Droit et Cultures (Apr 2015)
L’ambigüité des modèles d’égalité des genres en Russie : famille, droit et idéologie
Abstract
Soviet family law had originally privileged the future by trying to realize a total gender equality which would parallel gender equality in the labor world. But the realization of this equalitarian model which was supposing, in the Engelsian ideology, the transfer of the exercise of family functions to society, encountered considerable material difficulties. In order to ensure the victory of ideology, the initial equalitarian model was therefore modified by the creation of «motherhood as a social function» presented as a prestigious one. This initial deformation was afterwards to be accentuated by becoming the basis of a progressive redefinition of family functions – reproduction, education, material support – as «naturally» being the women’s tasks. At the same time, regardless of social reality, the equality ideology was proclaimed as already realized. The equality principle since the Eltsinian Constitution of 1993 together with the newly adopted Family Code of 1995 was proclaiming for the first time that it protected not only motherhood and childhood but also fatherhood. It was thus solving the contradictions of a «mother-centered model» predominant even among the feminists who were denouncing men’s irresponsibility by contrast to women’s overloading tasks but were glorifying the Mother in her exclusive family responsibilities. Twenty years later, we observe in 2013 a still more serious denial of social reality by the Putinian ideology. Wishing to oppose Russian values to Western values considered as a degeneracy factor, it defines a new objective consisting of a «return» to Russian traditional family values inspired by the Orthodox Church. But still one year later, in 2014, the Russian Ministry of Labor, who has been working on a concrete social reality, gives a new formulation to a real demographic policy which respects the 1993 Constitution excluding ideological obedience.
