Anchors, Habitus, and Practices under the Siege of War: Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

• In Event: 257 - Section on Peace, War and Social Conflict Paper Session. Inequality in War and Social Conflict

Abstract

As war challenges civilian survival, how do identities, interests, and practices (i.e. habitus) inter-sect with challenges and strategies of wartime survival? Do logics of habitus and practice shift or remain fairly stable? To explore these issues, I focus on women’s perceptions and conceptions of their positions and status vis-à-vis men in an intense wartime situation, the 900-day Blockade of Leningrad (1941-1944). Starvation and conscription feminized the city, raising women’s posi-tions and statuses in enterprises and elsewhere. Further, women’s caregiving and breadseeking skills (i.e. finding and using scarce resources) raised status and dependency power vis-à-vis families and men. Yet women more strongly believed in and identified with gender roles as natu-ral and women as “Other” vis-à-vis men. Using wartime diaries for data on motives and percep-tions, I offer an addition to field theory to address women’s paradoxical sense of status and con-tinuous gender position: anchors. These are entities of valence in fields of perception and practice to which actors attach significance, with which they identify self and interests, and by which they code risk and status. For Leningrad women, male kith and kin and children were anchors of identity and practice; women could not exercise dependency power for fear of threatening these anchors, and their growing status was refracted through these anchors, and thus through gender essentialism. In sum, two possible insights are: 1) fields and habitus operate and are refracted through crucial external entities; and 2) contextual shocks might precipitate retrenchment as well as change in identities and practices.

Author

• Jeffrey Hass, University of Richmond and St. Petersburg State University