Soviet women honoured

Press, 10 March 1983, Page 9

Soviet women honoured

NZPA Moscow The Soviet Union celebrated International Women’s Day yesterday with a national holiday and an outpouring of sentimental adoration for women that contrasts sharply with their daily lives. Each, March 8 people in the Soviet Union get a day off in honour of the fairer sex.

Muscovites used a bright, windy spring day to take walks in the park, meet friends and hand flowers and candy to their favourite females.

The normally austere pages of “Pravda” and other

Soviet newspapers were brightened with red banner headlines congratulating “dear women” on the occasion.

. “Pravda” said in a front page editorial that March 8, “has become in our country a symbol of deep respect for woman and of her equality with man in socialist society.”

The statement was typical Of the ritual listing of Communism’s achievements for women each March 8. Yet even some of the fulsome official praise for the occasion suggests that women’s voice in Soviet life is limited. The current edition of the weekly, “Moscow News,” for example, was adoring in its front page headline: “These Wonderful Women.”

Yet its photos showed just three acceptable stereotypes — a mother with her baby, women fighting the threat of nuclear war, and the cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya. Liberation officially arrived in the Soviet Union with the advent of Communism 60 years ago and a Constitution guaranteeing equality of the sexes. Figures showing that 92 per cent of women hold jobs are regularly cited to prove that. But most women workers occupy lowly positions.

Women in Moscow are often seen hacking ice from the roads, lugging heavy machinery or dirt and garbage. Women play small part in the top leadership. Statistics boast that women account for 27 per cent of some 17 million Communist Party members. But there are no

females in the ruling 12-man Politburo and only six women among the 322 full members of the Communist Party’s central committee. In the Soviet Union ordinary women are far less liberated than their Western sisters. Soviet women not only work but keep house and raise children, as well.