Three Regimes of Gender Citizenship: Social Policy Experience of Three Generations of Russian Women

The article is devoted to the analysis of ideas of women belonging to three generations about their rights. Women’s rights are considered as part of the concept of gender citizenship, which includes ideologically and institutionalized ideas about normative gender contract for women, as well as their own meanings and values that they attribute to their status as recipients of social policy. The empirical basis of this study is composed of 45 biographical interviews with women of three generations (1950s, 1970s and 1990s years of birth). The interview guide also contained questions about parental family, education, professional activity, family and parenting, housing, organization of recreation and medical services, and retirement benefits. Based on the analysis of biographical narratives, the authors identify three modes of gender citizenship that are typical for women of three generations. 1) The mode of receiving support and benefits from the state is built through receiving support from the state as workers and mothers within the framework of social policy and is built on the subjective assessment by women of the ratio of their labor and reproductive contribution and the amount of assistance received from the state. 2) The regime of self-sufficiency and market consumption of goods relevant for women of the middle generation with experience of socialization and the beginning of working life in the period of post-Soviet transformations. In a broad sense, they see the market as the main source of well-being, which determines their solidarity with the values of the neoliberal economy and forms in them the skills of competent consumers of a wide variety of goods and services. 3) The regime of demanding support and active consumption of social goods and services is built on the basis of a proactive and individualized position of women in relation to such sources of well-being as the state and the market. Representatives of the younger generation not only have their own experience of gender discrimination, but also actively use feminist optics to define and interpret various life situations in terms of gender inequality as structurally determined differences in the life strategies of men and women.