"I Would Be Against That, If My Husband Says: 'You don't work.'" - Negotiating work and motherhood in post-state socialism

Abstract

For a country like Lithuania the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the second great transformation of gender relations in the 20th century. While the first one at the beginning of the 1940s brought an end to the then predominating catholic-conservative model, the second one during the 1990s brought an end to the Soviet version of gender discrimination and its ideology of the dual role of women as worker-mothers. This paper confronts some of the institutional change in post-communist gender order and regime with an exemplary look into the actual negotiation of requirements and possibilities in the context of a concrete biographical situation. On the basis of a single case of a young Lithuanian woman after secondary education the paper illustrates the tensions and contradictions that young women growing up in postcommunist societies have to face in their establishment of a biographical perspective between employment, partnership, and motherhood.