Feminist Titles

Poetessa and Poet in the #MeToo Era

The summer of 2020 found Russian-speaking Facebook users in a huge linguistic free-for-all. The uproar stemmed from a poem written in support of Yuliya Tsvetkova, the activist who was at the time facing criminal prosecution for her drawings of vulvas. That poem, titled “My Vagina” and written by Galina Rymbu, frankly describes the lifeways of the female body and contains well over a dozen explicit references to its controversial subject. It has since been attacked on the grounds that “the v-word” has no place in real poetry and defended in terms that essentially dismiss the opposing camp as sanctimonious reactionaries.

The “vagina” controversy is only part of the turbulent discussions on language that have occupied Russia’s intellectual community over the past couple of years. A resurgence of the global fight for women’s rights has presented Russia with a list of action items and added fuel to the linguistic fire.

When I was studying at the Literary Institute in the early 2000s, praise for a female student who had written a poem could well be worded as “You’re not just any old poetess, you’re a real poet.” The assumption behind that formulation was that “women’s poetry” is a thing and always a bad thing, but, although you’re of the female persuasion, you write well, just like a man. Those accolades might come from a male classmate or from an instructor, and the girls patted on the back in that way usually found it sincerely gratifying. Concepts such as mansplaining, sexism, and objectification had not yet hit the big time in Russia.

We didn’t even know back then that “poetess” was gender-marked language. Today, the vehement debate over gender marking has expanded far beyond the closed circle of the literati. And the opposing sides in that debate are as irreconcilable as the supporters and opponents of the Crimean annexation or the wearing of masks when out and about during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Feminist linguistics and language critiques first emerged as an offshoot of the women’s movement in America and Germany during the 1970s. And when the Russian language was studied from that perspective, it was found to be less androcentric than either English or German. For example, the word chelovek (person) isn’t a synonym of muzhchina (man), even though it is most often used to mean precisely that.

This unexpected distinction has a multivalent historical backstory. In her descriptions of the women of Ancient Rus, Natalya Pushkareva, the founder of gender studies in Soviet and Russian scholarship, has consistently underscored that they enjoyed more legal rights than the European women of the time. Another intriguing nuance is that Russia never experienced the witch hunts that have come to symbolize medieval misogyny. And finally, there is the landmark attempt, in early Soviet times, to usher the ideals of universal equality into reality: after the Revolution, education and politics were legally opened up to women, and that also unquestionably influenced the language.

Yet gender inequality persists in the Russian language. It can be identified, for example, in Russian’s wealth of misogynistic proverbs, such as “Kick the broad off the cart, give the horse a good start”; “Keep your fair maid safe at home, let your money never roam”; “A hen isn’t a bird, a broad isn’t a person”; “Long hair, short wits,” and many others.* Of course, no one says that sort of thing in respectable company nowadays, but more subtle forms of linguistic discrimination still lurk in unexpected places – in job designations, for instance.

The fact of the matter is that job titles, while often neutral in English, are certainly not so in Russian. Those words carry either a masculine or a feminine suffix, clearly indicating the gender of the jobholder. As a result, the modern Russian language signals loud and clear which jobs have traditionally been held by women. Words such as posudomoika (dishwasher), kukharka (cook), vakhtyorsha (doorkeeper), and – one last eloquent example – prostitutka (prostitute) are all linguistically feminine. Some don’t even have a masculine equivalent. But most of the high-profile professions – doktor (doctor), redaktor (editor), ucheny (scientist, scholar), inzhener (engineer), menedzher (manager), and so forth – are masculine. That inequality was the motivation behind the coining of feminized job titles, the female versions of traditionally masculine designations, formed by adding a feminine suffix to produce doktorsha, redaktorsha, uchenaya, inzhenerka, menedzherka, and many, many others.

Some of those feminized forms are more familiar, others less so, and the years immediately following the Revolution played an important role in that. In those days, women were being actively drawn into the so-called male professions, while their traditional role of keeper of hearth and home was tagged as a bourgeois holdover and publicly condemned. The new woman in the Soviet utopia was supposed to be liberating herself from household chores. Feminized job titles were all the rage, one of the most famous examples being aviatrissa (aviatrix), because Soviet citizens believed that in the splendid new world they were building, everyone would be allowed to pilot those flying machines.

But in the 1930s, as totalitarianism began to take hold, women’s emancipation was sidelined. While continuing to work alongside men, women now reassumed their traditional homemaker role. The creation of feminized job titles was rolled back too, and the masculine variants were established as the linguistic norm.

The word “poetess” is the poster child for that process. At the outset, it had usually carried an ironic subtext. In an article published in 1913, for example, critic Pyotr Pertsov made a big point about poetesses usually saying too much, whereas Marina Tsvetaeva, the article’s subject, “thankfully leaves some gestures” undescribed. Meanwhile, there were more and more poetesses, and Tsvetaeva regularly used the word in a completely neutral way – until the 1920s, when she abruptly changed her mind and began identifying herself as a poet. To quote Dr. Irina Shevelenko, a professor of literary studies in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, subsequent cultural and political processes “depreciated the value ascribed to the uniqueness of the woman’s voice in poetry. Following that, the word itself forfeited its prestige. For Tsvetaeva, as for many others, that feminized designation came to betoken a diminution of value.”

The negative connotations that attached themselves to this and many other feminized designations survive to this day. Even so, they’re back in fashion, although those who want nothing to do with them accuse those on the other side of being linguistically tone deaf. As they see it, the people who use those terms just make themselves look stupid. And that’s putting it as mildly as humanly possible, as the anti-feminized-designation crowd quite often resorts to crudely heavy-handed language, including gems such as “Feminized job titles should be a shooting offense.” On the face of it, that degree of aggression seems completely inexplicable. Yet there’s nothing unfamiliar about the overheated animosity that rears its head when Russians discuss language. Psychologists link it to the Soviet trauma and the collective memory of a time when an ill-chosen word could easily bring on a world of hurt. That phenomenon features in the 1975 Andrey Tarkovsky film The Mirror, whose female lead, a proofreader, almost has a nervous breakdown when she thinks she has accidentally allowed the word “Stalin” to go into print with a lower-case “s.” In those days, a mistake like that could cost you not only your freedom but even your life. Since then, the public at large has become firmly convinced, on pain of metaphorical or literal death, that the only correct idiom is the one employed by the “official sources.” And so, to this very day, any deviation from the norm – an unfamiliar expression, a variant stress placement, or a feminine ending on a word – very frequently infuriates people beyond all measure.

Another thing that is keeping the discussion at its current fast boil is that not all women, not even those pursuing an active agenda, are fans of feminized job titles. Some are entirely fine with the masculine versions of those words, while others have a problem with both approaches. Director of Photography Yuliya Galochkina, for example, agrees that the gender-marked operatorsha has an unpleasantly dismissive ring to it. Yet the discrimination she has experienced in her profession makes it important to her to highlight her gender identity.

The Camera Operating Department at the Gerasimov Film Institute had never admitted so many girls as it did when I was there. It was still only about 50-50, but every instructor getting his first sight of our class had roughly the same reaction: “Good going. In all the years I’ve been teaching here, I’ve never seen so many girls in my classroom wanting to run a camera.”

Now a camera in the hands of a woman isn’t such a surprise, but female graduates often go into documentary film-making because it’s so much harder for them to break into fictional film. There’s more status there, more prestige – which doesn’t mean that documentaries are a piece of cake, of course.

When I’m working on a feature-length film, I have charge of some 20 to 25 people, and they’re all, with very rare exceptions, boys. Producers often say that they won’t take on a girl as a matter of principle. That gave me a lot of problems at the start of my career. I’m invited onto projects now because I have experience, but back in the day, people’s jaws would just drop. You’d show up for a project, and everyone would be staring at you like deer in the headlights. You had to waste no time showing that you could do it all. In our line of work, women definitely have to put in far more effort to get what men are routinely given.

Galochkina hit on an altogether original solution: “My German colleagues taught me a lovely word, Kamerafrau. Sounds very cool, if you ask me. And for them, it’s part of their vernacular. The want ads read ‘Kameramann or Kamerafrau Needed.’ It’s never, ever just a Kameramann. So I’ve started using it all the time when I’m filming in Moscow. I’m crazy about it!”

We see here how the issues associated with #MeToo have filtered into the Russian-speaking space, changing it and injecting new words into it. But those processes don’t always tend to enrich the language. Quite the opposite, in fact: they can result in other lexical strata just going away. And I’m not only talking about the colorful but irreparably sexist Russian folk sayings we discussed earlier. There are also, for instance, the euphemisms for menstruation used by young people. They make up an entire linguistic stratum that has a lot to teach us about Russian culture and politics.

What do we have here? Well, the national cuisine (“the borshch is simmering,” because the traditional beet soup is dark red); and sinister tokens of a police state (“the cops have come,” because the Russian word for “cop” is ment, and that distantly echoes “menstruation”); and nods to favorite films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a classic horror movie, very popular in Russia, that seems to symbolize the bloody nightmare that menstruation can be); and daydreams of a date driving a nice set of wheels (“I was picked up in a red Zhiguli” – or stretch limo, or Ferrari, or whatever vehicle gives the speaker the most convincing impression of well-heeled beau). And then there is an especially interesting corpus of references to revolution, from “the Revolution” itself, with its “Red Army” to the “red-letter day” that actually harks back to Samuil Marshak, whose verse contains a line that every Soviet schoolchild knew – “The Seventh of November, what a day. A red-letter day on the calendar.”

But the young people of today, with their cutting-edge, citified cultural upbringing, are no longer embarrassed by menstruation, and that has cut right down on the need for euphemisms. Mind you, the feminist activist Dinara Rasuleva, who wrote a whole poem about those bashful rewordings, maintains that there’s still a long way to go before they disappear entirely and that the progress made so far has impacted only a very narrow swath of people.

Rasuleva’s poetry showcases her as a relentless champion for giving women their linguistic due. Born into a Muslim family, she collided early on with what she herself calls inequality by default, by which she means that the male and female roles were set in concrete. She is exasperated by pervasive chatter to the effect that in Soviet times, even without feminized job titles, men and woman were guaranteed equal rights. In fact, she has plenty to say about those equal rights, using her own family as an example.

My grandmother was abducted by her first husband when she was 17. She was married off contrary to her wishes and gave birth to a child sired by a man she didn’t love, who treated her as an object from the very beginning. Husband and child died during the Leningrad Blockade. Grandmother survived.

My other grandmother, who loved a boy in her village, was married off to my eminently eligible grandfather. Grandfather drank, but grandmother never said an unkind word to him as long as she lived. The marriage looked altogether happy – the kind that people cite as an example. She stayed with him until he died, and was holding his hand as he breathed his last.

When grandmother was 81 years old, she dreamed about the boy from the village, hearing him say that he was still waiting for her. A week later, she died. My mother was beaten by her drunken husband, but she found the strength to leave. Many don’t.

Like Galochkina, Rasuleva is comfortable with neither the male version of her job title, poet, nor poetessa, the most current feminization. She has chosen a third way, preferring poetka, which, though not unknown, is certainly unfamiliar, and edgy and radical too. “Poetessa carries a different intonation than poet in the contemporary Russian discourse, and that intonation is often disparaging. There were two alternatives for me – to reappropriate and recolor poetessa or to introduce a new word. I chose the latter. In labeling myself poetka, I’m not only defining myself relative to the profession but also underscoring my feminist stance.”

Will these words and processes ultimately prove to be only a passing fad, or will feminized job titles have better luck this time? Will they embed themselves in the language? Dinara Rasuleva is sure that feminized job titles are here to stay. “One hundred percent! If we look at history, we’ll see that feminized job titles come into use whenever there was a need for women, whenever women entered professions new to them that had been an exclusively male preserve. And these days, women ought to have access to every profession, without limitation. Plus, the spread of feminism in the Russophone culture over the past decade has fast-tracked the rooting of feminized job titles in the language.”

But Irina Shevelenko is a little less exuberant, although she too holds that feminized job titles have an important message for society and that their message is one that could possibly give the project more longevity. “Forever, though? I don’t know. Looking back, it’s impossible not to notice that feminized job titles have never had a whole lot of staying power in the Russian vocabulary.”