Anchors, Habitus, and Practices Besieged by War: Women and Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

Abstract

As war challenges survival and social relations, how do actors alter and adapt dispositions and practices? To explore this question, I investigate women's perceptions of normal relations, practices, status, and gendered self in an intense situation of wartime survival, the Blockade of Leningrad (1941–1944), an 872‐day ordeal that demographically feminized the city. Using Blockade diaries for data on everyday life, perceptions, and practices, I show how women's gendered skills and habits of breadseeking and caregiving (finding scarce resources and providing aid) were key to survival and helped elevate their sense of status. Yet this did not entice rethinking “gender.” To explore status elevation and gender entrenchment, I build on Bourdieu's theory of habitus and fields to develop anchors: field entities with valence around which actors orient identities and practices. Anchors provide support for preexisting habitus and practices, and filter perceptions from new positions vis‐à‐vis fields and concrete relations. Essentialist identities and practices were reinforced through two processes involving anchors. New status was linked to “women's work” that aided survival of anchors (close others, but also factories and the city), reinforcing acceptance of gender positions. Women perceived that challenging gender relations and statuses could risk well‐being of anchors, reconstructing gender essentialism.

Moral Economies: Possibilities for a New Framework of Economic Structure and Change

“…If fields are norms and rules, then actors not only assume or follow those rules -they can also apply them strategically and even break them strategically for an advantage [Martin, 2011]. Additionally, fields are not simply norms that are free-floating in some social or discursive space: they are likely to be anchored in particular entities of valence [Martin, 2011;Hass, 2017], i. e. entities that have institutional or other significance, and around which actors orient not only norms, but also interests (and so fields and anchors ground interests as well). Finally, if we take a field approach, we can propose that a moral economy does not apply only to an entire economy -it can apply to smaller contexts (e. g. sectors) or relations (e. g. labor relations or relations between organizations in a particular sector of exchange, such as importers).…”

Moral Economies of Wartime Intimacy: One Facet of Gender in the Blockade of Leningrad

“…These shifts in the distribution of women into men's positions and the increasing importance of their domestic skills for Blockade survival raised their status and senses of self-worth in families and workplaces, granting a new sense of empowerment amidst the deprivation and suffering of the Blockade. 9 Patriarchy, like the city itself, was under assault. While these dynamics did not directly reshape intimacy -at least there is no irect evidence that it affected women's and men's senses of sensuality and intimacy -this did awaken in women a greater sense of self-assurance in making judgments.…”