"No Striving for Glory Here": An Essay on Women and Leadership in the U.S.S.R.

Abstract

The mission of our visit to Moscow and the Republic of Estonia over a nine-day period in December, 1984, was to meet with women in public life and with members and staff of the Soviet Women's Committee to continue establishing a dialogue on matters of mutual concern to women in the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. A word about the history of this project and how our particular delegation was assembled. The Women's Dialogue--U.S./U.S.S.R. is co-convened by Colette Shulman, a researcher, consultant, and journalist based at Columbia University who specializes in Soviet-American relations, and Phoebe Cottingham, Assistant Director for Social Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation and board member of and Foundations/ Corporate Philanthropy.' For about two years Shulman, Cottingham, and others had been developing a program under which Soviet and American women could come together on a fairly regular basis to discuss issues affecting women's lives. Under the auspices of and Foundations/Corporate Philanthropy and with additional financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American conveners and a small planning group composed largely of women from the organized philanthropic community had established links with the Soviet Women's Committee, the prestigious official organization based in Moscow that handles contacts and exchanges between the Soviet Union and women's groups in other countries.2 By late 1984, three exchanges had taken place both in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. and the co-conveners had received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to plan a next visit by American women. The Soviet Women's Committee had invited the Americans to send a small group for informal discussions about a topic emerging from the preliminary exchanges.3 The topic, Women and Community, was to focus our meetings on how, where, when, under what circumstances, and related to which issues women today are serving as public leaders in the two societies. Selected by the co-conveners, our delegation included a scholar of Russian folklore, who served as staff for the project; three women from foundations; a vice-president of Independent Sector (an alliance of organizations concerned with encouraging voluntary, philanthropic, and not-for-profit community activities); a magazine journalist (the editor-at-large of Working Woman); a city councilwoman from Minneapolis; two state legislators from Iowa (then the co-chairs of the women's caucus in the Iowa legislature); and me, the director of a university-based research center that studies women's participation in U.S. politics and government. We had in common interest and expertise in contemporary American women's activities in the local community and the larger public world. We all wished to learn about the U.S.S.R., especially to understand more about Soviet women's experiences and perceptions of their place in public life. We were aware in advance that we would encounter a highly selected and very small segment of Soviet womanhood; we did not expect the Soviet Women's Committee to introduce us to dissidents or to people who would publicly express doubts about their country's social, political, and economic systems. We assumed correctly that the Committee would organize our itinerary to impress us with exemplary institutions and with their best