Blessing or burden? Paradoxes and traps of female spatial emancipation

Abstract

The object of the study is the historical process of spatial emancipation of women, Ukrainian women in particular. This process is understood as the widening of the socio-spatial context of women’s existence throughout their relocation from the private to public spheres as an imperative of industrialization and is seen as aimed at the achievement by women of spatial freedom and the right to autonomous geographic mobility in the second half of the 19-th – early 20-th centuries.

On the grounds of the data of two stages of spatial emancipation of women, singled out in the author’s earlier works, the paper analyses socio-historical paradoxes and gendered traps resultant from this process. They consist in the transformation of socio-cultural benefits provided by female spatial emancipation at the first stage of this process, into the burden of excessive obligations, dependencies and limitations of post-soviet Ukrainian migrant women. Thus, the research showed that at the first stage of spatial emancipation, i.e. in the second half of the 19-th – early 20-th centuries, a great significance for Ukrainian womanhood had academic migration to West-European Universities, which triggered the modernization of women’s spatial practices. In turn, this process facilitated the transformations of bodily and physical image of females as well as gendered evolution of their self-identity. As a result, a figure of a «new woman» has emerged, the one who rejected «home as a woman’s place». Yet, the realities of the capitalist stage of human development have transformed the acquisition by women of the freedom of movement in the public sphere from a decided benefit into new forms of dependencies: exploitation and over-exploitation at the working place, inequality in the remuneration for work, women’s «double burden» and even «triple burden» for rural women, with respective negative effects on their health, devaluation of «women’s work», constraints in making career and in joggling work and family life, feminization of poverty and homelessness,  etc. That is, spatial emancipation of women became, for one, the tool for the maximum widening of their existential space, which today became global in scope, but for the other, it turned into a gendered trap for women insofar as it transformed into a tool of their exploitation and multidimensional discrimination, thus reinventing itself from a blessing into a burden, from emancipation into «pseudo emancipation».

The paper identifies the following paradoxes of the historical process of spatial emancipation of Ukrainian women: 1) triple loss as a way to «triple win»; 2) «home» as work and work as «home»; 3) social exclusion in the heart of a foreign family; 4) growth of social status as a result of downshifting; 5) paradoxes of «globalization of motherhood»; 6) strengthening of one myth as a result of contesting the other; 7) negative gender saldo of migration for women; 8) double burden instead of gender egality; 9) pressures of spatial freedom as a way to hijab. As a conclusion, the author contends that the causality behind the gendered paradoxes and traps of female spatial emancipation lies in the nature of capitalism which regards a human being not as an individual and a personality in his/her own right, who performs sacral and metaphysical functions, but as no more than a tool of enrichment and of achieving selfish interests by the exploitative class of capitalists.