

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of work and leisure among women scholars, taking the institutional case of the Russian Academy of Sciences as an example, and attempts to document the analysis with personal stories and autoethnographic narratives. Drawing on the gender theory, the author examines the workload and leisure of women in academia and assesses the ratio of time allocated to work vs. that devoted to family and home duties. She argues that, for the Russian/Soviet intellectual, the relationship between work and leisure is still largely the one typical of the Soviet everyday where women demonstrated selfless devotion both to their workplace and to their home obligations. From the male point of view, it is indeed difficult to explain just how Russian/Soviet women employed in academia managed their time, since leisure of men and leisure of women working in scholarly institutions differ substantially. The article is followed by critical comments by Оlga Valkova, Valentina Veremenko, Irina Gewinner, and Olga Sekenova.