The political exclusion and commodification of women - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 262

theory about the need to 'return women to the home and give them a rest
from socialism'.
(Posadskaya 1994:3)
Six years later the 'Women 2000' report stated that 'among the political
parties and movements represented in the State Duma, only the Liberal
Democratic Party's program included a special section addressing women's
issues' (International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights 2001:379 ). 6
This attitude resulted in an unwritten false assumption that democracy can
be established without women's participation; women just have to relax
at home and do their best carrying out the role of wives and mothers. The
'Woman question' was reduced to everyday life and domestic problems and
was considered to be trivial and uninteresting for the state. This political
attitude continues to guide the public perception that women's issues are
a secondary problem, which can be addressed once the situation is better,
not least economically (according to a non-inclusive model of a successful
market economy).
Another consequence of the prevailing attitude is that women are regarded
as alien to politics. After a little over a decade of 'democratization', an analysis
of the weekly poll carried out by the Public Opinion Foundation in 2001
examined data for the three previous years. The aim of this work was to clar-
ify the gender dimension of the developing democracy and civil society in
Russia. Differences in value orientation and political attitude between men
and women were identified. Russian women were less willing than men to
participate in solving municipal problems. The question about the wish to
participate in municipal government was positively answered by 38 per cent
of men and 30 per cent of women, although 51 per cent of men and 59 per
cent of women supported the statement 'women have to be more active in pol-
itics'. A clear one-third of respondents were sure that politics is not women's
business. Statistics showed that fewer Russian women supported such institu-
tional elements of democracy as freedom of speech, political pluralism, market
economy and freedom of conscience, and were often ready to refuse them in
favour of state care and regulation of social relationships. Existing differences
in attitudes between genders in modern Russian society may explain these
data. Aivazova and Ketman (2001) concluded that gender inequality resulted
in women not perceiving civil and political rights as having a significant
institutional sourc e. 7 Only forty-five women were elected to the State Duma
in 2003 (10 per cent of members of parliament). Parties such as 'Women of
Russia' and the 'Russian party of women's protection' got 2.04 per cent and
0.80 per cent of votes respectively and did not achieve representation in the
Duma. The lack of representation of women in political processes must also
be seen in light of the developments in the market economy, of the commodi-
fication of sex (and the concurrent attitudes towards sex), to be able to get a
sense of the position of women in Russia today.