Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 99as privileged sites for the perpetuation of tradition: a state of affairs that was seen
as clearly inimical to the goals of socialist transformation.
I argued elsewhere (Kandiyoti 1996b) that, if the concept of ‘traditional-
ism’ has had an exceptionally long and productive career in Central Asia, this
is partly because it served to hide from view some of the consequences of the
Soviet system itself. The gendered effects of Soviet economic, demographic and
anti-religious policies and their combination with socialist measures for the pro-
tection of women gave rise to what I term the ‘Soviet paradox’: women’s high
literacy and labour-force participation rates against the background of high
fertility rates, large families and relatively untransformed domestic divisions of
labour.
The Soviet command economy in the Central Asian republics gave rise to
distinctive and well-documented patterns of ethnic stratifi cation. The Slavic/
European nationalities were mainly concentrated in urban areas and non-
agricultural occupations, whereas the indigenous nationalities continued to be
over-represented in the rural areas and in agricultural and pastoral occupations
(Lubin 1984; Khazanov 1995; Sacks 1995). The effects of ethnic stratifi cation
were even more pronounced in the case of women of indigenous nationali-
ties (Lubin 1981; Sacks 1995). A comparative survey of women’s employment
and fertility in socialist countries undertaken by the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) inadvertently highlighted the uniqueness of Central Asian
patterns (Anker 1985). Uzbekistan turned out to be the only case among the
various socialist countries surveyed where the education–fertility connection
did not appear to hold. Women had educational attainment levels similar to the
industrialised socialist countries, with birth rates more comparable to those of
developing countries of the South.
Soviet demographic policies were clearly implicated in these outcomes. The
promotion of motherhood as a social duty, which was meant to address fertility
shortfalls in the more industrialised republics, remained an explicit and endur-
ing theme of Soviet social policy. These pro-natalist and maternalist policies sat
well with the social value attached to large families in a predominantly rural
Central Asia. Record numbers of Central Asian women qualifi ed for the title of
Heroine Mother (awarded to those with ten children or more) and Motherhood
Glory awards (given to those with seven to nine children). The provision of
public goods such as free kindergartens, schooling, health services and gener-
ous maternity leaves served to bolster these tendencies. Central Asian women’s
Soviet identities were powerfully shaped by expectations from the state for a
range of benefi ts and entitlements supporting motherhood.
It was not until the debates preceding the 1981 Family Policy Law that con-
cerns about regional disparities in population growth started to be expressed
openly (Weber and Goodman 1981; Rywkin 1982; Feschbach 1986). The poli-
cies adopted did not involve any direct attempt at curbing population growth in