Sometime ago I was arguing on twitter about the number of women in the medical profession in the USSR. While I knew I was right (because I am always right), my opponent ridiculed my anecdotal references, like a number of female doctors I visited in my childhood, or a number of female students in my Dad’s medical school photo-album. I thought maybe a scientific-looking study would be more convincing.
Women had been 10% of doctors and dentists in 1913. They rose to 77% in 1950 (Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie, 1969a: 103), but then declined to 72% in 1969, when they were also down to 55% among medical students, pointing to an equalized sex ratio in medicine a generation hence.
Although remuneration in the Soviet professions shows nothing remotely like the spread in the United States between the teacher at the bottom of the heap, the engineer somewhat better off, and the doctor way out in front, there is a differential there as well. The Soviet government, always economically pinched, has raised wages and salaries in a[264] manner to attract people into fields which would not otherwise be entered by enough candidates to meet the need. Engineering is the best enumerated. Law is the lowest paid of the professions in the Soviet Union, and in it women are precisely the same proportion (one-third) as in engineering,the highest paid. Women had been 5% of the lawyers in 1926. At present there are 2,500 women judges. So women are majorities in the two professions in the middle of the payscale – medicine and teaching minorities in the two at the extremes-engineering and law. However, the 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan provides sharp salary increases for the two professions of medicine and teaching. Those seeking signs of discrimination no matter what are faced with the fact that, in numbers as distinct from percentages, there are more women engineers than physicians, and more physicians than librarians. The 775,000 women engineers in the USSR (1969) is almost equal to the total number of engineers in the United States (870,000), of whom only 1% are women.
On this International Women’s Day I am posting some photos of the Soviet women at work and at play. Wishing the best to all my female readers, even those who thought they can prove me wrong.
My secret awesome tipsters (who are everywhere) alerted me about an exhibition of canned food sculpture at the Union Station.
CANstruction, is a design-build competition, that showcases the talent of Kansas City’s creative community as they create unconventional, astounding structures using only canned and other non-perishable food items.
After the exhibition is over, Union Station will use cans and other non-perishable items to build an army of robotic employees to replace those recently laid off.
We answer: Tracy, what you see is a traditional Russian folk dance. Although I personally never observed anyone dance that way at home without beforehand consuming “mass quantities” , it doesn’t mean it never happened. Maybe the fact that all of my relatives and most of my friends were Jewish explains my lack of personal encounters with the Russian folk dancing, but the fact remains.
It doesn’t mean that I was immune to some folksy dance moves. The photograph below depicts me in a Russian-style shirt ( I am the one next to a girl, if you have trouble locating me) at some kindergarten event. Of course you may wonder what was a Jewish kid doing wearing a Russian folk shirt. Well, that makes two of us, but on the other hand what does a Jewish shirt look like? I don’t know either. So much for multiculturalism…
Old joke: A Jewish girl comes home and tells her parents she needs to wear a national outfit to school the next day. Her Mom says to her Dad: “You hear? She wants a fur coat already!”
But I digress, if you want to find out more about Russian and Eastern European Folk Dancing, there are plenty of photos and videos on this website.
Continuing from my previous post, more photos of 1938 Kansas City made by William Vandivert. Most or all of these are previously unpublished; I could not find a corresponding issue of the Life Magazine from 1938. At the end of the post there are a few vintage burlesque show photos, they are hardly NSFW but be careful scrolling all the way to the bottom if someone is looking over your shoulder.
