Global Responses to Population Ageing: Populism, Pronatalism, and the Politics of Care

Written by Harry Robinson, current UCL SSEES MA student (International Masters in Economy, State and Society)

On Wednesday 29 October, the UCL FRINGE centre hosted an event to celebrate the launch of Dr Anna Shadrina’s new book: The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia, published by UCL press. Dr Shadrina, a Political Sociologist at the University of Liverpool, was joined by Professor Karen Glaser, former director of the King’s College London Institute of Gerontology, and SSEES’s own Professor Alena Ledeneva, who moderated the subsequent discussion.

Dr Shadrina presented her book’s analysis of what she terms the ‘babushka phenomenon’, the ‘expectation that older women will be dedicated grandmothers, producing an imaginary that equates women’s later stages of life with their role in informal welfare.’ Dr Shadrina’s evidence base was a set of interviews conducted in 2016 in Samara, integrated with  media, literary and film analysis. She sought to combine perspectives of gender, age, and class to examine how the expected performance of ‘post-sexual, post-professional’ womanhood that is associated with babushki developed, exploring the cultural marginalisation of these key contributors to social reproduction.

Dr Shadrina located this phenomenon in a context of a moral panic in Russia about falling birth rates; she found that women do want larger families, but what is holding them back are fundamental problems such as a high male mortality, estranged fathers and work-life balance- structural impediments to procreation, rather than the lack of desire to have children. Babushki play an invaluable role in upholding this arrangement by providing informal care, influenced by an internalised perspective of the inevitability of this arrangement.  Dr Shadrina highlighted the paradox that, by promoting pronatalism and relying on grandmothers to step in and provide care instead of addressing fundamental issues of gender equality, the Russian government is making the heteronormative standard of the nuclear family which it promotes less viable. Dr Shadrina concluded that the babushka phenomenon illustrates a broader pattern of post-socialist reforms and redistribution, in which the withdrawal of the state from providing free housing and affordable childcare is offset by older women’s commitment to prioritising the interests of their children and grandchildren. The role grandmothers play in social reproduction is regulated by norms embedded in mainstream culture, which portrays women who seek recognition for their dedicated care as ‘monsters’.

Professor Glaser provided an illustration of the dynamics of grandparental care in other contexts. Utilizing demographic data collected over the course of her ESRC-funded research, she highlighted regional and socioeconomic differences and their implications for government policy and health across Europe. Prof. Glaser found that the involvement of grandparents, overwhelmingly grandmothers, in childcare was fundamentally driven by a lack of formal childcare provision. While in England, 6 percent of grandparents provide 15 or more hours unpaid labour, in Italy and Greece, 24 percent do. There is a pan-European trend for high-intensity, quasi-obligatory grandparental participation in lower income families, whereas those in groups with the highest income and education focus more on low-intensity tasks such as providing help with homework and emotional support. Professor Glaser emphasized the fact that, potential health benefits associated with grandparenting are significantly lower if there is no choice as to performing the unpaid labour. She highlighted the paradox between rising pension ages, extended working lives and the continuing need for many of those potential grandparents to provide unpaid care.

Though differing in approach, the research presented illustrated similarities in the tacit reliance of states on informal care provided by grandmothers, as well as the gendered nature of the issue. Dr Shadrina’s research convincingly demonstrated the Russian state taking advantage of moral economies of care to make up for a shortfall in redistributive capacity, and Professor Glaser highlighted just how common variations of this arrangement are. The presentations revealed the tension between a celebration of grandparental care and reliance on it as an informal welfare system – raising the question of how states can square the circle of a dependence on grandmothers’ unpaid labour while variously seeking to extend working lives and promoting higher birth rates.